The complete privatisation of public services has taken a massive step forward with the announcement that a further education college in Luton is to become the first in the country to be run for profit, and paying dividends to its private shareholders.
Barnfield Federation is exploiting a provision in the coalition government’s Education Act of 2011 that allows colleges to be run for profit.
According to the head of Barnfield Federation, Peter Birkett, he has already had a lot of interest from private investors in the scheme which would entail shareholders getting a slice of any financial surplus made by the college.
But Birkett’s plans are not confined to the privatisation of further education.
Over the past few years Barnfield College has taken over four so-called ‘failing’ schools and transformed them into academies, and it is these that Birkett has his eye on for opening up to the privateers.
Under the 2011 Act, privatisation is only mentioned in respect of FE colleges but Birkett has made it clear that he is confident that the Tory-led coalition will shortly introduce legislation that will allow this to be extended to academy schools and from there into the entire education system.
Birkett said: ‘We’re ready to step up a level – modernise public service thinking and delivery.’
What he really means is that the Barnfield Federation are taking the first steps nationally to throwing open the whole of the education system to the vultures of the private equity funds, who are more than keen to get their hands on the education budget and turn schools into profit making industries.
In order to maximise their dividends these shareholders will be demanding increased productivity from teachers in the form of pay cuts, reduction in staffing levels, and the exclusion of pupils with learning or medical problems who will be deemed too expensive to educate.
In the past month we have seen the start of the privatisation of the police service with two authorities inviting tenders from private security firms to run and staff local police stations and even conduct criminal investigations.
Last week the government threw open the door to privatising the postal service when it took over the huge pension deficit of the Royal Mail making it a viable proposition for the privateers.
Barnfield’s move is one more step in the Tory-led coalition’s plans to completely privatise every part of the welfare state from health to education, and in the very near future to fully privatise every aspect of public services.
This drive to privatise everything is driven by the crisis that is gripping the world capitalist economy, it is the price the bankers and finance capitalists are demanding to keep up their profits and stave off bankruptcy.
This can be seen most clearly in Greece where a main plank of the EU ‘bail-out’ plan has been the insistence of the bankers that Greek privatisation must raise 50 billion euros.
To achieve this a ‘privatisation agency’ has been set up with orders to sell all government assets, those that cannot be sold off are to be ‘liquidated’ – that is just closed down.
Where bankrupt Greek capitalism is going, the equally bankrupt British capitalist system is rapidly following.
There can be only one adequate response to this assault on services and that is to demand that the TUC and union leaders stop just wringing their hands over these attacks and go on the offensive to defend the NHS, the education system and the entire system of public services that workers have fought to establish in the past.
This means calling an indefinite general strike to defeat the government and its privatisation plans and going forward to a workers government and socialism.
