{"product_id":"private-island-why-britain-now-belongs-to-someone-else-9781784782061","title":"Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\"The essential public good that Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and  now Cameron sell is not power stations, or trains, or hospitals. It's  the public itself. it's us.\"\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn a little over a generation  the bones and sinews of the British economy - rail, energy, water,  postal services, municipal housing - have been sold to remote,  unaccountable private owners, often from overseas. In a series of  brilliant portraits the award-winning novelist and journalist James Meek  shows how Britain's common wealth became private, and the impact it has  had on us all: from the growing shortage of housing to spiralling  energy bills.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Meek explores the human stories behind the  incremental privatization of the nation over the last three decades. He  shows how, as our national assets are sold, ordinary citizens are handed  over to private tax-gatherers, and the greatest burden of taxes shifts  to the poorest. In the end, it is not only public enterprises that have  become private property, but we ourselves.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Urgent, powerfully  written and deeply moving, this is a passionate anatomy of the state of  the nation: of what we have lost and what losing it cost us - the rent  we must pay to exist on this private island.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJames Meek's superb book exposes the perversities, hypocrisies and failures of privatisation. Meek is a writer of fiction as well as a journalist, and it shows: he crafts beautiful and vivid passages that turn what could be a dry subject into a highly readable study. -- Owen Jones * New Statesman *\u003cbr\u003eDo yourself a favour: read Private Island and find out what has really happened in Britain over the past 20 years. -- John Gray * Guardian *\u003cbr\u003e[A] devastating account of the privatisation dogma of the past 25 years ... As demolition jobs go, this can hardly be bettered. -- John Kampfner * Observer *\u003cbr\u003eIf you have a taste for historical irony \u0026amp; absurdity, you'll love this book. -- Francis Wheen * Mail on Sunday *\u003cbr\u003eAn energetic and colourfully told polemic against privatisation. * Financial Times *\u003cbr\u003eJames Meek's brilliant book, bracing in its detail and sweeping in its scope, makes clear just how central privatisation is to the story of contemporary Britain: some of it will make you sad, some of it will make you furious, but you are guaranteed to be left feeling that you understand this country much better. * John Lanchester, author of Capital and Whoops! *\u003cbr\u003eOne of the most powerful critiques of the mess that is Britain's economy. -- Aditya Chakrabortty * Guardian *\u003cbr\u003eEntertaining, vastly intelligent. * New Yorker *\u003cbr\u003eThis is the definitive account of how so much has gone and continue to go wrong with Britain's institutions. Don't read it all at once - it's too depressing. -- Joan Bakewell * New Statesman (Books of the Year) *\u003cbr\u003eOne of the country's finest writers. * GQ *\u003cbr\u003eA Virtuoso [.] mixture of hard-won knowledge and literary flair. * Times Literary Supplement *\u003cbr\u003eYou don't have to be.excessively sentimental about the public service ethos to find the story Meek tells here genuinely shocking. -- Jonathan Derbyshire * Prospect *","brand":"Verso Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52091181793623,"sku":"9781784782061","price":999.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/private-island-why-britain-now-belongs-to-someone-else-9781784782061","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}