Industry | 2010.04.19
A people power fraud that promises mass privatisation | Seumas Milne
The reality of Tory Big Society rhetoric will be corporate control of schools and the breakup of the welfare state
You\'ve got to hand it to them. The Tories\' chutzpah knows no bounds. Having declared themselves the new progressives, denounced the government for widening the gap between rich and poor, and launched an appeal to "working people" Gordon Brown would never risk, David Cameron\'s Conservatives have now made "people power" the Big Idea to propel them into power.
It\'s a brilliant piece of marketing by Britain\'s new masters of spin, which takes Cameron\'s political cross-dressing to a new level, trumps Labour\'s lack of an overarching campaign theme and reflects the genuinely progressive public mood in the wake of the economic crash.
Close your eyes during Tuesday\'s Tory manifesto launch , and you could almost imagine you were in Hugo Chávez\'s Venezuela, with all the talk of people taking collective control of their own lives and being given the right to set up schools, run libraries and parks, elect police commissioners and create workers\' co-ops in the public sector.
It\'s a powerful message. Who isn\'t frustrated by the corporate managerialism of public services and wouldn\'t be attracted by a bigger say in how they are delivered – even if there might be worries, as Oscar Wilde had about socialism, that it might "take up too many evenings".
But you don\'t have to drill down very far to see that Cameron\'s battle cry about handing power to the "little platoons" masks a much more traditional Thatcherite agenda. As William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, put it as a precocious 16-year-old to the 1977 Conservative party conference , the idea is to "roll back the frontiers of the state".
Strip away the reassuring rhetoric, and Cameron\'s people power is unmistakably a programme for sweeping privatisation of public services. The only difference with his predecessors is that, after a generation of Tory and New Labour sell-offs, we\'re now talking about the final frontier of the welfare state.
Take the Swedish and US-style "free schools" the Conservatives want parents to be able to set up. The problem isn\'t just that the sharp-elbowed and better-off will be able to divert scarce funds from other schools at a time of heavy cuts, or that the evidence from Sweden suggests free schools are expensive, increase social segregation and often lack basic facilities.
It\'s also that they\'re mostly managed by private companies whose first responsibility is to their shareholders. That\'s clearly what will happen here if the Conservatives are elected, now Michael Gove, Cameron\'s education spokesman, has announced they can after all be run for profit.
Professor Stephen Ball of the Institute of Education describes it as "a huge gamble based on little or no evidence". The same goes for the Tories\' much more ambitious planned expansion of academy schools, some already sponsored and controlled by private companies making money by ensuring school services are commissioned from themselves.
Gove is determined to take the government\'s brakes off that process and have privately run academies – despite a patchy educational record – let rip throughout the schools system, as "independent providers" are lured by the profits to be made from economies of scale in chains of schools.
That\'s one reason why the Conservative claim to be giving people control over their lives and services is such a transparent fraud. As anyone who has been a maintained school governor knows, it\'s hard enough to make changes with only a minority of parents and teachers on a governing body.
It is impossible in academies, which are required to have only one parent and no teacher governors, and no right of appeal to the local authority. The majority of the Tories\' new free schools and academies will be controlled by private companies, not parents – who will be reduced to the status of customers.
The result will be less people power, not more. Something similar will apply to the gimmick of encouraging public-sector workforces into sub-contracted co-operatives, lined up to be joint ventures with private firms, doubtless as a precursor to corporate takeover.
The evidence has built up remorselessly over two decades that privatisation of public services is expensive, drives down pay and conditions, reduces transparency and accountability, increases bureaucracy and political corruption and corrodes the ethos and character of the service. What specialism does the KPMG-sponsored City Academy in east London offer its pupils? Business and financial services, naturally.
But the power of the corporate interests driving privatisation and their capture of the main political parties mean its record is barely challenged in the mainstream. So Cameron this week blithely promised to "break open state monopolies", while Ken Clarke pledged full privatisation of Royal Mail and a "hands off" approach to big business – and the private General Healthcare Group, chaired by his Whitehall adviser Peter Gershon, looked forward enthusiastically to "an increasing role for the private sector" as a result of NHS cuts.
Of course, New Labour has laid the ground for such an onslaught with 13 years of privatisation of its own, exorbitant private finance initiative schemes and the most stubborn resistance to corporate regulation until it was overwhelmed by the neoliberal crisis in the last couple of years. There has since been some slowdown in the rate of private takeover in health and education. But despite other positive pledges – on the minimum wage and industrial intervention, for example – Labour\'s manifesto this week reverted to shopworn New Labour themes on public services, the banks and income tax. As the Liberal Democrats confirmed yesterday, none of the main parties has moved beyond a discredited market model.
In the case of Cameron, Gove and George Osborne, who all boast of being heirs to Tony Blair, they haven\'t the slightest intention of doing so. Whoever is elected, there will be more sell-offs and a battle royal over cuts. But if the Conservatives come to power, we can now be in no doubt it will mean the deepest cuts since the 1930s, lower taxes for the wealthy and mass privatisation of public services. Cameron\'s Britain won\'t be a state of the little platoons, but the big corporations – and people power will provide cover for the breakup of the welfare state.
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