It is bizarre that the hated Atos, whose reputation was destroyed by its punitive mishandling of work capability assessments of the disabled, should be awarded a multi-million contract for the new personal independence payments across London and the south of England. In one sense it is not surprising because the Tories, having privatised major public […]
Posts under ‘Public services’
How did the disgraced Atos get a £184m disability assessment contract?
Jun 13th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.
State ownership of rail is only the start
May 6th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.As the 31 Labour parliamentary candidates are demanding in their letter to Miliband, the case for returning rail to the public sector after the botched privatisation of 1996 is overwhelming. Private ownership has produced for the UK the highest fares in Europe, extensive overcrowding on commuter lines because of giving priority to dividends for shareholders over […]
Share:
State ownership of rail is only the start
May 1st, 2014 by Michael Meacher.As the 31 Labour parliamentary candidates are demanding in their letter to Miliband, the case for returning rail to the public sector after the botched privatisation of 1996 is overwhelming. Private ownership has produced for the UK the highest fares in Europe, extensive overcrowding on commuter lines because of giving priority to dividends for shareholders […]
Share:
NHS: He who pays the Privateer’s Peer
Apr 7th, 2014 by Solomon Hughes.Former Labour Health Minister Lord Warner’s call for everyone to pay £10 a month fees to use the NHS got very wide press coverage. The Mail, Telegraph, Times, Guardian and Independent wrote 500-odd-word stories on Warner’s charge-for-the-NHS call. The Mirror, Sun and other tabloids chipped in with 200-word pieces on Warner’s fees, including his extra demand that […]
Share:
Wolverhampton Council cuts: What are the alternatives?
Mar 19th, 2014 by John Millington.Wolverhampton – the home of the once mighty Wolves football team and the former workshop of the world in manufacturing, has been dealt a crushing 21st century economic body blow. Council bosses revealed to their stunned workforce this month that 2000 of them will almost certainly be made redundant following the latest round of cuts to […]
Share:
Fast Facts: Gender social inequality and austerity in Europe
Mar 11th, 2014 by Tom Gill.Europe’s austerity fetish and longer term neo-liberal reforms promoted by Big Business, Governments and the EU Commission hurt women disproportionately. Here’s a few facts to illustrate the point. Europe wide The gender pay gap is around 16% It ranges from more than a quarter (27%) in Estonia to around a fiftieth (2%) in Slovenia. The latest figures […]
Share:
The private sector isn’t just providing NHS services, but now commissioning them too
Mar 9th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.It had always been the Thatcherite/Blairite dogma of service provision that the big private companies – whether the likes of Capita, G4S, Serco, A 4E, Atos or the huge US healthcare multinationals – wouold provide all the health services, but the commissioning would be done by the independent public sector. Now even that split, with […]
Share:
Private oligarchs have it all stitched up in Whitehall outsourcing
Mar 6th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.Once upon a time we had nationalised industries; now we have Capita, G4S, Serco, A4E, and the rest of a small coterie of private conglomerates who dominate the service world. Unlike the nationalised industries they have no specialist focus, but merely bid for anything going, much of which they handle poorly or badly as we […]
Share:
Living where privatised railways mean subsidising foreign state-run services
Feb 26th, 2014 by Dan McCurry.The railway that passes our constituency Labour party office in Bethnal Green and Bow is owned by Abellio, the Dutch state railway company. Am I alone in thinking this is somewhat surreal? We supposedly put these franchises out to tender because we wanted the private sector to provide their management know-how. It turns out that […]
Share:
Putting public interest first means rejecting Tory dogma that private is best
Feb 23rd, 2014 by Jon Trickett.Recently, Ed Miliband said that the times we live in demand “a new culture in our public services. Not old-style, top-down central control, with users as passive recipients of services. Nor a market-based individualism which says we can simply transplant the principles of the private sector lock, stock and barrel into the public sector.” In […]
