Your editorial (3 July) on children’s care homes proposes an important first step in reversing the trend since the 1980s in replacing the concept of public service as an underlying value with the profit motive. You imply, however, that child services are somehow unique and this special status should exempt them from the underlying presumption in favour of market-based solutions. While the clash of values between profit and public service is more starkly evident here, the same moral and social questions arise in every other area where profit has been substituted for service as the primary driving force.
The concept of the public provision of public services has been successfully vilified by rightwing propaganda as a form of toxic “hard left” ideology, when in fact it is simply the right moral and social way to proceed, and was until the 1980s recognised as such by all political parties left and right. There are many areas of national life where needs are so basic, universal and socially important that the services should be provided and managed collectively, democratically and explicitly in the interests of the public, not privately and in the interest of profit.
The real toxic and irrational ideology is that of neoliberalism that has so permeated the zeitgeist that its pernicious attacks on the public realm are now the accepted currency of political discourse preventing the reclaiming of public services.
Stephen Smith
Glasgow