‘The chaos currently engulfing the NHS is due entirely to its marketisation by the government and the transfer of up to 50% of public money to the private sector […] Increasingly, government has given away control of resource allocation and more and more of the NHS’s scarce funds are flowing into the pockets of shareholders, bankers, management consultants, and for-profit providers – away from the service.’ Allyson Pollock, head of the Centre for International Public Health Policy, University of Edinburgh, January 2007.
The scramble for state nursery places
Travel on public transport in any British city late on any weekday evening and you will see exhausted parents or carers struggling home with babies in buggies, sleepy toddlers and little children. They are the Labour government’s sacrificial lambs on the altar of the education market. In 2007 state provision of free nursery places is almost non-existent and paid state nursery places are hard to get even for working parents paying up to £200 a week. While state nursery and primary places have dropped by 300,000 in the past ten years, the private sector has boomed. Working class parents are left juggling a mixture of family support and child minders as best they can. This shameful public neglect of young children is ignored by Labour’s high-handed education ‘experts’ who lay down laws for child development and design tests for four-year-olds.
Plenty of cash – but not for the poor
Since Labour came to power in 1997 state expenditure on education has risen. However, this money has cascaded down into the private sector by a process of fragmenting services in order to outsource them to private companies. An ideological attack on the very notion of state provision has been used to justify handing over state finances to thousands of new education businesses and consultancies that have mushroomed in the grab for profitable investment opportunities. Handing over £35 million of assets to companies and Trusts to run Academy schools is only the latest in Labour’s 10-year promotion of private enterprise as the future of education. As a result, class size in British schools remains disgracefully high with Reception classes of 30, 25% of school leavers have no qualifications and Britain is placed 24th out of 29 advanced countries in staying-on rates for further study.
Big money
Meanwhile, most of Labour’s big new ideas fail at the cost of millions – although there are always businesses that cash in on them. The £2bn school truancy plan made no difference to school attendance, but made lots of money for security firms. The £3bn Individual Learning Accounts scheme led to a boom in phoney education providers, which continues today in the Learning and Skills sector.
This year the scheme for the computerisation of national curriculum tests is in disarray after a £26 million launch less than six months ago, but for RM, the computer software giant that developed and sold the test, it was pure profit. But the education department will not finance the upgrading of the information technology infrastructure of every school in the country that would have made it a viable national programme.
Class war in the classroom
Free state education was introduced at the end of the 19th century because private benefactors, philanthropists, charities and churches were failing to educate the working class to a level necessary for a disciplined proletarian class in an industrial economy. At regular intervals the ruling class takes a stand against the expansion of educational levels for all. The capitalist class remains antagonistic to the expansion of the cultural and educational levels of the working class as a whole.
This hostility dominates British society today. Any increases in state expenditure are designed to go towards the standard of living and salaries of the increasing layer of middle-class supplementary workers whose jobs cluster around the basic provision of state welfare.
On 19 March Blair and Brown appeared together at a new Academy school in Hackney to announce the aims of the latest Cabinet review. Labour wants ‘to tailor public services to the needs of individual families’ via ‘increased choice in public services and more competition between state and private sectors’. This is a cover for rationing services to the poor, but it is also a threat to the rights and dignity of the working class. Only by opposing Labour’s plans can we establish a future – for the many, not the few.
Susan Davidson
