Guardian: Seumus Milne on Privatisation

The corporates and the rich and the old Establishment have got this country sewn up and voting really won't change much. To the extent that we can claim Democracy is a sham and window dressing in Britain we can use the issue of continued privatisation to prove our case. We don't want it, but we've got it. Vote Labour, vote against privatisation and what do you get? More privatisation.

How many of us, when we voted for Labour, were actually casting a vote for more privatisation? Very few. How many of us were voting for The Post Office to be privatised at the last general election? Not many Labour voters, I guess. So who is pushing this privatisation agenda?

Seumus Milne in an insightful article in the Guardian today says:

"What exactly is going on? ... the passion for all things private goes far beyond that. ...the ideology [behind privatisation] is driven by powerful vested interests...Decades of lobbying politicians, the civil service, corporate-funded thinktanks and the media have created a received wisdom ...resistant both to facts or the views of ordinary voters...37 former members of the government have been given permission to take private sector jobs within two years of leaving office. As with their Tory predecessors, many of these jobs involve working for companies directly bidding for government contracts and privatised services...The market for privatised public services is getting on for £50bn and companies are hungry for more...It beggars belief that the prospect of lavish future consultancies doesn't influence or shape the decisions of ministers when they're dealing with corporate regulation and private contracts. A culture of corruption pervades the links between government and business, fuelled by and fuelling privatisation. These relationships are – as Adam Smith put it – a conspiracy against the public interest.

Now this is a far greater scandal than MPs expenses, isn't it? Whereas with expenses MPs may be behaving dishonestly, here they are selling their political souls post facto to the highest bidders. Democracy is not driving privatisations, we the voters were not driving privatisations, this dirty-dealing, this back scratching, this jobs-in-return-for policy happens after a so called social democratic government like Labour is elected.

We the people of Britain lose out every time with de-nationalisation because in addition to paying for the service we have to pay, additionally, to enrich someone and to pay for massive promotion and advertising budgets. Not only that, but services are reduced and cut when they aren't enriching anyone. Profit as the bottom line doesn't mean service provision it means service only for those who can pay enough to keep some spiv from investing elsewhere where the returns are greater.

Lucky for the spivs then that the Thatcherites were happy to privatise natural monopolies like communications, energy and transport, where companies can gang up in little mafias to charge usurious prices. And new Labour neo-Thatcherites were happy to keep these services privatised.

In my mind the logic goes like this: If tax payers pay the government directly for a service like a railway and the government runs the service then the money we pay the government in tax plus affordable tickets should be the only costs involved.

Nationalised industry: Tax money + Ticket money = service

But if a service is privatised then our ticket costs more, service is reduced to profit making lines, maintenance is pared down and money is wasted in marketing and advertising.

Privatised industry: Tax money (still on tap) + ticket money + profit + marketing

Ken livingston said, on another Guardian blog:

"But the real issue is that it is inherently wasteful to run these services on privatised lines. The nature of the privatising companies is that a significant proportion of the profits of their activities have to be paid in dividends to shareholders rather than reinvested in the service. This is money wasted. A publicly-owned company would be obliged to reinvest any revenues back into the transport system."

Once we have cast our pathetic votes and go back to the reality of serfdom, those of us who still manage to earn a living, we realise that we are all absolutely powerless in this society to change anything through a ballot box.

Government allows us to have our little election and then goes on and do what the people with real power in this society ask them to do - blackmail them into doing. Once the votes are cast, that's when this government's real constituency swings into action. Society is not in charge, capital is.

What privateers want want is control of natural monopolies because demand for energy and water and train travel and health is inelastic. With a natural monopoly a private company can screw us into the ground - regulation or no regulation.


But never, ever vote Thatcherite.

However, we may have a corrupt bunch of treacherous dolts as our leaders. But let's not let that blind us to the fact that if the Thatcherites are allowed to come into power in Britain again this place is going down the tubes. The Tories will turn Britain into an absolute shit hole.

You can just see the vast police force, the blasted town centres, the armies of part time underpaid workers, the unemployed just waiting to leap at the chance to clip Cameron's lawn or clean his loo for a few pounds, the huge internment camps for asylum seekers, the limousines cruising through London, the riots, the misery. It will all be far worse under the Conservatives.

Bush goes in the USA so here in Little Britain who might we vote for at the next election?
Our own little neo-con. Our own little Bush: Cameron.

If we elect Thatcher's grown up boys, spivs to a man, (because nearly all of them are Tory boys and not Tory girls) then we will indeed be voting for no holds barred privatisation and for the corruption that Seamus describes on a really grand scale.

Now government is a mouth watering prize for these "social entrepreneurs" called the Tories. They are not wasting their time or making sacrifices and doing a public duty. They are in it for their own enlightened self-interest and the self-interest of their class. Yes. Their class.
Or do some of you doltishly still think this is a classless society - that this is a classless world?
Forget the Thatcherites foxy moral doublespeak. That's what they really want and they are willing to do anything or say anything and spend vast sums on marketing to dissemble in order to get it.

Can't you just see the Tories licking their lips, slavering at the prospect of getting into government?

In my view, it is as clear as can be, what the Thatcherites want is:

1. access to what Kurt Vonnegut called the "the money river".
2. access to directorships galore.
3. peppercorn taxes for themselves and their rich friends.
4. the slashing of public spending which is wasted on the hoi poloi.
5. the privatising of education and health monopolies (after all, Tories usually go private) with their vast budgets and vast potential for making so many people much, much richer than they already are.

You may be sorry now, but if you vote for the Thatcherites you will be voting us into a capitalist hell hole in 2010.