Red Pepper » Richard Goulding

Personal critique – Why are We the Good Guys?

admin — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 10:00:31 +0000

Established in 2001 with the aim of ‘correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media’, MediaLens uses a ‘propaganda model’ analysis inspired by Noam Chomsky to argue that mainstream newspapers and broadcasters are systematically incapable of challenging business and state power. In his latest book, the website’s co-editor David Cromwell offers both a critique of the ways the powerful convey propaganda through the media and a personal memoir.
Cromwell addresses several topics, including Iraq, climate change and the financial crisis, highlighting the narrow scope of media debates that rarely question the assumption of a benevolent if fallible west. He intersperses this with several formative moments of his life and his development as an activist.
Sometimes eye-opening information is uncovered. Consideration of the post-second world war Marshall Plan reveals how it was used as a cold war weapon to dissuade the Attlee government from nationalising industries. Chapters on the Iraq war and Iran expose both the media’s dissimulation of bias and distortions and the selective amnesia and hand-waving of many journalists when confronted on it.
That said, the book has weaknesses and its view of the world does not escape the good/bad guy dichotomy, with certain self-styled anti-imperialists left unchallenged. Cromwell denounces ‘the British media’ for trying to ‘silence or vilify’ Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, but does not address the rape allegations against him.
The final two chapters are the weakest, unconvincingly merging together existentialism, Buddhism and psychology to set out a personal philosophy in which social change seems to derive more from individual enlightenment than collective struggle. The result is an eclectic romanticism, in which enlightened individuals who have freed themselves from selfish indifference to others use compassion to overcome the egotistical corruption of civilisation.
This offers little obvious guidance as to how people constrained not by ‘indifference’ but by oppression can emancipate themselves. And strategic considerations as to how journalists can work within the limits of the capitalist press to speak out against power and ensure audiences receive accurate information are sidelined. Sadly, given the useful information compiled elsewhere in the book, this leaves political strategy sidelined in favour of empty moralism.

Community organising – a new part of the union

admin — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 10:00:55 +0000

Illustration: Cressida Knapp
Travel two miles from the gentrified eyesore of MediaCityUK by the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal and you’ll arrive at Salford’s Unemployed and Community Resource Centre. Once part of a network of at least 200 TUC-supported centres established in the 1980s to provide advice, representation and support to those out of work, Salford’s centre is one of the few dozen survivors following cutbacks in their funding from mainly Labour-controlled local authorities since the late 1990s.
‘Organising the unemployed has been a massive issue for the movement for over 100 years,’ says Alex Halligan, secretary of Salford trades council and a driving force behind both the centre and the local branch of Unite’s initiative to open up its membership to people out of work. ‘The official movement, the trade unions, the Labour Party have never really taken their role to do so seriously.’
In Britain one has to go back to the 1930s to find serious attempts being made nationally, when Wal Hannington and others mobilised tens of thousands through the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. ‘This was always organised through the fringes of the movement, by the Communist Party, which was much more powerful than they are now,’ says Halligan. ‘[The Unite initiative] is the first time the official movement have taken on this role and I think people are almost shocked at how innovative this could actually be.’
For 50p a week
It has been a year now since Britain’s largest trade union officially announced it was opening its membership to unemployed people, pensioners, students and others without jobs. For 50p a week members of Unite’s ‘community branches’ gain some practical benefits, including the use of the union’s legal helpline, debt counselling and tax advice, though not the right to representation by a TUC-trained employment officer at tribunals. Still in its early phase, six active branches have been set up across the country and so far 1,000 people have joined.
Though Halligan welcomes the material benefits of community branches, he sees them as ‘trimmings’ compared to the wider potential for empowerment. ‘At the moment people are fragmented and desperately crawling around at the bottom for something,’ he says. ‘The union offers something. It offers a concrete, collective form of action.’ While one person faced with housing benefit cuts has few ways of voicing the ‘terrible situation it’s left them in’, Halligan points out that ‘when there’s a thousand people all screaming the same thing it’s easier to get a message across’.
Organisers in Sheffield, where a branch has been operating for months and has so far gathered a core group of 20 members with plans to set up telephone pyramid contact schemes to mobilise activists to resist evictions, echo this view. ‘It’s something that’s been needed for a very long time,’ says Richard Brown, a mature student. As someone who previously only ever joined a trade union – some years ago – for ‘insurance reasons’, Brown feels the project could reignite a link between community and union activism in an age when those bonds have withered as industrial jobs vanished.
‘Years ago,’ he says, everyone who lived in an area ‘worked in the same place’. Whereas workplace activism then ‘in a way was community organising, that’s gone now because lots don’t work or people travel to work and often don’t know who their next door neighbour is.’ Pointing to a proposed campaign in solidarity with low-paid recycling agency staff at the local council facing cuts to their hours, he says there is an ‘obvious opportunity’ to rebuild a direct link between workplace issues and wider residential concerns such as increased fly-tipping.
So what’s new? Brown argues that ‘the fact that it’s run through a trade union gives it credibility’ it may otherwise lack. He also sees community branches as offering the unemployed greater scope to organise around their own issues than through charities, which are ‘more like a service where you’re a customer . . . They’ve moved away from campaigning to an almost managerial way of doing things. They don’t call demonstrations, they lobby politicians.’
Cautionary note
Matt Scott of the Community Sector Coalition, an alliance of grassroots groups and activists, agrees that ‘the trade unions have got to play a huge role because they have the resources, leadership and potential to be a huge resource’. Yet while he welcomes Unite’s seeming re-engagement with community activism following the ‘hollowing out of democratic action’ under both the Conservatives and New Labour, he cautions that the process will ‘take years’ and need to be ‘negotiated’ between grassroots groups and the union rather than ‘controlled’.
‘Community organising’ has become a much-used phrase as a result of the part it played in the rise of Barack Obama and its co-option as part of David Cameron’s ‘big society’ initiative. Scott voices concern that in contrast to the community development of the 1970s, with its focus on grassroots democratic control, community organising’s issue-based aim to ‘get in, win a campaign and get out . . . in a strange way sometimes flatters politicians because it ultimately allows them to do a deal’ and demonstrate their power.
Liane Groves, one of two officers in Unite’s community support unit working nationally to get the scheme up and running, disavows comparisons with the big society, arguing that the union wants to build on the labour movement’s existing infrastructure. ‘It’s about collective solidarity and finding our solutions,’ she explains. ‘We really don’t want to start telling the community branches what to campaign on.’ In Sheffield, this ethos has been maintained, according to Richard Brown. ‘Unite has been really supportive so far, they’ve left it to us to ask what we want from the union. In the long‑term it’s a strength – it’s our union then.’
Key levers of power remain closed off to community branches, however. While members can vote for Unite’s general secretary, they are not permitted to elect representatives to the union’s executive board, a crucial means by which to influence the union’s rules and policy. Some of those policies may prove politically controversial. Unite is Labour’s largest funder, and its political strategy adopted in December 2011 explicitly aims to recruit 5,000 union members into the party within 12 months with the intent of ‘reclaiming Labour’ by ‘extending our influence’.
Regional political officers have been tasked with drawing up plans to drive forward this aim, subject to oversight by Unite’s national political committee, and the union will ‘ensure that our new community membership and branches are fully involved’. Commenting on the strategy, Liane Groves says, ‘We would hope that our members would engage with constituency Labour parties’, adding they wanted ‘to work together’.
At the launch of Manchester’s community branch, Alex Halligan acknowledged this was the ‘elephant in the room’, although as a party member himself he believed that boosting the number of union‑backed candidates was ‘a good thing’. In practical terms members cannot use the branches to oppose Labour Party candidates, although they are under no obligation to campaign for them and the event attracted a range of attendees from different political traditions and none.
There was sympathy at the meeting for working through political divisions. Tom Barlow, an organiser of the event, said he was ‘an avowed anarchist’ but ‘willing to work within structures and with anyone who wants to make this a positive thing’. One attendee, an unemployed person who said she had ‘not really been politically involved’ in the past, said ‘people are going to have to link up in fighting austerity . . . The rivalry in the left needs to break down.’
How sincere the union is in allowing community members to set the agenda if and when difficult issues are contested will be the test for the branches’ survival. To be powerful, the branches will need to offer a space for generating alternatives to austerity rather than simply a ‘resilience agenda’ that manages and minimises the impact of poverty on the vulnerable. If Unite’s community branches do survive, and prove a strong enough foundation to contribute to those alternatives, it will no less welcome for having been a long time coming.

