Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

Then, the only option that blinkered, narrow-minded public sector
grandees and local authority decision-makers can see in times of budget
cuts is tendering out, or selling off, services to cheap private providers.
Those private services are impersonal, profit driven, fat cats in the driving
seat, using workers who are low paid, intimidated, often forced to be
complicit in rule-bending for the sake of keeping their job, and generally
being denied trade union representation.
6
We Own It should be arguing for public authorities to clip the wings
of their high flyers and to honestly explain to the public the true costs
of services, which in many cases we already own, before considering
anything else. Whatever a service actually costs – paying a proper living
wage, with job security, safety considered, reasonable hours – tell us, the
public, we can take it … Like all social/community costs, if they need to
be paid and are demonstrably fair and open, we have to pay them!
The truth is, up until the second world war, for most of us, the UK’s history
was one of serfdom, wage slave, slums, long hours, children workers,
dangerous conditions, misery and wasted lives … and all that fucking
upstairs downstairs nonsense. After the war a progressive Labour Party
introduced the Welfare State, nationalised things like the mines, the
railways, waterworks, gas and electricity suppliers … all brought into
public ownership … We Owned It!
Since then successive governments, criminally accelerated by Thatcher’s
anti-working class zeal, have, at the bequest of pillagers, privateers and
pirates, chipped away at that magnificent egalitarian statement of ‘for the
good of all’, allowing and encouraging dodgy characters to sow seeds of
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER TWELVE