.... 1982 it was, .... British Petroleum had already been privatised. British Aerospace, too, and a slew of others. The right to buy had been introduced a couple of years earlier. Still to come: BT, ports, buses, British Leyland, British Steel, Rover, gas, electricity, water, the railways. All those non-coloured Monopoly cards? Wait, wait, you can’t privatise those, they’re public utilities, clue’s in the name, oh, too late. It was a free-market frenzy. Everything we owned was being flogged off by pinstriped bastards reeking of lunch.

I say “we”, although the greatest trick Thatcherism ever pulled was this redefinition of “us and them”. Suddenly, people in your own family were voting Tory. Mrs Thatcher’s chief information officer, Rupert Murdoch, was telling us that the firemen and the dustmen were our enemies. That the women of the NUT and Nalgo were the mad, selfish defenders of a doomed elite. The Tory government went after the local authorities, telling us that government itself was our enemy. You were just going: “Hold on a minute, if you’re the government …” and then they shouted: “Oh, God, look! The Falklands!”, hired more expensive PR guys and carried on privatising. All through the reign of Margaret the Baby-Eater. Through John Major’s steady-as-you-go age of dinge. And into the sunlit uplands of Blairvana where, ingeniously, the government launched a full-scale privatisation of the future: the public finance initiative. Of all the Tory policies adopted by the Labour government, none was Torier than PFI. This policy wore a black cape and a top hat. It twirled a moustache and cackled. “Oh, you’d like a hospital? Allow me to build one for you, no charge. Just rent it back from us for, let’s say, 50 years, plus service charges; exactly, minister, why worry, you’ll be out of the cabinet and on our board soon enough. Waiter! We’ll see the pudding menu now …” Instead of snapping this brittle cack in half and binning it, Labour embarked on a massive PFI expansion. Now our children owe billions to PFI shareholders, and it’s no consolation at all to think that our grandchildren will, too. 

But there was a time when “we” were winning. The “we” I always understood to be “us”, that is. The collective us. Before the privatisation of air and space. Let me tell you, little ones, about how popular music and the bright optimism of collective space came together long ago in London’s heady, soot-laden, pre-privatised air of 1967. Song of the summer was Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks, with its odd blend of keening melancholy and positivism. Nostalgia for a doomed postwar world, exhilaration for the coming of a new post-industrial one. Terry and Julie, facing the future unafraid. Wherever you went, it floated into earshot on a tide of treble from someone’s transistor radio.