Robert Peston

Control is with Manchester, right?

And so when supporters of, you know, because one of the...

charges laid both from within the Labour Party from those who don't want Andy Burnham as leader but also from outside the Labour Party about the great risks that Burnham represents is when he says he wants control for example of

energy, transport, water, people immediately say, oh, my God, you know, that would require the government to spend, I mean, well over £100 billion on nationalising all these services.

And if you just look at the, you know, there are lots of people who would agree that the water industry has been an absolute disaster for the UK.

High prices, you know, polluted rivers.

You know, no...

proper investment for years and years and years.

You know, what is it?

We haven't had a new reservoir since the 1990s.

And people say, yeah, we've got to take, we've got to grip water.

And

But we can't afford it because at the moment there's already a perception that the public finances of the government are not robust enough.

If you took all of that debt onto the balance sheet, lenders to the UK would have kittens and the interest rate that they would charge the government would get even higher.

So as I said, the critics of Andy Burnham would say, you know, nice idea to nationalise all this stuff, but we can't afford it.

What Burnham and those who advise him would say is he's not proposing conventional nationalization, that he is proposing a sort of extension or translation of the model that he used for buses to other public services.

Now, if you think about that...

It sounds like a nice idea.

So if you think about what it might mean for energy or indeed for water, what you're really talking about is much tougher regulation.

What you're basically saying is you would impose on water companies just totally clear regulations.