For 50 years we've lived as if private profit is good for public services and it has led to the mass extraction of public wealth by corporate insiders.
PFI extracts wealth. Public procurement contracts extract wealth. Outsourced delivery of core services extracts wealth. Seconding bankers to write public policy creates policy designed to extract wealth. Creating an untouchable caste of senior managers enables them to extract never-ending wealth. It is a cannibalistic free-for-all.
None of it is about efficiency. Even less than none of it is about pursuing the public good. This is a bunch of ideological senior managers and an entire industry designed to profit from outsourcing in a mutually-assured theft spree ripping all of the rest of us off in every single way they can find.
Yet we never talk about this. Or at least Common Weal does, but both the main political parties in Scotland shut us down immediately. That is why the Minister is shocked that essential money needed to support vulnerable children is ending up in offshore tax havens in industrial quantities but will do nothing about it.
Our taxes go to making rich corporations richer and public services are secondary. In Scotland they'd rather drop a National Care Service altogether than have a non-profit one, because that's who they really are. The ideology of extreme wealth is the only non-negotiable.
It tires me out monitoring the disgusting free-for-all of financial industries and outsourcing companies and consultants and the rest who all-but steal your tax money from you. But it needs done because it needs stopped.
First, we must accept a truth; everything they said about efficient markets and the disciplining power of profit is wrong. It isn't discipline, it's moral hazard. There is no incentive not to cheat, and cheating beats competing. It was tried, it failed and it has destroyed faith in the public realm.
It's time for a revolution in government and it starts by calling bullshit on the Thatcher-Blair-Brown garbage about private profits. They were wrong, dead wrong. Nothing got better because of their ideology and so, so much got worse. The public realm wasn't always run like this and it doesn't need to be run like this in the future. It is killing us and it is killing our democracy and it should be stopped.