Reform should mean change for the better not a euphemism for cuts and privatisation. It’s time progresssives took back the initiative and saved our services
‘Reform’ is a term that was once championed by the Left. It had a very clear meaning. The NHS, the foundation of the welfare state: all these historic triumphs were labelled ‘reforms’. But these days the word – along with, say, ‘modernisation’ – has become a euphemism for privatisation, cuts and a race to the bottom in workers’ rights. It’s clever stuff: it paints opponents of such policies as the real conservatives, or ‘roadblocks to reform’, as the Tories once put it.
With the NHS, it means a policy of privatisation via a ‘top-down reorganisation’ that the 2010 Conservative Party manifesto explicitly pledged not to introduce. Section 75 of the legislation demands that all NHS services are put out to competitive tender unless commissioning groups are satisfied a ‘single provider’ can deliver the service: a ‘free-for-all’ beckons.
In education, rather than addressing the root causes of educational inequalities – Britain’s intense social divisions – Michael Gove is embarking on an ideologically driven crusade to marketise and dismantle the comprehensive system.
Back in July 2011, David Cameron pledged to end ‘old fashioned’ state delivery of public services and open them all up to private companies. The government is planning to re-privatise the East Coast mainline, for example, even though Office of Rail Regulation figures found that it’s the ‘most efficiently run franchise in terms of its reliance on taxpayer funding’.
Bear in mind that the taxpayer is forking out up to four times more on public subsidies for the privately run railways than in the ‘bad old days’ of British Rail.
Indeed, there have been plenty of reasons recently to doubt the dogma of the private sector being best placed to run public services. When G4S failed to deliver Olympic security as required, it was the state that had to step in, leading Tory minister Phillip Hammond to confess the episode had made him rethink his ‘prejudice’ about the private sector. And look at the private companies dependent on the state like welfare-to-work firm A4e.
Then there are the banks: it wasn’t free market dogma that came to the rescue in the global financial meltdown of 2008, but rather trillions of dollars of public money.
Then there are the cuts to local authorities, with deprived areas such as Hackney and South Tyneside taking a battering, while more prosperous communities like Windsor and Richmond escape almost unscathed. The impact is frightening. Eight Bristol care homes face closure; Somerset has cut its youth services by 71%; women’s refuges have lost up to a third of funding when 1 million women are victims of domestic violence each year.
Does this mean that progressives should retreat into a defensive posture? ‘Stop the cuts’, ‘Stop privatisation’: or ‘Stop the world, I want to get off’? No. It does, of course, require an alternative to cuts. A good start would be a clampdown on the £25bn lost through tax avoidance a year – compared with the £1.2bn benefit fraud bill.
But it also calls for a different sort of reform or modernisation. That doesn’t mean a return to top-down nationalisation or selling chunks off to profiteering companies that don’t have the interests of service users at heart. It could mean public services democratically run by service users and workers. How about a publicly run British railway with passengers’ and workers’ representatives on the management board?
‘Never let a crisis go to waste,’ Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s then-chief of staff, was reported as saying back in 2008. ‘And what I mean by that is that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.’ That’s a concise summary of the Right’s approach since Lehman Brothers came crashing down.
Time for others to adopt the same principle, and go on the offensive in the battle for the future of our embattled public services.
Owen Jones is a columnist and author of Chavs, the demonisation of the working class. He will be speaking at the CIPFA conference in London on July 10
This article first appeared in the July/August edition of Public Finance
