Making the case for progressive reform of public services‏

Professor Gregor Gall, writing in the Morning Star, identifies a right wing hegemony of ideas when it comes to making the case for improved public services. http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/93408

This is largely down to the right wing onslaught by the Conservative Party, its corporate backers in the public services industrial complex and assorted paid academic hacks, think tanks and propagandist fronts such as the Tax Dodgers’ Alliance:

“It's all been about how the public sector is inefficient, unresponsive and stifles the private sector which itself is, of course, more efficient and responsive - or so the argument goes. You can trace this through the coup by the Thatcherites to gain power in the Tory Party in 1975, the winning of office by them in 1979, the creation of think tanks to disseminate the ideas, the development and implementation of their policies when in government and so on until 1997. Then there has been the later but parallel process in the Labour Party of ceding ground to and taking up these ideas, most obviously epitomised by the so-called "Tony Blair revolution" of creating new Labour and implementing these ideas between 1997 and 2010.”

However Gall is correct to stress the importance of the left identifying improved methods of public service delivery to meet ever changing social needs:

“This comes down to being able to set out a positive alternative agenda of reform so that public services are fully and properly publicly funded, publicly delivered and publicly accountable. This does not mean that every service has to be delivered in a centralised and statist manner in the way they were in the past. Decentralisation and new forms of public or social ownership must be permissible within the left's agenda. This should be our cutting edge against the de facto privatisation of Cameron's big society and the coming appropriation of the resources made available under it by the middle classes.”

Gall warns that our efforts to defends public services will be weakened if we defend bureaucratic, ineffective or unresponsive services.

“In order to fend off the new stage of the right-wing ideological and material onslaught that is beginning, we need to sidestep this danger of defending, or being seen to defend, the indefensible by saying that not all of the public service was excellent and here are our distinctive and alternative ideas for reform. We should be able to show that by bringing the level of decision-making down to the level of the citizens in each locality, and where there is the necessary co-ordination between localities to stop duplication and aid specialisation, that public services can be democratically driven and publicly accountable. What this means is that we would not just advocate increasing taxes on the rich and business in order to generate more resources to devote to the NHS, for example, in order to improve it. We'd also say that we need to reform the way the NHS works to ensure that the extra resources produce what they can and should and are not wasted or frittered away.“

A positive future vision of public services informs UNISON’s Million Voices Campaign and the work of our allies in other unions, TUC and organisations such as APSE. Winning the intellectual arguments for accountable, well run public services are no less important than exposing the negative consequences of the Con Dem slash and burn cuts agenda.