The BBC reports:
David Cameron has said the government will set out plans to allow private and voluntary groups to run almost every kind of public service.
He told the Daily Telegraph there would be a new "presumption" that private companies, charities and voluntary groups could run public services.
A "complete change" was needed to boost standards and end the "state's monopoly" over public services.....
But unions accused him of trying to "privatise everything".
But unions accused him of trying to "privatise everything".
General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress Brendan Barber accused Mr Cameron of pursuing a "naked right-wing agenda" that would take the country back to the most divisive years of the 1980s.
"The prime minister has been telling us that the cuts are sadly necessary, not a secret political project to destroy public services. Yet today's proposal to privatise everything that moves is exactly the kind of proposal that voters would reject if put at an election.”
Quite. How many people want to see privatised libraries, a privatised NHS and a privatised welfare state?
Read Dave's DT article and then go back to read George Monbiot’s excellent Guardian article on how British politics works, which I linked to here.
Governments don't ask themselves "what can we do that is good for the people?". They ask themselves "how do we persuade people that what we want to do is good for them?". The task of both politicians and the corporate press is to convince us that what is good for billionaires is good for everyone but billionaires.
…..An economic war is being fought here. Wealth is being transferred from the poor and middle to the rich at stupefying speed and on a stupefying scale. The financial sector seeks to wring every drop from the productive economy, heedless of the eventual impacts. The government is there to help.
And that is what the ‘Open Public Services’ White Paper is all about.
3 comments:
So, in public service provision, David Cameron is to enact a "presumption in favour of" Conservative Party donors rather than public service providers. In his Howard Hughes-like fear of the latter's "dirt", Cameron is truly the Heir to Blair.
Those who wanted the wrong Miliband as Labour Leader, this is what he would have been like, too. Indeed, as with the schools policy, the forests sell-off, and so many other features of this Government, this latest wheeze was in fact devised by David Miliband when he was working for Tony Blair.
'David Cameron has said the government will set out plans to allow private and voluntary groups to run almost every kind of public service.'
Well, if you take Nick Clegg's comments to their logical conclusion, then maybe an army of people who don't need food, accomodation and electricity and whose kids don't need attention will pack in their jobs and do all this stuff free of charge. Or maybe this is the dumbest coalition in existence.
http://www.lbc.co.uk/clegg-admits-tuition-fee-mistakes-lbc-exclusive-36359
I'm politically opposed to the coalition, but I don't feel so much that it needs to change direction, promote more intelligent voices or restructure its arguments so much that it simply needs to be put out of its misery.
It's incredible, isn't it? They throw everything at the public, swamp them with the most extremist policies, so in the end it is so overwhelming that there the only response is relative silence.
And what do they renege on in a bout of unparalleled generosity? The fucking woodlands. Some concession!
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