SPOKESMAN BOOKS
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Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
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Catalogue
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Socialist Renewal - fifth series: 3
BOOK
REVIEW
Patrick
Ainley
reviews Dexter Whitfield’s (2006) hard-hitting book
‘New
Labour’s Attack on Public Services’.
Markets
in public services are rarely created in a single ‘Big Bang’. Instead,
Dexter Whitfield argues they are stimulated by ‘numerous policies and
initiatives in parallel with the erosion of public services’. As a result,
‘Marketisation develops in different ways at different speeds in different
services’. For a book aiming ‘to show how the language and ideology of
modernisation and the modernisers use marketisation to achieve endemic
privatisation’ the problem is how best to present this multi-faceted
process.
Dexter,
who has long worked at the Trade Union supported Centre for Public Services
(now Northumbria University’s European Services Strategy Unit), previously
collected together examples of the privatisation process in his compendious Public
Services or Corporate Welfare, Rethinking the Nation State in the Global
Economy (Pluto 2001). This was an unreadable ‘Gulag Archipelago’ of a
book that provided invaluable reference to the same process in different areas
of the welfare state - housing, education, health, transport etc -to develop a
theory of what Dexter calls ‘the emerging Corporate-Welfare Complex’. He
thus supports the growing consensus that sees a ‘post-welfare’ or ‘new
market-state’ managing a new mixed economy with a semi-privatised state
sector dominated by a state-subsidised private sector.
Indeed,
in a chapter in that book titled ‘The nation state in 2020’ Dexter painted
a vivid picture of a future in which transnational corporations provide
‘cradle to grave’ health, education, social care and local environmental
services with ‘Two-tier provision for all basic services’. With ‘a
myriad of tax reliefs, allowances, subsidies, vouchers and grants’,
‘Choice is determined by ability to pay: ‘Local government is reduced to a
skeleton regulatory and monitoring agency’ and ‘Cities are run by elected
mayors and committees of business people.’ They assign staff to groups of
contracts, not to particular sectors like health or education. Meanwhile,
national government is ‘limited to coordinating sponsorship and patronage by
business and organizing competitions and lotteries’.
Now
Dexter updates his previous research to develop a theoretical framework to
understand better the marketisation of public services and identify the role
of the state in creating and sustaining markets. This results in a typology of
privatization and marketisation that explains the different ways in which
public services and the welfare state are being transformed by New Labour
government. He examines the nature of markets in the public sector and makes
the case for in-house provision of services to highlight alternatives and
strategies that can stop, slow down and mitigate the negative consequences of
marketisation.
As
such, the book provides essential theoretical ammunition for defending public
services. For a start, it defines ‘neoliberalism as a conservative economic
philosophy revived in the late 1970s following the crisis in Keynesian
economics’. Neoliberalism is then dissected into eight components:
liberalization and competition, markets, deregulation of financial markets,
reconfiguring the role of the state, privatization, consumerism, labour market
flexibility and deregulation and increasing the power of business, coupled
with the erosion of democratic accountability and transparency.’
Each
of these components is demonstrated in examples across the public sector to
show how ‘marketisation embeds neoliberalism’ and ‘drives the
privatisation agenda’. Key
events in marketisation and privatization since Mrs. Thatcher in 1979 are next
presented.
Although
she took a ‘Big Bang’ approach to the privatization of the nationalized
industries, with the . . . exception of John Major’s disastrous
privatization of British Rail in 1996, the pace of change has quickened since
1997 under New Labour which operates simultaneously on many fronts, each
feeding from and strengthening one another. I ‘New Labour dresses up choice
as empowerment. But the real power in marketisation is gained by transnational
companies and consultancies which provide services and, slowly but surely,
take-over the ownership of public sector assets: The Private Finance
Initiative, for instance, having become embedded in the public sector, has
spawned a secondary market for speculating ‘in the public money involved,
selling it on to other companies while developing derivative specialisms in
the NHS Local Improvement Finance Trust and Building Schools for the Future (BSF).
But ‘PFI has never been simply an alternative method of financing
infrastructure investment’; it is part of ‘a longer term strategy by which
the private sector will ultimately own/control the welfare state and provide
privatized core services’.
Schools,
especially City Academies, figure largely in Dexter’s account. BSF, for
instance, ‘is not just about the provision of new schools’. It illustrates
Dexter’s ‘five-stage marketisation process’ – commodifying services,
labour and restructuring the state to weaken democratic accountability while
embedding business interests. Apart from extending opportunities for educated;
malconsultants to be part of PFI consortia for the first time, it also drives
Leas into a commissioning role ‘which is the government’s longer-term
strategy’.
Elsewhere
Dexter draws a diagram to show how teachers have been ‘corralled’ by
academies, school trusts, BSF, the outsourcing of services like school meals,
the childcare market, private supply agencies, commercialization of
materials’ with sponsorship of events and the privately controlled Local
Educational Partnerships. As a result, ‘Secondary and primary education may
remain largely state funded for the foreseeable future, but they will be
delivered mainly by private contractors.
Although he
concentrates on Britain, ‘which is in the vanguard of the marketisation of
public services’, Dexter draws lessons for the Europe Union which wants to
liberalise the cross border supply of services to create a single market
removing all barriers making it less profitable for a service provider to
operate in one country compared to another. This complements the World Trade
Organisation’s General Agreement on Trade in Services to which Dexter
counterpoises ‘GATS free- zones’. He adds that campaigning organizations
such as the World Development Movement, Oxfam and War on Want should link
their opposition to GATS to oppose Britain’s internal marketisation and
privatization programme.
Indeed,
campaigns across sectors have to be united conceptually and practically to
build a national coalition of trade unions, public sector alliances, community
and civil society organizations through regional and national action starting
from cities such as Newcastle where there have been some successes to forge a
wider network. Dexter’s new book helps to inform this joined-up opposition
to joined-up privatisation.
Price: £11.99
ISBN: 978 085124 7151
paperback
