2 March 2012

Why I hate Cameron


This poster would be funny if it were not true.

This one simple phrases sums up what the Conservatives are doing to all public services. One of the most notable example is Education where national rights and standards are being eroded away by Free Schools and Academies.

The other half of the plan is the Big Society. This gives us two levels of service; the profitable areas will be run by private companies and where they cannot make a decent profit it will be left to the Public Sector and volunteers to fill the gaps, or they will be cut altogether.

Vicious cuts are being made to disabled benefits etc. simply because a profit cannot be made from these.

Privatisation is being sold to us as a way of improving efficiency by bringing in competition. The argument goes, if Private Hospital A can do the operation cheaper than NHS Hospital B then we should use the private sector and save money. This looks simple but it masks the real difference between the public and private sectors that makes the argument false and misleading.

The sole reason for the public sector is to provide services to the public. Efficiencies made, and they are made all the time, are fed back in to the system to provide more/better public service. The sole motive of the private sector is to make a profit.

However you look at it, when the private sector provides public services it takes money out of the system.And this is often a lot of money.

One example to make the point. The board of E-Act gets paid around £2m to run just 16 schools (even a small local authority like Kingston has over 50). This money goes on flash cars and holidays rather than books and school trips.

I could also mention Emma Harrison payment of £8m for chairing A4e. All of that money came from the public purse but was spent on personal gain.

Cameron is deliberately dismantling the public services that define us as a country. In doing so he is going further than Thatcher who only dismantled publicly owned services that had a commercial basis (though we can now see what a bad idea even that limited privatisation was with energy companies making huge profits at our expense). Cameron is destroying Britain.

And he's dong it in a way that is hard to fix. It is fairly easy to renationalise British Telecom and National Rail as they are single companies but regaining control of thousands of independent health providers and schools will be a lot more difficult.

I can see why he wants to do that, he's rich and is helping his rich friends get richer but, for the life of me, I cannot see why the Lib Dems are supporting him in this outrage.

Joni Mitchell once told us "you don't know what you got till its gone." In a few years time we will be saying that about our health service, schools, parks, legal system, ...

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