Services made with our hands and our hearts

There is a lot of election talk in the UK these days, which is unsurprising with the EU elections recently taking place and the next national election due in one year’s time. Current polls are starting to suggest that the lead the opposition Labour Party has held for a few years is beginning to slip, and the Conservatives may rebuild their base over the next year and win the election outright – rather than having to go into coalition with the Liberal Democrats as they did this time around.

All of this is very interesting, but only if you’re a bit of a geek for UK politics. What might prove more interesting to all of us in the long term, however, is that a particular topic seems to slowly be creeping onto the radar of the national discussion that will take place over the next year – and that topic is renationalization. The Green Party are explicitly arguing for the railways to be nationalized again, and some in the Labour Party are encouraging leader Ed Miliband to do the same, seeing it as a potentially very popular policy among voters from all sides of the political spectrum.

Many British institutions that were traditionally owned by the state – most notably the railways and the energy infrastructure – were sold off to private companies during the 18 years that the Conservatives were in power under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. The current Conservative government is following a similar path by slowly trying to sell off more and more of the much-loved National Health Service. However, such policies are seen by much of the public as a disaster – they have seen the ways in which energy bills and train tickets are permanently going up while service levels get worse and worse. A recent poll by YouGov found that 68% of the British public support handing the energy companies back to the state, 66% support nationalizing the railways, and a massive 84% believe that the health service should not be sold to private companies.

The railways, energy companies, and health service were built up by generations of hard work from the people of Britain. They were not created by private companies, and private companies did nothing to create the value they had when they were privatized. By selling them off, Thatcher essentially gave away decades of labor to her corporate friends at a price far below what it was actually worth. The companies running these services have proven that they do not have the same level of passion for them that the British people do, they do not care for the effects of their policies on the people, and they care only about profits rather than about providing an efficient service to those who need it. Things will be no different if the health service is given to private companies – indeed, they may be worse, as profit would then be taking precedence over what is literally a matter of life and death.

The damage privatization did to the UK was huge, and is ongoing – both in terms of the gradual decline of the railways and the energy companies, and in terms of the ideology of private profit and ‘free markets’ that it helped to spread. However, we still have time to reverse it if we act now, and consequently the upcoming election campaign needs to hinge around the issue of keeping the National Health Service in public hands, and returning the other services to the people who built them. The Green Party should be commended for making this part of their platform, and those on the left need to encourage Labour to follow suit – for the good of all working people in the UK.

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Is Europe breaking down?

The EU has been rocked in the past few days by the news coming out of a country that doesn’t even belong to the 28-country bloc – Switzerland. The highly complex Swiss political system allows for regular national referenda to be held on issues of popular concern, if enough signatures can be gathered to put a measure on the ballot. The right-wing Swiss People’s Party managed to promote a referendum on the issue of restricting immigration – not just from Africa and Asia as we might expect, but even from other European countries. No-one expected it to pass, and polls in the last week suggested it would fail. But on the day of the vote the measure passed with 50.3% in favour and 49.7% against.

The implications are already worrying people across the continent, although the Swiss government has three years in which to draw up legislation to implement the vote – and will presumably be looking to do so in the least restrictive way possible, as much of Switzerland’s wealth comes through freedom of people and capital. Although Switzerland is outside the EU, it currently reaps all the major benefits of membership, including tariff-free trade and free movement. This vote puts all of that in jeopardy, and EU members like France have already suggested that it will mean re-examining the European relationship with Switzerland. All in all, it seems like an insane decision by the Swiss voters, and one which will damage them just as much as it will harm the rest of the continent.

That’s not to say Switzerland doesn’t have a certain amount of form on backwards referenda decisions. In 2009, the country voted to ban the construction of minarets on mosques, in a campaign that was marked by controversial race-baiting posters designed by the Swiss People’s Party. However, this latest vote feel more significant in terms of the resurgence of right-wing feeling in Switzerland and across Europe, as it suggests that ill-feeling towards foreigners is expanding from the usual targets of Africans and Arabs towards fellow Europeans. In the midst of an economic recession that shows no signs of ending anytime soon, Europeans have begun to turn on one another – the Greeks blame the Germans for their problems, the British blame the Romanians, the Ukrainians blame the Russians, and, it seems, the Swiss blame everybody but themselves. In this atmosphere, the Swiss People’s Party currently receive over 25% of the vote in Switzerland, and the equally anti-European United Kingdom Independence Party are set to come second in the forthcoming EU elections, ahead of the Conservative party that currently leads the government in the UK. The rest of Europe has not escaped the rise of this right-wing sentiment, and I’ll discuss some other examples in future blogs.

Ultimately, this intra-European tension helps nobody, and the idea of Switzerland, one of the richest countries in the world and vital part of the global economy, closing its borders seems ridiculous to everyone except the Swiss voters themselves. However, it does highlight the increasing tension which needs to be worked out within Europe – perhaps the wealthiest and most fortunate area on the planet, but which still contains so many people who feel left behind and excluded from the modern economy. This is clear in the breakdown of the Swiss vote, with rich, cosmopolitan areas like Geneva and Zurich voting strongly against the motion, but the rural areas that still rely on agriculture voting strongly in favour. In the modern European economy, some are winning while others continue to lose and to feel that their place in the world is slowly being eroded. The Swiss vote shows how vital it is to turn that situation around and ensure everyone is included and made to feel listened to – whether city-dweller, farmer, citizen, immigrant, or otherwise.

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