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Is private investment the key to saving public infrastructur [1]

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Date: 2025-01

Welcome to openDemocracy’s weekly reader comments round-up. We receive so many carefully considered messages about our work that it seems a shame to keep them to ourselves. Send us your thoughts for next week’s round-up by replying directly to any of our emails or commenting on our articles or Instagram posts.

These comments are edited for clarity, accuracy and length, and aren’t necessarily a reflection of openDemocracy's editorial position.

No, it is the key to undermining infrastructure on behalf of billionaire asset-stripping robber barons who have long since bought off the corrupt politicians who enable their greed. –Mick Miles

This is not a yes or no situation. More money is needed to support UK infrastructure, and the private sector can provide some of it – provided that the terms are reasonable. Generally, this private sector money is outrageously expensive and on unreasonable terms, so the answer would be, don't touch it with a barge pole. Only if the private money is close in cost to government borrowing costs should it be considered. –Paul Ryder

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I might be wrong but surely if the government made private companies pay their fair share in taxes we wouldn’t need those companies to invest. They invest to make a profit or what’s the point? The taxes would pay for what was needed just like it always did before big money stuck its fingers into the pie. Big money is the problem, not lack of investment. –Vee Lavallee

I am sure that some private investment is necessary to develop public infrastructure. However, I believe that providers of public goods and services, such as water, energy, health and transport should be publicly owned. One way in which private investment could be used, without imperilling public services, would be to offer tax incentives to private investors in public goods and services – without ceding control to those investors. Where it is currently too expensive, given the state's finances, to renationalise public services, there should be much stricter controls. –Richard Lindley

My answer to this is yes and no. Of course, the private sector must invest. Ours has not done so and that's why so much of the supply of infrastructure components comes from outside the UK. It then depends on what you mean by investment. Privatisation has been a disaster; the worst kind of rentier economics here in the UK, in plain sight. What is key is a sustained long-term strategic plan – working through the regions to local areas. –Neil Blackshaw

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Here’s my experience, currently writing from Tbilisi. In 1989, at a meeting of the Ecological Union in Moscow, I met the late Zurab Zhvania MP, and he first invited me to Tbilisi to give a press conference (in Russian) on power-sharing. It was well covered, locally. Alas, on gaining independence, their first president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was a majoritarian. And sadly, the western press was just not interested at all in any criticism of our western system of democracy – ‘majoritarianism’ – despite the fact that, on translation into Russian, the word is ‘bolshevism’. –Peter Emerson

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I hope that the Australian ban fails and I'm certain the kids will find a way around it. More anti-youth hysteria – from comics, to penny dreadfuls, to TV, to music – you name it. Adults – leave those kids alone! –Mark Taylor

Are there no savvy teenagers there that can find a way around this? –Abdul Swaleh

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