Neoliberalism is built on lies. For decades the deceit at its core has been ignored because it appeared to deliver prosperity. It does not any more. That is why everything is unravelling.
The biggest lie that neoliberalism promotes is that all value is created by private sector business, which claim is contrasted with a claim that government destroys value. So, apparently, a teacher working for a private school adds value. The same teacher in front of the same children in a state school would, apparently, not do so. The idea is obviously absurd, and yet is key to understanding neoliberal's approach to public services, which is built on this lie.
This neoliberal lie has corrupted public services. Based on this claim it has come to be believed that there is no answer to any question that the state can supply. Instead, it is the private sector that must provide the solution to problems because that sector supposedly knows best.
The PPE scandal provided evidence of that. The civil service did know how to procure PPE legally. There were channels for doing so. But ministers chose to ignore those skills and available options: naked greed would, they claimed, motivate the delivery of the supplies they claimed the country desperately needed. They clearly did not. They just led to waste, abuse and outright corruption.
But the scandal is in many ways much more pervasive than that. This weekend government minister James Cleverly was telling the media that pay talks between the government and nurses were not possible because the nurses needed to talk to their employers instead - and they were the supposedly independent NHS trusts. These, as we all know, could be swept away on a whim by the government, but we are apparently required to believe in their substance, independence, and credibility despite the obvious sham implicit in their status, whose sole justification is to eventually be the vehicles for profit-motivated privatisation.
Likewise, Steve Barclay argued yesterday he could discuss pay with nurses' leaders because this issue had been resolved by the independent pay review body. That this body was appointed by the government, works within parameters set by the government, and respects government budgets is all ignored in that comment: we are told instead we must accept the independence of those working for it when there is no real evidence that this exists.
To those who know about the workings of offshore tax havens all this is terribly familiar. The skills of wilful lying now in evidence daily from the government were developed there when so many supposedly professional people became used to making persistent false claims that the supposed operations of multinational companies in these locations had real substance when this was complete nonsense, when the whole control of the corporate operation was very clearly located elsewhere, and seemingly remarkably close to the chief executive's office.
That is also the case in the current pay disputes. All the sham trust, academy and franchises statuses of many of the bodies involved cannot disguise the fact that, firstly, these structures are incredibly expensive to operate fig leaf entities that ministers use to deny responsibility for their actions, and secondly, have only been created to pursue the neoliberal desire to claim that nothing is efficient unless removed from the sphere of government.
As is readily apparent now, neither of those claims are true. What is more, they have been seen through. No one believes ministers' claims that pay issues in the public sector are beyond their remit.
Nor, come to that, does anyone now really believe the claim that value is not created by the public sector when its failings as a result of continual underfunding are imposing massive cost on society.
And people do not believe in a private sector alternative when that appears to be more expensive, corrupt or just worse due to the failure to integrate planning.
The reality is that the lies do not work any more. All the cover put in on place for greed, cronyism, profiteering and denial are now seen for what they are. They have leeched the public sector of already scarce resources, leaving them incapable of delivery from structures wholly unfit to meet need.
Public sector employees need inflation matching pay rises to provide any chance for these services to survive, because unless those rises happen essential employees will walk away.
But more than that, the neoliberal lies, into which most political parties have bought, need to be called out, with the constructs that have resulted from them being swept away.
We need an integrated NHS, run by regional health authorities responsible for integrated care across regions.
We need local education authorities to coordinate all education in an area.
We need nationalised railways, working as an integrated service.
And we need nationalised utilities to underpin well-being with energy, water, post, broadband and buses back in state control to make sure, once again, that service comes first.
Then the lies will have been swept away.
And they need to be. The lies have failed us, as have the liars. We need to move on from the edifices of corruption they have built. We need the honesty to do that. We need politicians willing to say so.
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Hear hear. The outsourced private sector alternative to the public sector work I do is vastly more expensive, provides an often crap service (that then has to be repeated in-house) while cherry-picking the easy work, leaving the difficult stuff to the over-stretched, understaffed and under-funded public service. We could easily do a good job in-house while keeping up with the demand, with no out-sourcing, if the government would only invest in the staff and equipment instead of chucking the money at the private sector, which then unfairly comes to be seen as the saviour of the failing public service.
That trenchantly sums up the situation we are in. Meanwhile, Hunt thinks twenty years of Conservative austerity and recession (or downrright depression to come) is the best way to achive growth. That’ll do it.
Incidentally, I think a correction of ‘couldn’t’ for ‘could’ on the pay talks above.
An integrated health service -which is what there is in Scotland where there are regional health boards – and note that the NHS in Scotland has settled their workers pay claim
And Labour is just another neoliberal party. https://drshibleyrahman.wordpress.com/2022/12/11/wes-streeting-proved-today-that-he-has-no-political-nous-over-the-nhs-this-could-be-quite-a-big-problem/
Interesting article from the FT over Britains economic failure here
https://www.ft.com/content/ef265420-45e8-497b-b308-c951baa68945
If you cant access it the full text is on this thread on Mumsnet
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4639881-britain-and-the-us-are-poor-societies-with-some-very-rich-people-average-polish-family-to-be-better-off-than-the-average-uk-family-by-2024-a-far-cry-from-the-time-when-the-uk-was-the-biggest-economy-in-the-world-when-queen-elizabeth-was-crowned
Thanks
A really great post showing us what has been going on.
I recently read something about the the etymology of the word ‘private’ (as most of what we are seeing is driven by or a privatisation – the NHS is obviously been carved into independent business units ripe for batching up and selling off). It is very telling when you look into what words really mean:
“Private (adj.):
late 14c., “pertaining or belonging to oneself, not shared, peculiar to an individual only;” of a thing, “not open to the public, for the use of privileged persons;” of a religious rule, “not shared by Christians generally, distinctive;” from Latin privatus “set apart (from what is public), belonging to oneself (not to the state), peculiar, personal,” used in contrast to publicus, communis.
