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January 2007
Put need before greed
Great to be here, pleased to support this rally. Our message is a simple one: We're not going to sit back and watch the continued privatisation of our public services by this government. We have been here before. In the 1980s it was compulsory competitive tendering in local government. That was all about slashing workers' pay and conditions undermined by the mantra of competition.It's a disgrace to see the same attacks again under a Labour government, under the guise of marketisation or contestability rather than privatisation. Whatever words they use, it means attacks on public services and workers in the public sector. It means opening up a market to the private companies out to make a profit from anything that moves. It means organisations such as NHS Logistics being sold off to the highest bidder irrespective of the impact on service provision.
I've spent most of my working life dealing with the private sector. I know how it operates and I know what the bottom line is. Outsourcing is not about quality of service. It's about maximising profit at workers' expense - profits before people. That's the bottom line; that's the only reason why private companies want to steal our work.
I believe in the value of public services. I am fed up with the constant political sniping about the quality of public services and the continual undermining of confidence in them. The truth is that public services work for the people - and we have great people; the workers are doing a great job.
- For example, our members at Southampton council refuse section won a major national award for vast improvement in service delivery.
- In Salisbury council, grounds contracts and leisure services were outsourced and it has now been brought back in house. It was the public, not the private sector that provided the better service.
- Trade unionists in Flint have successfully improved the housing & maintenance contract and been applauded by the local community for quality improvements.
So the real picture on public services is very different from the one the government is painting.
Colleagues, the problem is a government is in the pocket of fat-cat business advisers pushing privatisation for a living. Over £20 billion - twenty billion pounds - of your money and mine has been spent by this government on management consultancy alone.
Don't talk to me about waste of money. We could have got more than 600 new schools for that money and that seems like a better bargain to me. And they would be proper state schools. Not so-called "academies" funded by rich individuals with an axe to grind or companies looking to change our education system in their own interests, controlling the assets of that school and setting the curriculum.
The T&G believes in comprehensive publicly controlled education giving a fair start for all our children. Education is not just about buildings and structure. It's about a vision of the future for all our children. A vision based on equality for all schools and not private sponsorship.
Look at the NHS. It's being pieced off and sold off, slice by slice, to US multinationals who are hovering around, lobbying behind the scenes. What can the US teach us? Their admin cost is a quarter of total spending in health care - with many of the population having no health care at all.
We've already seen, with the introduction of the internal market in our NHS administration costs go up from six per cent to 12 per cent following the US model. We don't need any more of that.
Who would have thought only a few years ago that a private company would be running GP services? But Barking & Dagenham PCT have signed a £5 million deal with a private company to provide GP services to 7,000 patients. So we now have private firms running hospitals and doctor services.
That's not what the public wants. Who would have thought that opinion polls would show that a Labour government spending billions on public services are now trusted less than the Tories to protect the health service, it is unbelievable. But can you blame them, when you see nurses laid off, ward closures, hospitals closing and services being slashed?
Mr Blair, by your very actions, you're losing the confidence of the public, your'e losing the support of your activists, and if you don't shape up and change track, you'll lose the next election. It's time to kick private profit out of the public sector and safeguard our services for future generations. Let's put need before greed.
This Rally is about fighting back against privatisation, and we can win. Let me share these words with you: 'If we fight, we may not always win, but if we don't fight, we will surely lose.' Well done today, keep your heads up and I pledge the support of the T&G for this great campaign.
For more on the T&G's campaigns for public services, see: http://www.tgwu.org.uk/