This is a fantastic article by my friend and colleague Stephen Pollard welcoming David Cameron’s announcement that the Conservative Party, if they win the forthcoming general election, will allow public sector workers to run the services that they work in as co-operatives. In truth this project will probably start in education but is likely to very quickly spread to healthcare services.
This is a real step in the right direction as far as Nurses for Reform is concerned. As regular readers of this blog will recall, we have always championed the rediscovery of the UK’s wonderful history of mutual and co-operative funding and provision of healthcare and we are so happy that David Cameron and his Conservative Party are taking on our policy ideas (here, here and here).
For NFR the saddest part of this is that the people who should be welcoming the empowerment of their members more any other are against it Unite, the largest public sector union have been publicly condemning this move. Well, shame on them. They have now demonstrated that they are far more interested in playing politics than really looking after the interests of their members and the workers that they claim to represent.
Unite and indeed the Labour Party must welcome this policy, they have to see this as a triumph for their ideas.
In line with public choice theory economics, I have long believed that health systems driven by greedy vote motivated politicians will have the opposite effect of their professed consequences. It is in this context that one expects to read articles like this. Billions spent and nothing to show for it.
A million miles away from the rhetoric of equality and all that top down pontificating beloved by our political class, the NHS and our wider welfare system is continually exposed for being a deeply dystopian and elitist operation. Its masters pretend otherwise. But, as Stephen Pollard and Andrew (now Lord) Adonis argued in their excellent book, A Class Act, Myth of Britain’s Classless Society, the NHS is the microcosom of a class based system. That is what it is.
It has essentially white male doctors and administrators at the top and a raft of poorly paid ethnic minorities doing the auxiliary services at the bottom. As a system overseen by the ‘Royal’ Colleges, built on legislative favour, and which taxes ordinary people to the tune of more than £100 billion a year, is it any wonder that the poor are kept poor – and made ill earlier?
Forget social justice and equality. The key to making poor people healthier is to enable them to get rich. That is why government should get out of the way. Indeed, it should allow welfare to flourish without the state. Forget politics and coercion. What we want is much more open, diverse and dynamic forms of health and welfare organised bottom up.
