ANDY HANSFORD wonders whether foundation hospitals will be a fig leaf for privatisation of the NHS. The Tories tried to reform the National Health Service by setting up an ‘internal market’. The result was a failure, with a massive increase in accountants to count debits and credits in a whole new layer of contracts....
The case against social enterprise
The headlong rush towards social enterprise could undermine any prospects of a genuine social economy, says STEVE SCHOFIELD Social enterprise is very much the flavour of the month, or even, possibly, the next big thing. Its proponents put forward an ambitious agenda of creating jobs, providing training and developing local services in areas of...
Labour’s illusory reforms
DEXTER WHITFIELD argues that by marketising our public services Labour is eroding democratic accountability The Labour government has launched a series of ‘reforms’, which place a new emphasis on market-based modernisation of public services. Democratic accountability and transparency will be further eroded. Although there is euphoria for ‘citizen engagement’ this is participation limited to...
Trouble on the buses?
BERNARD HUGHES provides a quick before-and-after survey of three areas of transport to help illustrate the marketisation issue Let me start with some caveats. First, it deliberately takes no ideological position about the question of public ownership of the means of providing public services. It’s a strictly mechanical cui bono look at the results....
Marketisation and its effects
WILL BROWN reports on the ILP’s weekend of discussions on the privatisation of public services What is the privatisation of public services? Where is it coming from and with what consequences? And what should our political response be? These are the issues which formed the central focus of the ILP’s successful weekend school in...
Covering the real issue
The veil debate obscures a bigger question, says BEN TURLEY. What place should faith have in our public life? When, on 5 October 2006 in the Lancashire Times, Jack Straw started a debate about the wearing of the veil by Muslim women, he did so with characteristic modesty and equivocation. While Straw said that...
An anti-Americanism of fools
Anti-Americanism must not become a pillar of left-wing thinking, says ALEX MILES Of all the clichés attached to the United States of America, one of those repeated most often is that it is a land of contrasts. Clichéd it may be, but the statement is also accurate. The ‘land of the free’ is also...
Iraq’s third big issue
We must look beyond the two issues that dominate discussions of Iraq, and unite in support of Iraq’s trade unions, says former MP HARRY BARNES In Britain, our minds are often focussed on two big issues concerning Iraq. First, should we have been involved in its invasion? Secondly, should our troops now be withdrawn?...
Orwell’s boy
BARRY WINTER remembers Staff Cottman, life-long socialist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, who died last year. Last September, after a year’s illness, Stafford Cottman died. Staff was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, a life-long socialist and trade unionist. What impressed me most about him was his comradely warmth, abundant energy...
Critical times in a back to front world
BARRY WINTER went to the Critical Politics conference in November, and found a Left still confused about how to respond to new times. Organised by the Signs of the Times collective, the intellectual heirs of Marxism Today, this conference was really back to front. It concluded where it might, more usefully, have begun, with...
Telling the troubled truth?
The idea of a truth process in Northern Ireland is gaining credibility. But it’s not without its problems, as GARY KENT reports. The Irish republican leader Gerry Adams is the latest politician to raise the possibility of a truth commission in Northern Ireland, after a generation of conflict still known euphemistically as “the Troubles”....
Impassable impasse?
As the Northern Ireland peace process lurches into another crisis, PAUL DIXON asks, what next? When the IRA announced its ceasefire in September 1994 it was always difficult to see what kind of agreement could be reached between loyalists and republicans. The propaganda war and real (physical) war between unionists and nationalists over the years...