Welfare for the wealthy
Privatisation takes many forms, from the earliest under
Thatcher to Labour's preferred method, the Private Finance Initiative
(PFI). But all the forms have one thing in common - corporate welfare.
Put simply, the public purse pays for what is laughably called private
sector 'expertise'. The only difference between the public and private
sectors is that the private sector has more ruthless senior managers, who
are consequently paid more than the backbone of the Labour Party that is
public sector management. The alleged expertise that the private sector
brings costs more.
Under some schemes, private investors take a risk. Following conventional
capitalist economics, they demand a greater return on their money for
taking it. A cursory glance at recent cases of PFI hospitals and prisons,
as well as at Railtrack and British Energy, all show that this risk is
non-existent in the case of the Private Finance Initiative. Its
non-existence doesn't prevent the government from being prepared to pay a
premium for it, however.
Either Chancellor Gordon Brown is a very stupid man or there's something
else going on. Of course, this 'something else' is that our old friends
from the international financial institutions � the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank and so on - have a view on how economies
should be run. It isn't just the IMF either. All the big accountancy
firms do too - respected names like Arthur Andersen and Price Waterhouse.
Even the palest pink social democrat knows that you can't run a major
economy like Britain's with the appalling level of investment that's been
put into public services in the last 20 years. But Gordon Brown also
knows that he'd be spotted if he invested directly in public services.
So, rather than risk any sanctions from the Bretton-Woods gang, he opts
for privatisation, even though it's inefficient, morally repugnant and
more expensive.
Once we understand this, we can see why it's only Brown, Prescott and the
companies who stand to profit who think the Public-Private Partnership on
London's Tube is a good idea. It isn't, any more than the various
Structural Adjustment Programmes forced on Africa and Latin America have
been.
In some areas of work, the private sector has no experience whatsoever.
In these, they simply buy out public expertise. We're all familiar with
scandals like the one in Southwark Education. The Director of Education
in this South London borough was headhunted by Atkins, an engineering
company who subsequently won the contract to run Southwark's education
for profit. His pay doubled overnight.
But this isn't just about fat cats. In many areas of council and
government work, the assets are the workforce. They've been trained by
the public sector and are then pushed into the private sector to make
profits. In some cases they're even paid better, though there's always
relentless pressure. For example, when the Tories forced councils to put
services out to compulsory competitive tendering in the 1980s and 1990s,
most contracts were won by local authorities' existing teams because
there was no realistic competition in, say, building repairs, housing
benefit, social services and council tax administration. Where there was
or could be (in competing for large scale building projects, IT support,
refuse collection and so on), many contracts went to private companies.
Since Labour came to power in 1997, this has changed. Central government
and local authorities have actively connived to transfer more work to the
private sector. Many of the big names in privatisation, such as Capita
(which oversees London's new driving tax), make regular donations to the
Labour Party. Some have even closer links. One example is Service Team,
set up by managers and Labour Party bigwigs from Lewisham Borough
Council, also in South London.
Those on the left who still believe that Labour has any 'organic
connection to the working class' should just look at the machinations of
managers in all areas as they try to carve out some little empire from
which they can launch a buy-out when they go private.
Martin H.
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****** The A-Infos News Service ******
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/04/04/1364795