This is a past-participle adjective from the verb privare “to bereave, deprive, rob, strip” of anything; “to free, release, deliver” from anything, from privus “one’s own, individual,” from Proto-Italic *prei-wo- “separate, individual,” from PIE *prai-, *prei- “in front of, before,” from root *per- (1) “forward.” The semantic shift would be from “being in front” to “being separate.”
Old English in this sense had syndrig. Of persons, “not holding public office or employment,” recorded from early 15c. Of communications, “meant to be secret or confidential,” 1550s. In private “privily” is from 1580s. Related: Privately.”
Private school “school owned and run by individuals, not by the government, and run for profit” is by 1650s”.
The intentions are all there aren’t they? That’s why we have rampant private profit making in utilities and sewage in our rivers and on our beaches.
I think you’ll find that the word describing this process and its pernicious outcomes most accurately is “enclosure.”
To slightly paraphrase JK Galbraith, “Nobody ever went broke by inventing excuses for the greed of the rich and powerful”.
As you have admirably pointed out here and in many other contributions, neo-liberalism falls into this category.
Indeed, based on the evidence from the Financial crash, Brexit, Liz Truss and countless other examples I strongly doubt that beyond its use as a permanent excuse the Tories have either much interest or much understanding of the theory.
Their constantly repeated mantra of “Taking back Control” is perhaps nearer the reality.
Gain power, change the laws to financially benefit themselves and to take power away from those opposing them, then use the ill-gotten wealth and power to repeat the cycle ad-infinitum.
I realised after 2008 that Capitalism was dead. As much as Communism was after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was a watershed moment.
Not that what we had could even be called capitalism, I like to call it crony capitalism. Driven by powerful lobbying corporations and bought politicians. The powers that be will try to lumber on with their noses in the trough, but we can’t let them.
“We need local education authorities to coordinate all education in an area.”
Academies are part of the meme: ‘private good, public bad’.
The National Education Union has a well researched position of academies
https://neu.org.uk/policy/neu-case-against-academisation
The govt. white paper “Opportunity for all” requires all schools to be academies or planning to be one by 2030.
IMHO this removes them from from local democratic control
Agreed. A disaster
Who will own the land they’re on when this happens? Isn’t this simply a land grab in disguise?
Yes – that core concept that public services are a ‘cost’ which has to be ‘borne’ by ‘the rest of us ‘ – is incessantly incanted by every BBC news interview / commentary, whether r4 Today World at One, PM even Womens Hour, again and again challenging nurses leader more or less to say ‘which patients would you choose to kill’, ‘the money has to some from somewhere’ .
Mick Lynch did challenge the BBC’s framing but surely until BBC has enough independence to at least ask in some depth – ‘ do patients have to die to fund a pay rise?’ we are heading down the road to autocracy .
Apparently Hitler took only a few months to abolish all other political parties in the 30’s – We are much more subtle – all parties are the same ‘party’ accepting the same narrative about why we cant do anything to change course.
Frightening..
I too heard Mick Lynch explaining to a BBC employee that the propaganda made up by Tory newspapers, Tory “think-tanks” and Tory politicians should not constitute the news agenda of any half-decent news organisation interested in the truth.
The BBC employee seemed startled by the concept.
Yes. It was marvelous to hear her struggle to give any sort of proper reply.
And Mick Lynch was perfectly right.
“Main Results. From 4912 citations, we included 58 reviews. Both the quality of the reviews and the underlying studies within the reviews were variable. Social democratic welfare states, higher public spending, fair trade policies, extensions to compulsory education provision, microfinance initiatives in low-income countries, health and safety policy, improved access to health care, and high-quality affordable housing have positive impacts on population health. Neoliberal restructuring seems to be associated with increased health inequalities and higher income inequality with lower self-rated health and higher mortality.”
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2019.305001?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed
Indeed
Neoliberalisms seduces the public with claims such as “Work hard and you too could become wealth”. It is literally a pyramid scam, because one or two people at the top of the corporate pyramid can earn a significant salary. Unfortunately the other 360,000 nurses, no matter how hard they work, will be rewarded with only a clap.
Modern Money Theory recognises this, and pledges full employment at a fair wage with all the benefits. Neoliberals claim this is not “affordable” (another lie) as taxes do not fund spending, and since the UK has sovereignty over its currency, can meet public sector spending as long as Parliament approves (as it does with military spending).
Superb post RIchard and as a worker for RM on strike today it is very poignant . The Royal Mail has been the conversation on Radio 5 Live today and the amount of Small Businesses that have come on and whinged about the Posties etc is unbelievable ! RM is a Private Business now yet everyone still thinks we are a Public Service !! All i heard was silence when we were Privatised … everyone now has a choice which Company they can use , that is apparently supposed to deliver Prosperity to us all !! Your first 3 paragraphs above present evidence to the contrary ….. The CEO of Royal Mail and the Board have presented the workers with a deal that literally surrenders all the hard gained Terms and Conditions won by the Union over the years . The worst one being that they want to Derecognise the Union in all but name . The 9% pay rise is spurious , we have already had a 2 % imposed on us without agreement and some of the remaining 7 % will only be paid out in a Lump Sum which is Taxed , if meeting certain Targets. I could go on but you get my drift hopefully , one service along with many others Today not being managed as they used to be and are now just a vehicle for making profits for Shareholders etc.
Thanks for this
And good luck
Don’t let the bastards grind you down
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