An extremely worrying post from George Monbiot that should make you very angry –

‘You’ve been told that nothing is sacred; that no state spending is safe from being cut or eroded through inflation. You’ve been misled. As the new public spending data released by the government show, a £267bn bill has been both ring-fenced and index-linked. This sum, spread over 50 years or so, guarantees the welfare not of state pensioners or children or the unemployed, but of a different class of customer. To make way, everything else must be cut, further and faster than it would otherwise have been.

This is the money the state now owes to private corporations: the banks, construction and service companies which built infrastructure under the private finance initiative. In September 1997 the Labour government gave companies a legal guarantee that their payments would never be cut. Whenever there was a conflict between the needs of patients or pupils and PFI payments, it would thenceforth be resolved in favour of the consortia.

The NHS now owes private companies £50bn for infrastructure that cost only £11bn to build.

Secrecy surrounded the whole scheme. To this day, PFI contracts remain commercially confidential. You can’t read them; MPs can’t read them. We don’t know what we are being stung for or whether the costs are justified

Obviously this supports the idea that interests of the business class – their profits – come before the well being of the public.