LABOUR Chancellor Rachel Reeves has commissioned a research paper from the British Infrastructure Taskforce, a group made up of major private investors, to investigate the merits of a return to the disastrous Private Finance Initiative (PFI) implemented by the Labour government of Tony Blair.
Originally, Reeves had asked these private investors to look at how PFI could be used to finance national infrastructure schemes including the Labour pledge to build thousands of new homes and create new towns across the country.
Yesterday the Daily Telegraph revealed that the research paper produced by this consortium of privateers recommends that the Labour government go much further and use PFIs to pay for ‘infrastructure that would usually be taxpayer funded, including in education, healthcare and defence.’
In an effort to distance themselves from the original PFI strategy, this latest plan is being rebranded a ‘public-private partnership’ (PPP).
PFI was originally launched by the Tory government of John Major in 1992 but it really took off under the Labour government of Tony Blair and his chancellor Gordon Brown after 1997.
Blair and Brown seized on PFI as a clever way to fund new public infrastructure like hospitals, schools and highways while keeping the debts off the public balance books.
In practice, PFI loaded hospitals and schools with massive debts due to binding contracts that tied them for up to 30 years to private companies.
Research found that taxpayers are paying £80 billion for just £13 billion of actual investment by these companies. Schools and hospitals across the country faced billion pound bills for PFI contracts forced on them by the Blair government.
Hospitals are still repaying what they borrowed originally, with one trust, the Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust, paying back 27 times the amount it borrowed under PFI.
In the past five years alone, NHS trusts have spent over £1.8 billion in interest for PFI debts with some hospitals spending more on repaying their debts than they spend on medicines for their patients.
The public outcry against the massive leeching by the private companies became so great that the Tory government in 2018 declared an end to any more PFI contracts.
Now the Labour government under Starmer and Reeves has returned to PFI in its latest guise of PPP.
Reeves is claiming the latest research paper was intended only to look at private funding for new housing, although the committee admitted it had exceeded this remit. However, last year Labour unveiled its 10 year plan for the complete reorganisation of the NHS which outlined their intention to use PPPs to build new Neighbourhood Health Centres.
The current Labour government, torn apart by the global economic crisis of capitalism and facing a working class that is rising up against all attempts to dump this crisis on workers and youth, is turning back to the policies of the Blair government and allowing private companies to take over the NHS, schools and housing infrastructure, making billions in profit.
Last week, Tony Blair took time off from being US president Donald Trump’s faithful lap dog on his ‘peace committee’ for Gaza to write a lengthy essay demanding Starmer must work ‘in partnership with the private sector’ to rescue British capitalism from collapse.
The powerful working class will never allow the privateers and financial speculators to leech off the Welfare State and drive hospitals and schools to the brink of financial collapse in their never-ending search for profits.
Workers must answer this latest threat from a collapsing Starmer regime by demanding the TUC immediately call an emergency conference to organise a general strike to bring down the Labour government and go forward to a workers government.
A workers government will nationalise major industries and banks placing them under the management of the working class and bring in a planned socialist economy.
Join the WRP and Young Socialists to build up the leadership required to put an end to bankrupt British capitalism with the victory of the British Socialist Revolution.
There is no time to lose.
