In the bad old days, neoliberals bemoaned state meddling in the economy with a mobile army of mixed metaphors. Public corporations like the state-owned car giant British Leyland were ‘lame ducks’ that would ‘go to the wall’ were they not ‘featherbedded’ and ‘bloated’ by public subsidy. In the 1980s privatisation bonanza, state assets were stripped and sold back to the public at a discount, on the plea of serving the consumer, rather than producer interests. Now, fuddled by talk of ‘stakeholding’, we have got to the point where public policy defers to private producers instead. David Willetts’s open access policy on publishing research offers a case in point.