The Labour manifesto published yesterday was a missed opportunity to create a clear dividing line between the Labour Party as the champion of public services and the privatising small state vultures of the Conservative Party.
Labour’s track record in office of delivering unprecedented investment in public services was unnecessarily qualified by concessions to the private sector in health care; by a commitment to extend Foundation Trust status to all English hospital trusts (and in doing so undermining the ‘national’ in the NHS), and by introducing new powers whereby non-accountable organisations (and potentially companies) can take over ‘failing’ public services in health, education and the police service. The concept of a failing public service is the new mantra of lobbyists for privatisation, determined to end public provision but who recognise the unpopularity of outright privatisation. Nor will pie in the sky concepts of mutualism provide the investment or infrastructure to meeting rising demand for public services.
Today will see the publication of the Tory manifesto and public service workers will get a stark warning of the (horrific) Tory alternative which will promote further deregulation of employment rights (notably for contracted out workers) and further marketisation of public services.
The Morning Star accurately sums up this sorry state of affairs: ‘the main case to vote Labour remains the negative realisation that the Tories would, difficult though it may be for some to credit it, be far worse than Gordon Brown and Chancellor Alistair Darling’.
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/89091
