Protect our public services
We must resist pressures towards forced privatisation in Europe
by Brendan Barber - March 22
The Eurosceptic press and too many British ministers tell us the UK is different from everywhere else in Europe. In reality, the similarities are greater than the differences.
Take public services. Each country has a slightly different definition - in France, the railways are still in public hands; in Sweden, even the off-licences are government-run. In every EU country, there is a public sector that provides services where the market has failed, or where private ownership is thought unfair or inadequate.
But European public services are under threat. Neo-liberals argue that services should only stay public if they can compete on price with the private sector. At their most extreme, they claim that the private sector is automatically better: services should only be public where the market fails catastrophically.
This neo-liberal agenda is not confined to the USA and Europe. It has done so much damage to Latin America’s economies that anti-privatising governments are increasingly the norm. It is forcing water privatisation on sub-Saharan Africa, and failing to provide an education to millions of children.
In Europe, the public sector is more resilient, and there is still a consensus over supporting the welfare state. But even here, liberalisers and deregulators continue to have an impact. In Eastern Europe, the understandable retreat from planned economies has turned into a headlong rush for profits, without concern for the rights of workers or the services provided to citizens.
Last year, the EU Services Directive proposed the wholesale liberalisation of public services. The original draft would have allowed private service providers in one country to force their way into any other country, regardless of whether that country’s people had voted to deliver that particular service publicly.
After unions mounted a mass campaign, the services directive was amended by the European Parliament to take out this "country of origin" principle, and many public services were excluded from its scope.
Yet the neo-liberals have not gone away. This is why unions in Europe now want to protect public services from these threats, giving citizens the right to decide where the boundary between public and private lies.
For that to be possible, the EU needs a new Services of General Interest Directive giving democratically-elected governments the choice to resist liberalisation of their public sectors.
The European Trade Union Confederation has launched a petition to support its campaign for the directive, supported by public sector employers, the Greens and the Party of European Socialists to which the British Labour party belongs. You can join the campaign by signing up at www.petitionpublicservice.eu
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