D.I.Y services

With twenty one days to go until the General Election, the party manifestos have been launched. Among the manifestos of the major parties, the Conservative ‘Invitation to join the Government of Great Britain’ stands out. It is not just the arresting presentation (a hardback blue book that looks a bit like a bible…) that has captured attention, but the claims within it. ‘There is such a thing as society; it’s just not the same thing as the state’, David Cameron proudly soundbites. The Conservative manifesto claims this as the new ideological heart of Conservativism – a vision of a Big Society in which citizens are given the power to govern themselves.

But a closer inspection of Conservative policy and the ideas that Cameron espouses tells a different story: this is not actually a radical or a progressive manifesto but an aggressively and regressively conservative one. It invites further privatisation of public services, will create massive variation in standards of education and healthcare provision and will deepen the chasm between the people and the state.



Some of the most frightening proposals are Conservative plans for public services. Despite the justified anger that greeted Labour’s Foundation Hospitals and PFI initiatives, the Conservatives are going one step further. They say that are going to let people take over local public services. Take education as an example: the Conservatives say they will let parents take over local schools. Even if they were going to let parents take over schools (they’re not) then let’s examine what would this mean. It might mean parents who have no experience of running organisations or delivering quality education taking over a public service that shapes the courses of our children’s lives. But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume there do happen to be a group of parents in every borough who are also:

1. teachers
2. managers
3. want to run a school

Do this group have time to run a school alongside working, looking after their children and possibly having a social life? Don’t they pay their taxes to government to avoid having to do it all themselves? But again, in the interests of seeing this argument to its conclusion, let’s suppose there are a group of parents who are:

1. teachers
2. managers
3. want to run a school
4. have time to run a school alongside work, family and friend commitments
5. don’t mind paying tax for a service they are actually delivering themselves

Even assuming all of the above were possible, this is not an opportunity that is likely to be available to most parents, because most parents do not fit into the above categories. Single parents, parents on low wages with long or unsociable working hours (e.g. nurses) are unlikely to find the time to run their children’s school on the side. It will be the ‘working people’ – the very people that Cameron implies that the Tories support - who will be excluded. These proposals will only work for affluent parents, free-lancers or the early retired. In short, it will be the middle and upper classes and two-parent families who have the luxury of time and are able to share family responsibilities who will benefit.

But all this is hypothetical, because actually the Conservatives are not really inviting parents to run schools. Instead they are inviting parents to join up with private businesses to run public services like schools. The widely championed ‘social enterprises’ may work for social ends, but are still driven by a healthy profit-motive this means that businessmen and women will be responsible managing and running schools – and for business people profit will always come first. Not only should we have serious reservations about letting private business run state schools for profit; allowing schools to be run by private business will terminally fracture any sense of accountability between citizens and public services. If small groups of predominantly privileged and affluent parents start taking over schools with private businesses, how will other parents - who are not in the position to get so involved - make sure their children are getting a good education, how will they hold these schools to account? The centralised standards we have now will no longer apply. As the American experience with Charter Schools has shown – you get some good schools this way, but you also get a lot of very, very bad ones.

Creating a stronger civic society where citizens’ voices are heard is an admirable political aim. But this is not the aim of the Conservative Party – education is an example of how their manifesto opens the doors to the mass privatisation of our public services and the loss of accountability between citizens and the state over the quality of these services. Perhaps most alarmingly it demonstrates a misunderstanding about what citizens want. Most people do not want to run services themselves and they do not want the government to disappear, eroding the little free time they already have with their family and placing the burden of service provision on citizens. They want a government that understands their needs and can provide a good local school and a good local hospital.

David Cameron, hear this: small government is not the same as good government.