Guest Blog 43

Reform is a right wing think tank that specializes in pushing the case for the privatization of the public sector. Of all its monies 70% comes from companies and 30% from the general public. Reform’s donors include corporate giants such as the General Healthcare Group, BMI Healthcare and BUPA Healthcare, all of whom would benefit from the selling off of public run services. The head of Reform (Nick Seddon) was also Head of Communications at Circle partnerships which describes itself as 'Europe’s largest healthcare partnership’ and is one of the great beneficiaries of the privatisation of the NHS. 

In 20012 the company took over Hinchingbrooke Health Care Trust the first time that an NHS hospital was handed over to the private sector. Seddon has written articles that call for the sacking of 150,000 NHS workers, real term cuts to the NHS budget and charges for GP visits. He has also called for healthcare to be 'largely funded by the government but organised outside the government' by insurance companies and other organisations.

Early in 2013 Reform published research endorsing the privatisation of Britain’s prisons, a policy from which even the Conservative-led government had been edging away. The report was widely cited in the British Media; the BBC flattered it by describing it as ‘thought provoking’. But what was not mentioned was Reform’s substantial funding from security firms G4S, SERCO and Sodexo – companies that were already running 14 prisons and stood to benefit from further privatisation. In 2012 alone Reform received £24,500 from G4S and £7,500 from SERCO.

In 2013 Seddon left Reform to become Cameron’s new health advisor!!!

Madson Pirie, a free market fundamentalist, and his outriders, the followers of Hayek, have not just moved mainstream - they are the mainstream. They have made ideas that were once considered ludicrous, absurd and whacky become the new common sense. They have shifted the ‘Overton Window.’ What was once whacky becomes normal and even moderate. Thatcher did not dare threaten the privatisation of the NHS but eventually after years of Thatcherism and then son of Thatcher ‘Blairism’, this was turned into a theoretical and actual reality by the last coalition government no less. They have laid the foundations of right wing radical ideas and then popularised them, with their friend Murdoch, to a mass audience. The national political conversation is kept relentlessly on the terms favourable to those with wealth and power. The Private Sector is good the Public Sector is bad – ‘four legs good two legs bad!’ (Orwell)

Tax credits could be seen as a state subsidy to private companies that pay low wages and they are now being reduced; housing benefits go to greedy Tory landlords. Douglas Carswell, the UKIP MP, refers to an oligarchy of corporate cronyism that the traditional shire Tories find revolting. The state therefore is the backbone of scrounging corporate capitalism, subsidising wages, bailing out banks and paying for private sector profit making organisations to terrify benefit recipients. 

ATOS (with a £500 million ‘scrounge’ off the taxpayer) means testing the disabled who are ‘bullied off benefits’ many of whom appeal successfully (over 50%) and many others who committed suicide. ATOS simply walked off the job retaining its profits. SERCO (Group 4? – what’s the difference they are all Tory shareholders) and the Olympics – original contract £7.3m then stretching to £60m (G4S) then couldn’t do the task it had been paid to leading to three and a half thousand tax payer paid soldiers being drafted in to finish the job. 

A4E in 2004 was paid £200m of tax payers money – all its income coming from the public purse - a total scrounger - terrorising people back to work. The Chief exec had £8.6m in stocks and shares, £365k per year in salary and was renting out her 20 bed mansion to her own organisation (conflict of interest?) whilst abusing, insulting and sending people to work at Poundland for free and making lots of other workfare people go to companies with close ties to the Tory Party, acquiring no skills in the process, but providing free servile labour. And the Mandatory Work Activity Scheme leading to no work later on; in fact less work than those who obtained work whilst on benefit

G4S, SERCO and Sodexo get over half their income from the state – 3 huge scroungers! (£4 billion to SERCO, G4S, Atos and Capita alone). The National Audit Office says that of £178 billion of public funds, over half is earmarked for the private sector. Even police services (and probation) have and are being taken over. Care in the Community opened up massive contracts to private care homes, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI)  swindle will cost future generations up to £301 billion and £20 billion of £95 billion of existing NHS monies are ready for the big P!

