A passionate polemic calls for those disaffected with mainstream politics to get involved with civil society groups and campaigns
In early 2005, a few months before that year’s general election, the journalist John Harris published a book entitled So Now Who Do We Vote For? It was an extended howl of disillusionment with the record of his party in office on the part of a previously loyal Labour voter. The deceptions perpetrated in the rush to war in Iraq inevitably loomed large in Harris’s calculations, but so too did the byzantine complexities of public service reform – the “quasi-markets”, targets, centralised audits and private finance initiatives (PFIs) that were as much an emblem of the New Labour years as was Tony Blair’s intimacy with George W Bush.
Harris was particularly exercised by the Faustian pact the Blair government had struck with the private sector. The shiny new schools and hospitals that sprung up around the country after 1997 – and it’s easy to forget just how denuded and dishevelled Britain’s public realm had become by the time Blair entered No 10 – were built with private capital that came with eye-watering interest rates attached. The theory was that the state paid these higher rates because the private sector was assuming risks previously borne by the taxpayer. Except, in the final analysis, it wasn’t. When PFI projects threatened to fail, as they often did, the government would always step in (people needed hospitals and schools, after all). But despite that, and despite the extraordinary growth of mega-firms such as Serco and G4S, whose principal business became winning government contracts to run services in areas in which they often had no expertise, we were told there was no alternative. As Alan Milburn, Blair’s favourite health secretary, declared, it was “PFI or bust”.
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