The version of history that was narrated by my schoolbooks (as is still the case with Thai history schoolbooks) is a story of kings (and the odd queen), generals and other lofty personages of a kind I was never likely to know personally.

So I never got to learn in school about things like Peterloo, where, one summer morning in 1819, a crowd of people, who were like me, had gathered in Manchester to call for such radical ideas as universal suffrage (even if the universe in those days was strictly male only) and secret ballots.

But this was a time when the word ‘democracy' was a term of abuse. The powers of the day called in the local yeomanry, drawn from that part of society that did have the vote, and horses and swords. With enough drink inside them, they served as useful defenders of privilege. The rest, as they say, is history. (Though not in my schoolbooks, of course.)

The yeomanry charged, slashing at an unarmed and defenceless crowd that included women and children. When they'd finished, 11 were dead, 500 or so trampled and the government had the excuse to pass their equivalent of the Internal Security Bill to safeguard themselves against the mayhem that they had just provoked.

Now the detail of this incident that I want to draw to your attention today is the battle cry shouted by the yahoos of reaction on that fateful morning. As they bore down on the scattering crowd, they were yelling ‘For King, Church and Property'. (This was the right-wing response to the ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité' that had come out of the French Revolution a generation or so earlier.)

And the idea of the sanctity of private property has ever since been a keystone of globalized capital. The World Bank routinely chastises governments that don't protect it with sufficient vigour, even when the concept of ‘property' has been stretched to include possession of some things that, on reflection, can't be owned, like information (aka intellectual property) or pollution (aka carbon trading).

So it is with some surprise that we see that the Thai government, normally a paragon of capitalist respectability, has been found guilty of flouting this basic foundation of modern capitalism.

You see, if you legally own something, then you can only be deprived of it under very special circumstances. And normally only by the state.

Suppose you own a piece of land that the government wants for a new road or something else of general public benefit. There is a legal mechanism by which the government can make you sell your land to them. All right and proper, with proper compensation.

But what if a privately-owned factory wants to build in your back yard? They can offer to buy, but they cannot legally force you to sell, like the government can. It's your private property. Sacred.

Now look what PTT did.

First they were owned by the government. So when they wanted to build a pipeline from the Burmese border to Pak Tho in Ratchaburi, to a power plant that had no generators to supply electricity that was no longer necesary after the 1997 economic collapse, they set about acquiring the private property they needed to achieve this. And public property too, since much of the route ran through National Parks and such. Never mind that clawing a trench through an RFD watershed is not exactly legal, even for the government.

Then the Thaksin government decides to make PTT a private company. So it sells off its assets, including the pipelines, to anyone with the connections to make a successful bid within the 67 seconds it took to get rid of the shares at the IPO.

Now this means that assets that PTT had been able to acquire only because it was a government entity had now passed into private ownership, which could not have acquired them in that way. By this two-step soft-shoe shimmy, the inviolability of property rights had been quietly finessed.

Now if I was the owner of a bit of scrub out in Kanchanaburi and I had been forced to take money from the government so they could bisect my land with a pipeline owned by the state, I can see myself feeling somewhat aggrieved. But when that pipeline is now earning money for shareholders who bought at 35 and are now looking at a share price 10 times that, I think I'd be incandescent.

So the courts put that matter to rights this week. They shirked the issue of members of the committee organizing the privatization standing to benefit personally from it; and the issue of nephews of ministers trousering more than their fair share of that 67 second fire-sale; and the issue of public hearings and all that messy democracy stuff.

But they did order PTT to hand back to government ownership the things only the government could have acquired.

But still the distinction of private and public seems to escape the PTT management, whose own salaries quadrupled as a result of privatization. Now that they are using pipelines re-owned by the government, they have to pay rent. The Ministry of Finance (which still owns half the PPT stock) proposed a standard rate of 5% of revenues that it charges other commercial clients. After they had recovered from their swoon, PTT argued they should only pay the 2.5% that, for example, the state-owned EGAT pays the Ministry.

But EGAT's privatization never happened. PTT's did and has just been confirmed by the court ruling. You would think PTT hasn't got a leg to stand on in arguing to be treated as if it were still a state enterprise.

Not quite.

If the Ministry insists on what to anyone else sees as a fair rent, says PTT, then we will be so financially straitened that we will be forced to pass our increased costs directly onto the consumer via higher prices. Don't dream of letting shareholders take a hit; forget about taking a long hard look at the enhanced wages and perks that PPT staff now enjoy. Just stuff the consumer.

Ah, the efficiency of the private sector.