The problem with this analysis is that it is, at best, only half right. Of
course a centralising government that creates lots of extra paperwork by
setting targets and constructing complex auditing frameworks and
bureaucracies will create more problems than it solves. But this is to
ignore the reasons for the centralisation in the first place. Thatcher's
grotesque legacy includes bequeathing the ideology that every penny spent on
public services must be accounted for, on the basis that state-administered
services must prove to the nth degree that they are at least as efficient as
those delivered by private businesses. This applies especially, of course,
where privatisation is an option, or wherever state-administered services
run contrary to the social and economic policies favoured by Thatcherites.
It's a different story when applied to the grossly wasteful "defence"
industry and the nuclear sector, to name two egregious examples.
The ideology of the "new public management" is the means by which this
centralisation is being achieved. It has the happy coincidence of rendering
all state sector organisations more businesslike in that cost centres become
profit centres and the accounting changes accordingly. This makes these
easier to privatise in the future. Large complex bureaucracies can be
dissected and their most profitable parts hived off to provide guaranteed
income streams to insatiably hungry investors. So it's no wonder that we
need more private education, health care, prisons, etc., because
privatisation will be the only way these services will escape from the
relentless auditing that is characteristic of the UK state sector that is
being ever more tightly squeezed by the most active Treasury department in
modern British history.
Leo Panitch's paper on the "new imperial state" in New Left Review last year
was useful in linking the state theory of Poulantzas with a neglected book
by Mark Harmon, published by Macmillan in 1994, entitled "The British Labour
Government and the 1976 IMF Crisis". Both Harmon and Panitch argue that this
intervention marked the first concerted effort by the U.S. Treasury to
enforce what we now know as structural adjustment. Thatcher's proud boast
about privatisation being a British export was, in fact, and as usual,
erroneous. It was surreptitiously imported prior to re-export. If anything
the UK today represents a kind of inverse take on Marx's famous dictum about
development, that the most advanced country merely reflects the future image
of the presently less developed. Some more years of Thatcherite "public
management" and everyone's infrastructure will be creaking as bad as the
British railways, health system, education system, agricultural sector,
etc., etc. Thereafter, inevitably, lies the path toward the inequalities
inherent in the U.S. system as those who can afford it opt out of the
crippled state-administered systems and buy into those provided by private
operators using assets cherry-picked from the state. The rest may ponder
their fate.
Michael K.
