Barely a week goes by without more cracks appearing in our heavily privatised utilities and public services. From the near collapse of Thames Water and raw sewage discharges, to a deeper and more intense cost of living crisis due to the extreme marketisation of our electricity grid. Yet despite the increasing evidence of the failure of privatisation, the Treasury continues to dig in on the promise of the private sector.
The government department and Bank of England are in the process of designing a new digital pound, a publicly issued digital version of cash, which would circulate alongside the private electronic money currently issued by banks. It presents a vital opportunity to build a new public payments system, which could be a stable foundation for the economy, safe from the speculative booms and costly busts of the “too big to fail” banks. This is why it is so disappointing to see that the Treasury is prioritising this new infrastructure as a “foundation for the private sector to innovate”.
