IN A speech yesterday, the Tory prime minister, David Cameron, promised to privatise every public service in the country, to ‘open up’ public services to private companies and break up what he called ‘state monopolies’.
The state monopolies Cameron has in mind cover every single part of the state. He particularly identified ‘children in care and prisons’ as being just two areas for the privateers to plunder. Cameron said this mass privatisation will be carried out by small businesses, claiming: ‘Opening up contracts to small businesses spreads entrepreneurship and drives innovation.’
Cameron is lying through his back teeth when he talks about innovation and entrepreneurship – the only innovation these privateers are concerned with is cutting services to the bone and innovating their own profits and bonuses through the roof. Every experience of privatisation – from the railways, mail service, energy suppliers and NHS – has been the same story of cuts in services and pay for the workers to boost the profits of these ‘entrepreneurs’.
When companies like Circle Healthcare, who used to run elderly care homes, find they cannot make a profit they simply close up and move on, leaving thousands of elderly people facing destitution. Cameron does not want to dwell on this, hence all the nonsense about small businesses and no mention of the giant multi-nationals that are really itching to get their hands on lucrative contracts.
As for essential services like fire, ambulance and police, Cameron made it plain that the Tories intend to intensify their drive to amalgamate these services entirely. Firefighters will be expected to double up as para-medics, as dedicated ambulances and staff are scrapped in the name of efficiency savings; savings that make them much more financially attractive to the privateers.
The speech is in line with the drive by Cameron and chancellor George Osborne to ‘shrink’ the state back to levels last seen in the 1930s, a time before the welfare state with its provisions for free health and education. This attempt to privatise the state, cut wages and end all benefits is an absolute necessity for the Tories as they grapple with cutting government spending by £20 billion, rising to £35 billion, in order to shore up a bankrupt British capitalism.
Such cuts cannot be carried out except through destroying the lives of millions of workers and young people, with even more savage austerity cuts and privatisation than ever seen before. The Tories are well aware that the cuts already implemented have caused a tide of working class anger. The further moves to even more savage austerity measures will drive forward a mass movement of workers and youth determined not to pay for an economic crisis caused by the banks and bosses.
These cuts can only be carried through by means of a class war against the working class. The battery of new anti-union legislation passing through parliament, laws which criminalise strikes and picketing and which put the state, in the form of the police and courts, in charge of strikes, is designed solely to try and hold back the revolutionary tide that is erupting in the working class.
The trade union leadership, meeting at the TUC Congress tomorrow, have run a mile from this fight. Not a single resolution calls for the implementation of the existing TUC policy, passed overwhelmingly in 2012, to consider the feasibility of calling a general strike – three years on, the demand for a general strike is no longer something to be considered; it must be implemented immediately.
Trade union members must deluge Congress with emergency motions demanding that the TUC call a general strike to bring down the Tories and go forward to a workers’ government that will not only renationalise privatised industries but will nationalise all major industries, along with the banks, and place them under workers’ control as part of a socialist planned economy where production is for human need not for the profit of a handful of capitalists and bankers.
The Young Socialists will be lobbying the Congress tomorrow fighting for this demand. We urge all workers and youth to join the lobby.
