In today’s Guardian Seumas Milne provides a timely expose of the growing influence of private sector vested interests on Government policy in Britain. What has emerged in the past 30 years is a public services industrial complex wholly analogous with the military industrial complex. In the same way the latter has fuelled the arms race and wars, the private sector lobby is driving the privatisation and ‘small state’ agenda:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/17/corporate-grip-public-private-sector
‘Across the range of public services, privatisation isn't about delivering new goods and services, but about making profits out of existing services for private shareholders, whose interests are likely to clash with those of users and producers. It is already a huge market, out of which legions of bankers, lawyers, consultants and managers have grown fat. Hence the need to corral the political class, media, thinktanks and academic world in order to create a public consensus that private colonisation of the public sphere must continue unhindered’, writes Seumas.
For more on the public services industrial complex read:
http://unisonactive.blogspot.com/2009/09/public-services-industrial-complex.html
UNISONActive is an unofficial blog produced by UNISON activists for UNISON activists. Bringing news, briefings and events from a progressive left perspective.