Editorial 2
Privatisation … less popular than Poll Tax!
Tony Blair’s "keynote" speech on "reforming" the public services through greater involvement of private companies on July 16 had been seen as spelling out the extent of the new government’s commitment to press forward on all fronts with the highly unpopular "public-private partnerships", private financing of schools and hospitals and private sector management of public services.
The Royal Free – which contains the biggest private wing of any London hospital – seemed a logical choice for such a speech, in which Blair was expected to go further than his ministers in throwing down the gauntlet to public sector union leaders.
But in the event the lengthy speech merely reiterated policies already spelled out during and since the election. New Labour, Blair declared, would:
Step up the programme of building hospitals and primary care facilities (and move towards financing social services, imaging and laboratory equipment) with private capital through PFI – regardless of the accumulation of evidence that the result is fewer, high-cost, low-quality, unreliable buildings for the NHS, while city fat cats pocket the difference.
Step up the purchase of waiting list treatment from private sector hospitals which cannot find enough paying customers to fill their beds – despite the fact that this will drain more staff and resources from the most pressurised NHS hospitals to bolster the profits of the parasitic private sector.
Bring in the private sector to run new "stand alone" surgical units to deliver waiting list operations – leaving unclear whether the clinical and support staff would be employed by the NHS or the private sector.
Press ahead with the hugely unpopular PPP scheme which will dismember and part-privatise the London tube – leaving passengers and taxpayers to pick up the tab for pumping profits into participating companies.
Step up the involvement of private capital in the building and refurbishment of schools, turning education like the NHS from landlord to tenant and squeezing profits out of an already under-funded service.
Bring in more private sector management to run "failing" schools and LEAs, again profiting from the historic lack of resources and deprivation, and transforming education from a public service into a business and a corporate income stream.
Of course Blair is formally right when he says that these big strides down the road stop short of a fully privatised system: rather they are novel ways of milking profits from public services. Schooling and health care will still be largely funded from taxation, and free at point of use.
But we should remember the bits of these services that have already been largely squeezed out of free provision – such as university education, where students no longer receive grants but instead run up massive debts and pay fees, and long-term care of the elderly, which has largely been hived off to private sector nursing homes and is still subject to means-tested charges.
If these body blows can be struck, more services could go the same way in later phases of what Blair insists is a 10-year programme of "reform".
Inferior
All of the evidence so far is that far from representing any solution to the problem, all these measures that chip away at popular public services deliver an inferior service at greater cost than the system they replace.
A Mori poll just days before Blair’s big speech found only 11% of voters believe that bringing in the private sector will improve any of the public services – making New Labour’s policy even less popular than Thatcher’s hated Poll Tax – which never dipped below 23% support.
The public sector union leaders – after largely kow-towing to New Labour since 1997 – have so far plucked up enough courage to defy Blair’s new offensive for a month.
If they want to retain public support and the support of their members, they must continue to press this line.
They should back the anti-privatisation lobby of Labour Party conference in Brighton this year, and build active campaigns against every futile and costly plan to siphon cash from the public purse into the wallets of private shareholders.