Without the promise of the welfare state, it is a moot point that Britain could have withstood the Nazi onslaught in the early part of the war. Today after much of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy has been carried forward by New Labour, Beveridge’s great vision has been reduced to farce.
The prose of Wall St. Journal (“Decline and Fall - Britain Feels Pressure as Public Services Continue to Decay”) has overtones of muffled drums. “One in five adults in the land of Shakespeare is functionally illiterate, putting Britain’s literary levels near the bottom of the class among developed nations. As Britain heads towards a national election, the debate between the two main parties centers on which can fix the country’s crumbling public services -not just schools but railroads and the National Health Service as well. The Labour government and the Conservatives trade accusations of mismanagement. But the real problem is more fundamental.
“Britain hasn’t decided whether it wants to be a high-tax welfare state, with the government ensuring high-quality services in the style of the Continent, or a US capitalist bastion, with lower taxes and services left largely to local authorities or private enterprise.
“The government’s response to failing schools and hospitals has been to spend what it can and shift some of the burden to the private sector, while creating ever more regulations and performance targets.
“Now, after keeping the state’s purse zipped tight for three years, Tony Blair’s government is promising a US$103.7 billion increase in public spending over the next three years. This may well be enough to persuade voters that he is serious this time when he says his top priorities are `education, education, education’ as he did in the 1997 election. In his pre-election budget, Finance Minister George Brown upped the stakes by promising a further $’2.92 billion for schools and hospitals.
“Even these sums won’t be enough to provide Continental European standards in Britain’s public services. The government can afford to spend extra now because it is enjoying a rare string of budgetary surpluses, but that is forecast to disappear by 2003. To go on spending what’s needed would require far higher tax rates, something Labour regards as political suicide. Britain’s tax rate in 1999 was 36.6% of GDP, according to provisional figures from the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development. In France the figure was 46%.
“The Conservatives are denouncing Labour as spendthrift and are promising to cut taxes. But voters are so angry about the decrepit state of schools, hospitals and transportation that, in fact, the Tories are promising to virtually match Mr. Blair’s planned increases, and to make only marginal tax cuts.
“Just four years ago the telegenic Mr. Blair came to power and proclaimed the birth of a sleek, modern, Cool Britannia. And to many tourists, Britain does seem rejuvenated. London is crammed with trendy shops and cafes. New landmarks like the London Eye ferris wheel and the Tate Modern art museum dazzle visitors. Britain’s Economy, the world’s fourth largest at present exchange rates, grew a healthy 3% last year. Inflation is at a 30-year low, and unemployment is down from a peak of nearly 10% in 1992”.
Such statistics, however, fail to register the squandering of physical and human public investment. “The public services on which the country depends for its long-term economic health are in a state of extreme decay. The health-care system belongs on life support. In England and Wales, men have a 42% chance of surviving prostate cancer for five years, less than half the US level and far below the rates in most other European Union countries. A 1999 study by the World Health Organisation estimated that up to 25,000 Britons who died of cancer each year would survive if British care were up to the best in Europe. Expensive medicines are routinely rationed.; waiting for operations can run to two years.
“Last month, British papers ran photos of a storage room in a NHS hospital where harried staff, lacking space in the morgue, had dumped corpses.
“Including both state and private expenditure, Britain spends $1,209 per capita on health care, compared with $3,070 in the US and $1,860 in France. The ratio of doctors to population in Britain is about half that of the Germany, France, or the US.
“During the Labour government’s first few years, it offered little extra money for the National Health Service. Instead it set targets: to raise cancer-survival rates, or reduce waiting-times for operations. But the British Medical Association argues that the targets can distort clinical decisions - e.g., by pressuring doctors to focus on simple cases that will help them trim waiting lists rather than on the most urgent cases.
“In 1994, the Conservative government privatised British Rail in an effort to rid itself of the huge expense and responsibility of running trains. The track is now owned by one private company, Railtrack PLC, while 25 other companies operate various routes, and scores more handle maintenance and other chores formerly done by British Rail. Marketing has improved; punctuality and safety have suffered.
“Last October, a train toppled off a broken track in Hatfield, near London, and killed four people. The investigation turned up gross failures of track maintenance. With so many companies and regulators involved, it was impossible to determine exactly who was to blame. Since then, Railtrack and its contractors have been scrambling to find and repair fractured rails, inflicting chaos on schedules. Aware that the electors hold them responsible, Mr. Blair and other cabinet ministers have immersed themselves in the detail of train schedules and technical maintenance. They warn of a crackdown on Railtracks if services aren’t restored to something approaching normal by Easter. The government has also promised to find $87.63 billion in public and private financing to upgrade the train network over the next ten years to make up for decades of low investment.”
“The government is trying to use the same awkward mix of public and private money to patch up the Tube, London’s 140year-old underground train network and another victim of chronic underinvestment. Antique escalators remain out of service for weeks. Trains often sputter to a long halt between stations. A proposed `partial privatisation’ of the Tube would shift the financing and management of renovation to private companies, while keeping the operation of the trains in government hands. `It’s crazy,’ says Robert Kiley, the American drafted to rescue the Tube on the strength of his record in reviving New York City’s subway system. `Those who will be held accountable are all in the public sector, no matter what’.
In Britain today one can see the end results of a scheme for “fixing” schools in which American readers will have no difficulty in recognising key features of President Bush’s program. “A visit to Stamford High, a school for 1 1-to-16year-olds set in 70-year-old brick buildings, illustrates the extent of the mess. The school has always had its share of troubles, just because of where it is, in a poor urban area. But its real problems began in the mid-1980s, after Margaret Thatcher enacted a radical change in school funding. Parents won the right to choose which state school their children would attend, while schools began receiving funds according to the number of students they attracted. To help parents choose, Mrs. Thatcher published tables of schools’ examination result.
“The idea was to create a market for pupils that encouraged good schools and punished bad ones. Stamford has been punished. Its enrollment has dropped a to 450 from about 1,0000. Many students are at Stamford because no other school will take them. The present government hasn’t tried to undo Mrs. Thatcher’s reforms, which are popular with parents. But it has been trying to help schools like Stamford with enough money to fix the roofs so that it is no longer has to set out buckets on a rainy day. It even has a plan to encourage private sector companies to take over troubled state schools and run them for profit.”
“But the government also has created loads of additional paperwork for headmasters and teachers. On a chair in the office of Phil Taylor, the school’s avuncular headmaster, is a two foot stack of the latest government-inspired plans and reports. There’s a 179-page school improvement plan, an asset management plan, and information technology plan and a plan for promoting child-safety on trains. `I can’t afford to read most of this stuff,’ says Mr. Taylor.
“Mr. Taylor has to employ one of his teacher, Sanjay Patel, as a part-time statistician to track the school’s effort to hit government targets. Teachers at Stamford and two other schools complained that bureaucracy was driving them to the brink of resignation”
“Bob Hewett, a drama teacher at an East Anglia secondary school, recently was sacked for refusing to comply with a rule requiring him to write lesson plans specifying what he would be doing in each five-minute segment of each drama class. His headmaster described him as a good teacher. At 56, I’m standing there arguing that you cannot plan spontaneity,’ says Mr. Hewitt says of the hearing where he was fired.’”
Sound familiar in Ontario? It should. It provided the template not only for George W Bush but for Premier Mike Harris.
-- from Comer, April 2001