“The executive of the modern state is but a committee for
managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” So wrote Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels in 1848. And today George Osborne confirmed how true this
observation remains.
The chancellor, or should that be the chief operating
officer (CEO) of Britain PLC, announced that firms involving in fracking – the
highly-dangerous, controversial, ecologically-damaging extraction of shale gas
– will only have to pay a 30% top rate on production.
That compares to 62% on new North Sea
oil operations, rising to 81% for established offshore fields. Leaving aside
for a moment that Osborne’s father-in-law
is head of a lobbying organisation for big oil and gas companies, the position
is clear.
The government, any government, will use its authority to
command the state to do what’s best for business – often to the detriment of a
particular community or society at large.
Desperate to create new energy supplies as North
Sea oil runs down, the government is hoping that a shale gas
bonanza is the answer to their prayers. Hence the tax breaks announced today.
Every day there’s another example of this ever-closer
alliance with business that is the hallmark of this particular period of
globalised capitalism. Last night, the UK ’s state-owned blood supply was
sold to a US-based private equity firm.
The Department of Health sold an 80% stake in Plasma Resources
UK to a Bain Capital. This company was founded by Republican presidential
candidate Mitt Romney, which paid £230m for a controlling interest.
This is consistent with the approach of all governments over
the last 30 years. In 2004, New Labour prime minister Tony Blair said: “Our aim
is to open up the system, to end the one-size-fits-all model of public service,
which too often meant one supplier fits all, with little diversity,
irrespective of how good new suppliers – from elsewhere in the public sector,
and from the voluntary and private sectors – might be.”
In 2011, David Cameron remarked: “From now on, diversity is
the default in our public services. What does that mean? It means that instead
of having to justify why it makes sense to introduce competition, as we are now
doing with schools and in the NHS, the state will have to justify why it makes
sense to run a monopoly.”
As a result, public services wholly provided for by the
state are an increasing rarity. Today roughly £1 in every £3 that government
spends on public services goes to contractors of one sort or another. That’s
about £100 billion a year. That’s a bigger proportion than in any other
country, the US
included.
With the state lacking expertise in contract negotiating,
let alone auditing what’s going on, the scene is set for creaming off the top,
also known as scamming or gaming. Last week it was revealed that government
contracts for tagging offenders held by G4S and Serco had been suspended.
The firms had been charging for tagging people who were
either dead, in prison, or never tagged in the first place. Even this
government had to act when the truth came out. This week, an extensive report
by the Institute for
Government into the outsourcing bonanza, gave chapter and verse on “gaming”
by all sorts of agencies. The report noted:
“Such ‘gaming’ behaviours included excessive ‘parking’ of
service users with complex needs and ‘creaming’ of users who are easier to
support, and therefore more profitable to serve… Such gaming was most apparent
in the Work Programme where the combination of low fees and specific design choices
in the ‘payment by results’ system of reward acted to discourage investment in
helping those who were less likely to get back into work swiftly.”
Choosing easier-to-pass qualifications is an education form
of “gaming”, often used to maintain or attract fund. One head teacher told the
researchers: “Schools that turn themselves around often do it… [by] exploiting
tactics to improve exam results in the short term which are not about the
experience that every child gets in every lesson.”
For Osborne and his corporate chums, however, it really is
one big game which ends with directors and shareholders laughing all the way to
the bank.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
No comments:
Post a Comment