“Governments stand because people sit; if people stand, governments will sit!”
– Mehmet Murat İldan (Turkish writer).
Did you clap for the NHS and key workers? Did you cheer on Captain Tom? Have you been angered by what has happened to some of the most vulnerable in our society both in care homes and in our communities? If so, then it’s time to take it a step further. Not putting too fine a point on it, clapping and anger are empty gestures without real action and sadly also have acted as a distraction to what is happening under cover of COVID-19.
Before it is too late to reverse the on-going creation of an all-powerful corporatocracy serving the few through government diktat, it’s time to recognise some difficult truths about what has been happening. Not just to our NHS but also to vital national and local public services which have been starved of cash, forced to reduce services and staffing levels and compelled to outsource or privatise those very services upon which we depend for national economic well-being. We are living the destructive consequences of an ideology that claims that private is more efficient, that our public services are dependent the state of the economy for funding and by association the false public assumption that a healthy economy increases tax revenues and enables public services to be paid for.
We are seeing first-hand what happens when the public purpose is subverted to deliver public money into private profit. As George Monbiot put it in an article this week in his blog: ‘There is a consistent reason for multiple systemic failures the pandemic exposed: the intrusion of corporate power into public policy. Privatisation, commercialisation, outsourcing and offshoring have severely compromised the UK’s ability to respond to a crisis’.
The campaigning organisation WeOwnIT in partnership with the University of Greenwich published a report just over a week ago ‘Privatised and Unprepared: The NHS Supply Chain’ which suggested our government is ‘asleep at the wheel’ although one might challenge that description for a more accurate one being ‘wide awake’. These are not failures of misdirected policies, they are deliberately constructed market-oriented strategies to favour corporations and serve a revolving door.
In a clear indictment of government actions, it describes a system which has been privatised to supposedly deliver efficiency savings but which in reality has left the country totally unprepared to address the COVID-19 emergency as well as seriously undermining the operation to protect the NHS, care staff and patients. Just in time systems, a fragmented supply structure in the hands of private profit-oriented organisations left the NHS and indeed care homes unable to access sufficient supplies of PPE. Privatisation and outsourcing have proven in the most tragic way that they are not the magic cure-all that was promised.
Worryingly but predictably the government, instead of stopping, is still pressing on with its plans as more and more public contracts are handed out to private companies without any accountability; fragmenting the emergency response even further at a time when it is essential for the government to act in the public interest, not to the advantage of private profit.
However, a privatised supply chain is just one piece of this complicated jigsaw. For decades and almost imperceptibly at least to the public the NHS has been undergoing a radical transformation. Behind its well-recognised public logo now sits a structure which has been infiltrated by private healthcare companies which have been directing the orchestra all with the approval of successive governments towards the creation of a US-style two-tier healthcare service. As our sister organisation, Public Matters, wrote in an article in 2017 ‘the Americanisation of the NHS [is] happening right here, right now.’ It is not a dystopian vision of the future. Furthermore, this vision goes well beyond the national borders of the UK as Professor Steward Player (co-author of ‘The Plot against the NHS) wrote in an article published in the Socialist Health Association in 2017 in which he indicates that the ‘basic strategy now adopted for the NHS in England has its origins in the business-dominated international circuit of which the WEF (World Economic Forum) is the apex…[and] what is planned for the NHS in England is not a home-grown response…but what the global policy-making elite at Davos sees as a way of avoiding further growth of spending on publicly-provided health care.’
He noted that in early 2012 the WEF had considered that ‘national healthcare systems were increasingly caught between a rock and a hard place as fiscal crises were creating pressures to curb expenditure’. Professor Player also noted that as a result, it had set about the task of helping ‘existing models become sustainable’. The first report, co-authored with McKinsey and Co, looked amongst other things at the financial sustainability of health systems in the context of the level of public debt and declining tax revenues and the second at offering solutions which included ‘rationing, shifting the cost burden onto individuals and raising healthcare ‘productivity’ through delivering more services with fewer resources.’
It is instructive that once again we see the use of a false narrative about public debt and unsustainable spending which has underpinned government policies aimed at delivering a corporate, profit-led world serviced by public spending taps which can be switched on and off at will depending on the political objectives. And again, with the caveat that we’ll need more austerity in the public sector to pay down the debt incurred which in turn will lead to services being sacrificed, yet again, on the altar of efficiency and profit.
