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The Blanket - A Journal of Protest & Dissent

PFI Ventures Show the Con in all its Sordid Splendour

 

Anthony McIntyre • Irish News, 23 August 2006

Last week saw the British Government announce a disaster plan. It was designed not for airports and the supposed Al Qaeda threat but for hospitals. Whereas most governments when they devise disaster strategies are of a mind to either avoid catastrophes or deal with them when they occur, 'Yo' Blair's ministerial gang is actually planning to create one.

It announced that through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) six hospitals would be built in Britain at a cost of £1.5 billion. Not content to slavishly emulate the debacle of President Bush's foreign policy, Prime Minister Blair is eager to score the same low marks when it comes to domestic economic concerns. Letting the private sector get its claws on the US education system has reportedly left American schools in danger of producing pupils as clever as the country's president.

John Major had just secured his second term as prime minister in the spring of 1992 when it was decided to launch the PFI assault. Once the public's vote had been pocketed then the public be damned as far as the Tories were concerned. A bucketful of autumnal blues was its reward for having returned a fourth consecutive Tory government. Major, holding to the principle that people deserve the government they get, set about giving the people what he felt they deserved - a good dose of bad health. The Ryrie Rules, operating within some semblance of a social democratic framework, were to be abandoned in deference to a more rampant economic liberalism.

Although the Fiend from Finchley had sidestepped PFI on her watch, there remained enough Bram Stoker-type things of the night in her party to make the puncture marks in the neck of the public purse, thus allowing leech-like profiteers to bleed it dry.

Introducing PFI was a shrewd ideological move by the Tories. Spun as a means to improve Britain's ramshackle health service and crumbling education facilities it was a rich man's solution to a poor man's problem. Hospitals and schools would be built without raising taxes. The rich while escaping higher taxation would be doubly advantaged by usuriously draining money from the public fund as payment for building centres of health and education, not to mention prisons and other ventures.

By 1997, the year of the Blair accession to office, doctors studying the plans of the proposed PFI flagship hospital, Cumberland Infirmary, were so alarmed they predicted a doss-house rather than a hospital. As soon as building was completed, it literally began to crumble. Before a decade had elapsed it was estimated that by 2025, £100 billion would have flowed from the public purse into the bottomless pockets of the profiteers. Yet, with alarm bells sounding, and the Tories long since sent to repose in their crypt by a disillusioned electorate, Blair, eager to show he was the perfect moll to hang on the arm of big business, was not for turning. His government continued, as Guardian columnist George Monbiot charges, to negotiate 'on behalf of the corporations and against the public interest.'

Private Finance Initiatives are public frauds. Private contractors are supposed to pay the cost of the initial building project which the taxpayer would then, spread over decades, pay back the contractor. In practice the £95 million scammed off early by private companies as a result of a PFI venture at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital showed the con in all its sordid splendour. Money that should have went to purchasing medicines like Herceptin, a potent drug capable of fighting breast cancer, came to lie in some fat cat's bank account accruing the interest that will make the cat even fatter.

The Blair government continues to exploit an anomaly at the heart of popular sentiment; a demand for better public services coexisting alongside an anathema towards higher taxation. The government and the business cartels get their way in the end because the money to pay the private sector ultimately comes from the taxpaying public which not only underwrites the cost of building but must also fork out the cost of the profits to be creamed off. The public pays to have itself robbed while the wealthy profit from illness.

Experience in the North on the matter has not been wholesome. Our political class, when given a little ministerial rope, decided to follow the Tories and hang their poorest constituents with it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote the famous lines that after they had come for the Jews, then the communists, then the trade unionists, there was nobody left to speak up. Just like here, when they came for the patients.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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Index: Current Articles



27 August 2006

Other Articles From This Issue:

The Price of Our Memory
Anthony McIntyre

In the Balance
John Kennedy

The Time for Revolutionary Marxism is NOW
Darren Cogavin

No! To A Holy War
Liam O Comain

Rendition Collusion
Eoin McGrath

Rendition Flights
John Kennedy

An Open Letter to Martina Anderson
Dr John Coulter

An Honest Writer: Cristóir Ó Floinn
Seaghán Ó Murchú

A Dual Presidency: An Improbable Solution to the Irish Problem
Michael Gillespie

Federalism
Michéal Mhá Dúnnáin

Petition Calling for a Referendum on Irish Unification
Patrick Lismore

Federal Unionism—Early Sinn Fein: Article 5
Michael Gillespie

Federal Unionism—Early Sinn Fein: Article 6
Michael Gillespie

Number Crunching
Dr John Coulter

PFI Ventures Show the Con in all its Sordid Splendour
Anthony McIntyre


21 August 2006

Throwing the Book at Gerry
John Kennedy

The Man With the Planter Name
Liam O Comain

Diplock Delay Equals Justice Denied
Martin Galvin

Kevin Lynch, INLA Volunteer
Ray Collins

1981 Hunger Strike Commemoration in Chicago
Richard Wallace

The Question of Paisley's Legacy
Dr John Coulter

Turf War
John Kennedy

Eoin O’Duffy’s biography by Fearghal McGarry
Seaghán Ó Murchú

The Proclamation to Me
Mick Hall

Federal Unionism—Early Sinn Fein: Article 3
Michael Gillespie

Federal Unionism—Early Sinn Fein: Article 4
Michael Gillespie

House on Notting Hill
Dr John Coulter

Courage, Muslim Leaders
David Adams

Middle East Conflict Has Abandoned Rules of War
Anthony McIntyre

A Warning From History
John Kennedy

Cartoon Commissar
Anthony McIntyre

The Letters page has been updated.

 

 

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