Privatising Humanity: How Our Essential Human Needs Became Financial Assets, with Kate Bayliss

Who owns the UK’s most essential infrastructure? How are our water and energy bills connected to offshore finance and private equity? What are the social consequences of privatised infrastructure ownership? And how can we build the political will to implement meaningful alternatives?

In this episode, Dom spoke with with Kate Bayliss, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Development Policy and Research at SOAS, University of London, about her powerful new book, Privatising Humanity: How Our Essential Human Needs Became Financial Assets, which was published in 2026 by Manchester University Press. The conversation covered the origins and extent of infrastructure privatisation in the UK, the differences between asset manager capitalism and the asset manager society, the catastrophe of Macquarie’s ownership of Thames Water, and why Universal Basic Infrastructure might be a more enduring solution to inequality than Universal Basic Income.

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