Meet the Privatisers – and their 5-point agenda

Sports fans rant about referees over any decision that goes against their team, but they know without referees there could be no sports matches at all. Beyond individual matches, leagues and competitions involving multiple teams need a governing body to resolve disputes, provide collective support, and share out resources. Similarly, for societies in general to function fairly and effectively, governments must be given a decisive role. 

There are too many challenges and opportunities that require us to work together with agreed rules. Ignoring each other, or falling out over disagreements, would drag everyone down. So why do the privatisers keep trying to subdue state institutions in favour of private powers? Why do they relentlessly attack public bodies and pretend things will inevitably be better in private hands? The answer lies in these five aims of theirs:

[1] Removing Restraints from Irresponsible Private Actions

Privatisers want to be able to do as they please – cheat consumers, mistreat their workers, bully their tenants, sell unsafe goods, pollute the environment – and they detest regulations that would restrain their irresponsibility. Hence the endless calls for deregulation and attacks on essential rules as cumbersome ‘red tape’.

[2] Diminishing the Public Safety Net

Privatisers know that without an effective public safety net against the threats of sickness, homelessness, and poverty, they could more easily pressure people into accepting their exploitative demands. By attacking ‘dependency’ on public support, they seek to increase people’s actual dependency on the whims and mercy of the rich and powerful.

[3] Increasing Wealth & Power Inequalities

Privatisers favour a system which would ensure the hard work of the vast majority of people in society produces rewards that could be overwhelmingly siphoned towards the tiny minority of plutocrats. Cutting taxes for the rich and benefits for the poor are designed to widen power inequalities, so the former can more readily dismiss the plight of the latter.

[4] Diverting Public Resources for Private Gains

Privatisers object to public resources being used for the public good when these can be transferred for making private gains for profiteers. By handing over public resources to the private sector in the form of commercial contracts or asset transfers, they can thereafter be managed to benefit a rich minority, at lower quality and accessibility, and with no democratic accountability.

[5] Undermining the Ethos of Public Service

Privatisers never tire of pointing to flaws and problems in the public sector, deliberately ignoring the fact that these are rare compared with the harm and deception routinely perpetrated in the private sector. They want to demoralise public servants, drive them away, so that public service is weakened and less able to help people poorly treated by the private sector.

Privatisers will always try to exploit public dissatisfaction with this or that aspect of their government, and stir it into a rejection of democratic governance altogether. It is not because they remotely care about other people, far from it, all they want is to deceive enough people to get them the power they need to impose their self-serving agenda on society.

Can Anybody Help: civics revisited

For many people, words like ‘politics’, ‘democracy’, ‘government’, ‘citizenship’, either strike them as boring, or worse, have negative connotations of being something that gets in the way of individuals living their lives without outside interference.

What they don’t recognise is that how they get to live their lives depends critically on the state of democracy and how they are governed. But they are not likely to know much about that when it is almost the social norm to avoid having informed conversations about such matters. Friends worry about antagonising each other. Teachers feel safer to keep silent rather than risk being accused of showing bias. Even politicians jump at the chance of saying ‘let’s keep politics out of this’ as though the subject is best brushed aside.

In reality – and here the facts speak for themselves – human beings are vulnerable to so many threats and problems as isolated individuals. Alone, we are more likely to succumb to disease, injuries, attacks, abuse, oppression, natural disasters, and other predicament. Throughout history, the plea ‘Can Anybody Help’ has only been answered reliably when there are adequate collective arrangements in place to give a satisfactory response. To understand what would constitute ‘adequate collective arrangements’, we need to learn about politics, democracy, and matters of government.

In the absence of civics education, we are left with simplistic regurgitation of dangerous ideas. We have the advocacy for authoritarian, ‘strongmen’ politics – with diverse lineages coming down from Hobbesian absolutists, Bonapartists, fascists, Stalinists, converging towards contemporary right-wing ‘populists’ who seek to wield unrestrained power to do as they please. And we have the propagation of anarchistic, libertarian politics – echoing the demands of the likes of Mandeville, Godwin, Spencer, Rand, to leave individuals to their own devices without any government stepping in.

It is hardly surprising that an increasing number of people, old and young, are drawn to unscrupulous politicians who insist they could do so much better for their country if they were not hindered by accountability procedures, safeguards for human rights, and public scrutiny; and that their country would thrive if government would leave it to the private sector to sort out healthcare, education, energy, water, housing, business dealings, etc.

It hardly requires much time to remind people the dire consequences of dictators imposing their ruthless and arbitrary rule on countries they have gained power over; or the terrible effects of leaving key matters to the private sector through privatisation or callous deregulation. 

As educators, we must communicate, explain, and engage as widely as we can so that our fellow citizens can better understand how the threats they cannot deal with on their own needs democratically controlled government institutions to pool resources and devise responses which genuinely help the people concerned.

The hijacking of conventional and social media by manipulators, the brazen attacks on teachers by ideologues and culture warriors, the systematic spreading of lies and false rumours in political campaigns, the undermining of universities by fundamentalist and corporate influences, are all making it critically urgent to counter distortions with facts, analyses, and explanations. Through reports, drama, classroom discussions, historical accounts, and a variety of other tools, we must reach out to those who are worried that they have been forgotten, and show them help is available, but only from those who are committed to serving the people through a strong, democratic government.