I LOVE to go into the kitchen and gaze at all the taps lined up like beer pumps in the pub. Each one is so shiny and offers a different choice of water.

There’s Yorkshire Water, naturally enough, but some days nothing hits the spot like a drop of Northumbrian Water. Other days Wessex Water is just the thing. And on a Friday night the Scottish Water tap has its moment: what else would you use to add a splash of water to the weekly glass of malt whisky?

Choice is a wonderful thing, and don’t even get me started on all the plugs lined up along the kitchen wall, each one a different colour and each one transmitting a subtly different charge of electricity.

All nonsense of course: how can water compete? The fanciful scenario came into my head after reading a newspaper feature by the journalist James Meek, who has a new book out soon called Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs To Someone Else.

Meek’s thesis seems to be that privatisation hasn’t done what it set out to do. The selling of state assets has merely replaced faceless state-owned monopolies with faceless private corporations and consortia.

When British Gas was plumped up for privatisation, an irritating TV advert campaign ran with the slogan “If you see Sid tell him.” What you were meant to tell Sid was that he shouldn’t miss out on buying shares.

Well, Sid is probably in a nursing home now, muttering over his tea about the post office being flogged off too cheaply. If you see Sid tell him that all the privatised public utilities are owned by big and remote foreign corporations, mostly non-British and not small share-holders such as him.

That was the big lie about privatisation, you see. Margaret Thatcher and her ilk made out that this was a capitalist version of people power: all the little people having a share of something big. It’s quite an attractive notion, for sure; it was also a big lie. And this isn’t a party political point as such: New Labour’s Tony Blair gleefully carried on what Thatcher had started.

As Meek points out in his article, the privatisation of electricity, for example, has seen much ownership pass from England to France. Electricity has been re-nationalised and much of it is now owned by the French state – a bitter irony for the Thatcherites, who hated all that smelly Camembert socialism.

As for water, here is Meek’s assessment: “Of the nine big English water and sewerage firms, six have achieved the seemingly impossible feat of being privatised a second time, de-listed from the stock market by East Asian conglomerates or by private equity consortia.” Either that or they are owned by civil service pension funds in Canada, Australia and the Netherlands.

The selling of council houses is another example, described by Meek as “one of the most glaring examples of market failure in post-war history”. How right he is. Even Thatcher was nervous about alienating hard-pressed property-owning families by more or less giving away homes to council tenants, until she swallowed the idea whole and made it her own.

Put simply, selling off council houses without replacing them was a short-term electoral bribe. Of course people liked the idea: they were getting something for almost nothing. But we’ve been living with the consequences ever since: over-inflated housing market, shortage of affordable homes and so on.

Meek also reminds us that the first Thatcher administration cut income tax and public spending, while boosting VAT (now 20 per cent). This sneaky tax hits the poor most.

Then there are all those bills to privatised utilities, which are basically taxes: a bill you have to pay for a service you can’t do without, but handed over to a private corporation rather than to the State.

All this has made me thirsty. Now which water shall I choose?

• IF you go up the steps at City Screen in York and turn right, there is a stretch of tiled wall beneath the window. All of 25 years ago, that was where you found the features desk of this newspaper. Then we moved across town to Walmgate and now we are moving next door. This column will be put to bed downstairs in what remains of the old office, and will rise and shine in the morning in the new premises, in a short but moving story spread over a long time.