And now following Brexit, as if that were not enough, the health service which is already minus the ‘N’ for national’ is also being threatened by a trade treaty with the US. Even if the government has promised that the NHS will not be on the table, given the government’s obfuscation and lies trust in that promise has to be questioned.
COVID-19 is providing the perfect #disastercapitalism opportunity to drive these policies as we remain locked down and fearful for the future and also the daily reminders of the dishonest claim by politicians and their pals in the media who labour the point that someone will have to pay up in the end. Even when that is not true!
The same situation also applies to the Care Sector where, as covered in previous blogs, for the last few decades services have increasingly relied on market provision with tragic consequences, historically and as a result of the current pandemic. David Rowland who is a Director of the Centre for Health and Public Interest noted in a recent article in LSE Blogs that ‘using the market to deliver social care on a low-cost basis had manifestly failed even before the current pandemic’ pointing out that ‘one in five care homes are rated as inadequate or needing improvement, personal care is provided to people in their own homes in 15-minute slots, with the sector as a whole suffering from a 30% turnover rate – a fact which might explain why there are currently over 120,000 vacancies.’
Like healthcare, the social care system is dominated by private residential and home care all competing for a share of the market, thus creating pressures on wages and quality of care. The workforce has become casualised with increasing reliance on zero-hour contracts. As David Rowland points out ‘because the state has driven the cost of delivering care down to a bare minimum and because off-shore investors have sought to extract the maximum short-term profit out of the residential care sector, many care providers were teetering on the brink of collapse even before COVID-19 hit. He notes that this has ‘left the financial structure of the industry in such a fragile state that it is not able to withstand even a minor downturn in income or increase in costs’.
Austerity driven from the top has percolated into every aspect of our lives, leaving our local governmental structures unable to provide the necessary expert and logistical support. Privatisation equally has proved to be a killer. In short, whether it’s the NHS or the care sector as TJ Coles notes in his book ‘The Privatised Planet’ ‘the less care you give the more money you make’. And that is the crux of the threat that faces not just us but our fellow planetary citizens
Never has there been a more important time to challenge this ideology that the needs of the ‘market’ should trump public purpose and the creation of a healthy, educated, purposeful nation.
One million people have signed a petition calling for the resignation of Dominic Cummings and tens of thousands have written to their MP. His actions have stirred a wave of disgust at a time of national emergency and solidarity in a way that the loss of our public services has not. Campaigns and demonstrations organised by committed individuals over the last 10 years have done little to raise real awareness amongst the general public about what has been happening with little or no public accountability. When you are struggling to pay your bills, rent or mortgage, working for poor wages and in insecure employment, living in bad housing or unable to access good healthcare and education there is little time left to be concerned about the future when the here and now is all-consuming. A rotting economic system has deprived many of the will and energy to stand up.
With a media that has also reinforced the perception that our public services are either unaffordable or reliant on a healthy economy and taxes being paid, the public has not stood a chance to make its voice known. Until now perhaps?
The public has had a full-on very personal encounter with the vital nature of our public and social infrastructure and if change is to happen then it now needs to stand up and demand that our vital public services are not only funded properly but also restored to public provision. As part of that demand and with the knowledge that a sovereign currency-issuing government is not short of cash but more accurately short on political will, it must also challenge politicians and media pundits who are already talking about how it will be paid for.
The message is simple. The government has the power of the public purse and the power to serve the public purpose if it chooses to do so. As the currency issuer, it neither needs tax or to borrow before it can spend, and that spending will not be a financial burden on future generations. Britain’s national debt which is predicted to hit £2 trillion for the first time will not be ‘the grim milestone’ it is claimed to be by a media pundit yesterday.
The real burden will be a government that has failed to spend sufficiently on delivering public purpose aims for today in the light of the damaging effects of COVID-19 on the economy which will continue for some time to come, and for future generations who will benefit or not as the case may be from government spending policies.
The political institutions, corporations and wealthy elites have gamed the system for their own purpose through domestic legislative means, trade deals and by subverting public funds into private profit. They are still gaming the system. As Arundhati Roy put it in the Progressive International ‘Our Task is to Disable the Engine’.
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