POLITICS, like life, can go through cycles. A few short years ago if you said you believed in Public Ownership you would more than likely been dismissed as some sort of fossil. But slowly the tide has been turning with more and more in favour of it. It's an idea who's time has come again.

How did we get to where we are now? To understand we have to look at what's​ happened since the privatisations the Conservatives carried out in the ‘80s and ‘90s. We were told then that our services would improve and be more efficient, that private money would invest in modernisation and that bills would go down over time. It would be a win-win situation, we were told.

Well this hasn't happened. Bills have gone up in real terms, no service has improved and nowhere near enough private money has gone into any of the services. What we have now is public money still being pumped into different services but without any of the benefits that publicly owned services would bring.

I don't believe there was ever that much enthusiasm for privatisation from the general public but neither was there much for how the utilities had been run as state run industries either. What has slowly dawned on people is that they have been sold a lie and have been well and truly ripped off.

For example, water bills have increased 40 per cent since privatisation and our private energy companies overcharged customers by £2 billion in 2015.