PREMIER Brown’s pre-budget comment piece in the Financial Times was written so that he could talk directly to his constituency, the bosses.
He pledged: ‘Over the coming weeks, starting in the Budget on Wednesday, we will set out the next steps of the government’s long-term public service reform programme. . .’ He is promising the bosses, rich new privatisation pickings.
He continued that ‘The first stage – our first task in 1997 – demanded a programme of investment and repair to remedy decades of neglect and to establish a basic level of standards below which no school or hospital would fall. This inevitably meant using national targets, league tables and tough inspection regimes to monitor progress.’
This is bunk. The first Labour government kept to all of the Tory spending plans, indeed the government insisted that they were bound by them and could do no other.
Its real first stage contribution to capitalism was to give the bankers at the Bank of England control over interest rates, and to push forward the Tories PFI schemes.
There was no additional spending on health care and education, but the bosses got a PFI bonanza, making highly profitable deals to build hospitals, that they leased back to the NHS, while at the same time making hundreds of millions more profits renegotiating the same deals, as they did in the case of the Norfolk and Norwich hospital, and many others. It was a daylight robbery of the taxpayers, organised for the bosses and the bankers by Brown and Blair.
This was the contribution of Brown’s first stage, to bring in a PFI bonanza, and then to sell half of Britain’s gold reserves for a pittance, because of his crazy idea, that was supported by the bankers, that gold was just a symbol and had no real value.
Brown continued in the FT about the second stage, in which he lumped the next two Labour governments together.
He wrote: ‘To ensure we obtained best value from each pound spent and that struggling services were turned round, the second stage of reform focused on tackling under performance and on reducing variations in standards.’
There was, in fact, a major increase in the health and education budgets with a view to bringing in privateers into education, leading to the Academies programme, and private health companies into the NHS, leading to the infamous ISTC centres which got block cash awards (easy profits), while the NHS hospitals got ‘payment by results’ (that is debt and closure).
This has now reached the point where the government is to shut over 60 District General hospitals (DGHs) and has virtually ended NHS dentistry. It is also bringing in private polyclinics to replace the DGHs, and to provide the base for Richard Branson and his ilk to make millions out of general practice.
In this ‘second stage’ thousands of NHS workers have been made redundant, hospitals have been closed, GPs have been treated as the ‘enemies of the people’ and the NHS has made a £1.8 billion profit, out of the cuts and closures!
And what of the new stage that Brown has promised the FTs readers.
This is to be the coup de grace for the NHS and state education and will see the Public Sector privatised and replaced by charities, private companies and voluntary organisations.
Brown states ‘In 2008. . . there can be no backtracking on reform . . . . This week Ed Balls and Alistair Darling will announce new plans that will empower and enable more of our best headteachers to help turn round low performers, create new trusts and federations around successful schools, and in areas of greatest need drive forward a faster expansion of our Academies programme.’
‘James Purnell is leading the same assault on under performance in welfare, where a focus on the needs and the responsibilities of individual claimants demands . . . a wider range of voluntary and private providers and a new responsibility to acquire skills.
In his ‘third stage’ Brown is pledging to the FTs readers, to terminate the Welfare State.
This is why his regime must be brought down by a general strike, that will bring in a workers government, to put an end to the Brown drive to restore the conditions of the 1930s, by going forward to socialism.
