The latest New Economics Foundation / Tax Justice Network economic mythbuster is out. It's featured in the Guardian and on the NEF website. It's by my good friend Andrew Simms, working with Stephen Reid and challenges the idea that the private sector is more efficient than the state. As they argue:
Towards the end of 2012 a telling interview with the head of the London Olympics, Lord Coe, was published in a national newspaper. "I actually don't believe in big government," said Coe "and half the time I'm never quite sure I believe in government, generally." Dumbfounded, the interviewer Decca Aitkenhead responded: "But without government we wouldn't have had the Olympics." Coe conceded, "No, that is true. That is true."
The myth of private sector superiority says that the private sector is efficient and dynamic, the public sector wasteful and slow; that the more we can get the private sector to run things the better. That the head of a massive public enterprise like the Olympics can so blithely discount what underpins it demonstrates its reach. In fact, while billboard adverts said we had commercial sponsors to thank for every minute of pulsating Olympic action, as little as 6% of costs were met from sponsorship.
The myth is effectively government policy. In 2010 David Cameron spelled out his priorities for government which were to use, "all available policy levers," to make it easier for the private sector to "create a new economic dynamism". The following year Cameron announced that he was "taking on the enemies of enterprise", which included the "bureaucrats in government departments" and the "town hall officials". The chancellor, George Osborne, claimed it wasn't just that the one sphere was generally better than the other. He argued that the public sector was "crowding out" the private sector and needed cutting back.
But, what of the evidence of private sector efficiency?
Well, that of course is the myth, as they show here, and in more detail here.
Read, enjoy and realise that your instincts that this was always a load of old baloney were right.
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Of course it is a myth so might that gag in the libel reform law may come in useful? From your earlier post on the libel reform law:-
“Libel reform campaigners ………..were disappointed by the failure of a bid to bar private companies contracted to run schools, prisons or healthcare from suing ordinary citizens who criticised the work they do for the taxpayer.”
Indeed
Does anyone know of any reliable information on what proportion of recent economic ‘growth’ the profits of privatised utilities, such as gas, electricity, water, transportation have contributed?
I haven’t done it
Agreed . On a similar note did you see the following excellent article by John Naughton
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/apr/21/fred-brooks-complex-software-projects
Yes
Fascinating
So the answer is to nationalise everything and make it more efficient? Shome mishtake shurely?
Only a wilful fool could reach that conclusion
One bit of the report particularly screams out:
‘One hospital trust in Bromley Hospitals reportedly spent £3 just on negotiating PFI.’
This culture of wallet lining without concern for the needs of social provision and outcomes is unconscionable