Joanne Harris - Martin Durkin TV - Dispatches TV - Lord Haskins - Benjamin Disraeli - John Pilger - Andrew Marr TV - Alex Jones - Lord Ramsbotham - James P Hoffa - Adam Curtis TV - Great Thinkers in Their Own Words TV - Noam Chomsky TV - Ken Loach: The Spirit of 45 2013 - John Smith -
I remember when we had: a working NHS, free university education; public libraries, an integrated national railway service, subsidised bus fares. We had these things. They were normal. And they were taken away from us by the same people who are now calling such things impossible. Joanne Harris, tweet 2022
Today in Britain the government spends more than all private individuals and companies put together. Martin Durkin, Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story, Channel 4 2010
Today in Britain the public sector is bigger than the private sector. ibid.
In the next five years annual government spending will climb from £697 billion to £757 billion. ibid.
We now have a national debt of £4.8 trillion. ibid.
Counted out in £50 notes our national debt would form a stack no less than 6,561 miles. Or to put it another way, if we sold off all the houses and flats in the whole of the UK, we would still be the best part of a trillion pounds short of paying our debt. ibid.
British governments have been steadily debasing the currency or printing money for decades through the deliberate expansion of credit. ibid.
It’s very much in the interests of politicians to spend money. ibid.
The idea that public spending will stimulate growth is the biggest myth of the twentieth century and is the cause of Britain’s economic decline. ibid.
What do they all do? ibid.
The idea that we need state monopolies in order to look after the poor is obviously untrue. ibid.
We look at the businesses and businessmen looking to take over our public services ... A handful of companies are set to make a fortune out of the spending cuts. Dispatches: Britain’s Secret Fat Cats, 2011
Ordinary people are feeling the squeeze, but not the men whose companies are taking over the public sector. ibid.
We’re handing over significant chunks of our public services to private companies. And we the taxpayer are paying for those services. But we have absolutely no say in what those companies pay to their chief executives. ibid.
The truth is shareholders have shown little appetite in holding companies to account over the amounts they pay their chief executives. ibid.
Questions have been raised about the process by which some outsourcing companies are awarded contracts. They often hire former government employees to work for them. ibid.
Power is shifting – not to individuals, but to big business. ibid.
Chief Executives’ salaries have gone through the roof ... This obsession with comparisons. Lord Haskins, former chairman Northern Foods
Power has only one duty – to secure the social welfare of the people. Benjamin Disraeli
It can only be a disaster, a disaster on many levels. For one thing you’ll see is the end of public service, and I think people now realise the true value of public service as the economy starts to melt down. In a way, that’s the biggest example of what a disaster privatisation is, that public service as such never really implodes or melts down. It’s a form of privatisation of capital ... That whole unspoken ethos would go. John Pilger, interview re privatisation of Sydney ferry service
The country was gripped by a borrowing frenzy. And it fuelled the mother and father of all consumer booms. This is the moment when British shopping goes turbo-charged ... In the ’80s for the first time we are what we buy. Now there was no stopping the revolution. The Conservatives set about selling off state-owned industries. Oil, electricity, steel, water, phones, airlines, all sold to the private sector. Privatisation became the very essence of Thatcherism. And British Gas was the biggest privatisation of the lot ... Billboards proclaiming Tell Sid. Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain, BBC 2007
The New World Order also allows European Union controlled and private financed corporations to buy up critical government services like waste, water and electricity. Privatisation isn’t private at all. It is simply a partnership between select corporations that act more like organised crime rings or modern pirates in partnership between government to bring you this tyranny. Alex Jones, Police State III: Total Enslavement, 2003
The thing that worries me most about the private sector’s prisons is frankly that because obviously they are trying to make a profit, they’ve got to decide where they can afford to cut corners. And the corners they cut are usually to do with staffing, and staffing numbers. Lord Ramsbotham, Chief Inspector of Prisons 1995-2001
Public sector employees are the eyes and ears on the ground for the communities they serve. James P Hoffa
A scientific model of ourselves as simplified robots, rational calculated beings whose behaviour and even feelings could be analysed and managed by numbers. But what resulted was the very opposite of freedom: the numbers took on a power of their own which began to create new forms of control, greater inequalities and a return to a rigid class structure based on the power of money. Adam Curtis, The Trap II: The Lonely Robot, BBC 2007
Once public servants were set performance targets they could achieve them in any way they wanted; the old bureaucratic rules could be thrown away and they would become heroic entrepreneurs. ibid.
James Buchanan, economist: He argued that politicians just like civil servants were hypocrites; the idea they promoted that they were serving the public was a fiction. In reality they too followed their self-interests. ibid.
And in the management of society New Labour turned to the mathematical systems that John Major had brought in but on a scale never seen before. They believe that people actually behaved in the way described by the simplified economic model. Performance targets and incentives would be set for everything and everyone. ibid.
Hospital managers proved to be particularly devious. When they were set targets to cut waiting lists, they ordered consultants to do the easiest operations first, like bunions and vasectomies. Complicated ones like cancers were no longer prioritised. And they found other clever ways of getting patients off the list. ibid.
But report after report came out which revealed that this inventive gaming of the system was now endemic throughout the public services. What was supposed to be a rational system was instead creating a strange world in which no-one knew whether to believe the numbers or not. ibid.
Social Insurance and Allied Services: Report by Sir William Beveridge. He produced a government report infused with Victorian morality, proposing a social security scheme to combat want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. The plan was controversial. Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words, BBC 2011
Privatisation: ‘You take a public institution and you give it to an unaccountable tyranny.’ Noam Chomsky, interview The Corporation 2003
A freeze on pay for public sector workers is a tax increase for the public sector workers, and if it extends over over a couple of years, it’s a significant tax increase. Noam Chomsky, lecture Oregon 20 April 2011, ‘Global Hegemony: The Facts The Images’
Piccadilly was already a seething mass of people; the hoarding around Eros was crowded with young people mainly from the Forces. Ken Loach: The Spirit of ’45, woman, 2013
Will we the people who have won the war, drive home our victory against fascism by defeating our pre-war enemies of poverty and unemployment? ibid. man
We’re still being taken in. ibid.
The great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men. ibid. Labour Party manifesto 45
The Labour Party is a socialist party and proud of it. Its ultimate purpose at home is the establishment of the socialist commonwealth of Great Britain – free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public-spirited, its material resources organised in the service of the British people. ibid.
The best health services should be available free for all. Money must no longer be the passport to the best treatment. ibid.
Newspapers carried the astonishing news to an amazed public – Labour landslide. ibid. Pathé news
We have been the dreamers, we have been the sufferers, now we are the builders. ibid. Aneurin Bevan