Nigel Lawson once said that the NHS was the nearest thing that the English had to a religion! Codex cleaners are earning half the wages they had 20 years ago - insidious - cleaner on 18 hours leaves and is replaced by one on 16 hours doing the same work or perhaps more! NHS is now contracting out the actual commissioning! Privatising the commissioning so that they can give it to themselves! Recently Surrey contracted out £500m, Peterborough £1.1 billion, much of the work going to Tory donors and as one Dr (Chand would you believe) said ‘If it does not generate profit it does not wish to know..............there is now cherry picking of elective surgery.........2 tier service’

These are the real scroungers sponging off society taking vast sums of tax payers money, producing reduced and poorer services, reducing codes and conditions of service and generating millions and billions to their shareholders (who are these we might ask? The haves and the have yachts?) whilst refusing to pay their proper taxes themselves. There is a programme on TV called Benefits Street but as yet no programme called ‘Tax Dodger St’ or ‘Off Shore Account St!’ Lastly, what about the Serious Fraud Office launching an enquiry into G4S and Serco after they allegedly over charged the tax payer for tens of millions of pounds of tagging that never took place?

I have seen a general election that was won outright, surprisingly, by the Tory Party that now has a working majority of 12 seats. The election exposed a democratic system that is anachronistic and unrepresentative given that UKIP had nearly 4 million votes and got 1 seat, the Greens over a million and 1 seat and the SNP got 57 seats for 1.5 million votes. If you look at the majorities of the Tories 12 most marginal seats, you will see that they have in fact a working majority of 1250 votes from all 12 combined! In certain countries people would be taking up arms at such unrepresentative injustice. 

Nonetheless, despite this lack of democracy the ‘winning party’ is embarking on a scorched earth policy of replacing the entire public sector with the private sector over the next 5 years and during the last 5 years the gap between rich and poor has widened on historically unprecedented levels; one million people attended food banks last year whilst 1000 people currently own £520 billion between them. George Osborne announced the other day that we will now be able to sell our houses for a million pounds without paying a penny of inheritance tax and in the same breath he is removing child benefits for every child after 2 and has announced cuts to the welfare bill of £12 billion pounds. You could almost see him taking it from one poor pocket and stuffing it into a rich one!

So it would be nice to think that the new Criminal Justice Companies would be ethically inclined in the delivery of its criminal justice service without a pre-occupation with making profits at all costs. A service that would look to diverting people wherever possible away from the criminal justice system and one that would shield the service users from the harsh judicial excesses that are possible under the 2003 CJA and now the 2014 ORA Act. A service that uses new technology appropriately and sparingly to deliver justice and evidence based interventions that work in reducing crime and the number of victims within society. Also a service that respects the high quality of its existing staff that will also seek to maintain its standards and conditions of service in order to attract personnel of similar quality and ability in the future.

But there is also the possibility during the next 5 years that we will get massive judicial inflation - selling goods (Court Orders and TAGs etc) that nobody needs to generate profits from people who do not need to go on orders or be Tagged; a large rise in the prison population as sentencers can now get prison plus supervision (something suggested in New Labour legislation in 2003 but not affordable – remember custody plus?); ‘sharper axes for lower taxes’ ie reduction of codes and conditions of service, replacement of staff with personnel that do more for less and possibly with reduced or no qualifications ‘better for less’; the blurring of the distinctions between the professional and other workers and what work can and cannot be done with and by whom (PSOs become DV experts in an afternoon?); the achievement of a manipulated key Performance Indicator (KPI) rather than the delivery of a professional service. 

Lastly, an organisation that leaves a criminal justice detritus, that is unreformable, to rot, whilst simultaneously cherry picking and making claims of success following interventions with a population of net-widened entrants who should never have been intervened with in the first place!

So 150,000 NHS workers - how many Probation Officers I wonder? Apart from that, everything is hunky dory! You can only say it as you see it. 

Cheers