How to fight the privatisation bonanza
Introduction
In the run up to the TUC Congress in September 2001, trade union leaders promised to give Labour leader Tony Blair a hard time over plans to introduce greater privatisation into public services. In particular, they were furious about the plans to downgrade workers’ employment and pension rights if they were transferred to the private sector.
Blair never delivered his speech to the TUC that day – 11 September – but carefully leaked press statements had seen Blair preparing to say: “Where use of the private sector makes sense in the provision of a better public service we will use it.” About as close to a declaration of full-scale privatisation of public services as you could get, given New Labour’s unshakable and mistaken belief that the private sector delivers best.
Whilst the union leaders declared a truce at the TUC after the horrific events of 11 September, New Labour cabinet ministers have continued their full-frontal assault on public services. The Labour leaders did, however, give some verbal concessions at the Labour Party conference one month after the TUC, saying they would allow public-service workers to transfer their full entitlements on pensions etc into the private sector.
Yet, less than six months later the New Labour government has bowed to big business demands and now accepts that these privatising parasites will not have to pay their workforce full pensions or offer new recruits the same wages as workers transferred from the public sector. This is according to leaked Cabinet Office papers. This information emerged as Blair prepared to launch the government’s 30-page document urging public-sector workers to embrace reform; a New Labour euphemism for privatisation, meaning cuts in wages, sackings and a diminishing of union rights all designed to bolster the profits of big business.
As George Orwell once said: “A mass of words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.” (From Politics and the English Language)
Since last September, New Labour leaders have issued pronouncement after pronouncement showing their love affair with the private running of public services is continuing and gathering pace. Health secretary Alan Milburn said about relations between the NHS and the private sector that they are “not a one-night stand.”
Many things have changed since the events of 11 September and the start of the war against Afghanistan. But one thing remains constant: Tony Blair’s class war against public-sector workers. He has made it absolutely clear that he remains committed to privatise the public sector beyond recognition.
Despite being forced to renationalise Railtrack – in all but name – the government intends to go ahead with the privatisation of London Underground, and to introduce even more ‘private finance initiatives’ (PFI) into health and education services.
Labour councils continue to hand over large parts of their services to private contractors. Whole sections of central government services including civil service agencies have been earmarked for sale.
Private-sector managers are being brought in to run the NHS and despite massive unease and opposition Byers is planning to proceed with the privatisation of London Underground’s infrastructure. This was despite a House of Commons select committee criticising Byers for following advice in an assessment from consultants Ernst & Young which they admitted was “part art and part science and involves a blend of subjective judgements and fact based analysis.” Yet another case of a soft snow of words falling upon the facts.
After being praised by union leaders earlier in the year for commending public-sector workers, Blair decided to make it absolutely clear that whatever happens he will not “allow ideological obstacles to stand in the way of reforming the public sector”. At Labour’s spring conference in Cardiff, Blair launched an unsubtle and outright attack on the public-sector unions saying they were “wreckers”.
Blair’s spin doctors went to work amongst the gathered journalists saying that Blair saw his battle against the public-sector unions as being as important as Neil Kinnock’s battle against Militant or Blair’s own battle to ditch the socialist clause 4 in Labour’s constitution. In both cases these attacks were designed to make Labour a party safe to represent big business interests.
The recent attacks are designed to make it safe for big business to cherry pick the most profitable bits out of the public sector without trade union opposition. But trade union opposition has shown signs of stirring, even at the top of the unions, against the privatisation mania of New Labour.
The elections of a new generation of militant union leaders as general secretaries of key unions, like the Communication Workers Unions (CWU), PCS civil service union, RMT rail workers’ union and others has worried Blair and the bosses that they won’t be able to hand over the Post Office, civil service and NHS to big business without a serious fight.
The demonstration called by the CWU on 16 March where 3,000 postal workers began to mobilise to stop the threatened privatisation of Consignia – the Post Office, is one example of how things are beginning to move.
What should socialists, trade unionists and public service users do to resist the widespread attacks upon their rights and conditions that privatisation brings? How can we mobilise the maximum opposition against the legalised corruption that privatisation represents?
The material carried here has been updated from the original pamphlet The Great Gold Rush – How to fight the privatisation bonanza written in November 2001, for the conference called by the trade union broad lefts on 24 November – intended to assist in showing a way forward for trade unionists in the struggle against privatisation.
Added to the original pamphlet is material that has been written in the last year for the Socialist Party’s newspaper The Socialist and its monthly magazine Socialism Today.
This pamphlet aims to arm trade unionists, socialists and the wider public with arguments against privatisation and for the socialist case for a society based upon the needs of the working class and not the profits of the few.
Bill Mullins and Ken Smith,
March 2002