Power and the people

What does ‘community organising’ really involve? And what might be its pitfalls? Community activist Ellie-Mae O’Hagan reflects
Community organisers believe in building relationships with institutions that already exist. They tap into existing networks of people in order to organise wider communities according to shared self-interest. Once those communities are organised, they can collectivise their power and mount a challenge to the government or the markets.
Community power is not something you have in isolation; it’s a relationship you build with those who share your inequality. Put bluntly, community organisers believe that the more power communities have, the more effectively they can win the war for power. For that reason, contemporary community organisers are not always overly discerning in terms of whom they form alliances with.
That may sound a tad cynical, and perhaps it is. But there’s no denying the successes of community organising. The most salient example in Britain is probably the Living Wage Campaign pioneered by community organisers London Citizens. The campaign calls for every worker in the country to earn enough to provide their family with the essentials of life – a ‘living wage’ set at £7.85 per hour in 2010.
Launched in 2001, by the end of the decade the campaign had persuaded more than 100 employers to pay the living wage, lifting 6,500 families out of working poverty. It succeeded by using a variety of strategies, from organising low-wage workers and wooing high-profile politicians to the public shaming of CEOs. Sir John Bond, executive chairman of HSBC, was left speechless when his cleaner Abdul Durrant stood up in the middle of an AGM and told him, ‘We work in the same office but we live in two different worlds.’
And yet, in my experience at least, community organising is not without its pitfalls. For one thing, the cynical approach to relationship building can sometimes lead to the formation of unholy alliances between organisers and the institutions that are arguably part of the problem.
Take, for example, Citizens UK (the national organisation of which London Citizens is a part) and its CitySafe campaign, which aims to make our streets safer. The campaign works by persuading businesses to become ‘CitySafe havens’, which offer sanctuary to young people in danger, report any crimes they see taking place and develop positive relationships with the local community. Citizens UK has approached numerous multinational companies with a presence on high streets to make the campaign a success, including the likes of McDonalds.
Although there’s no denying the benefits of reducing inner-city crime, a left-wing perspective sees that crime as a symptom of the inequality created by neoliberal capitalism, of which McDonalds is a particularly potent symbol. It’s worth asking, then, whether forming relationships with such organisations in order to alleviate a symptom of the inequality that they create places the community organiser in the position of being unable to criticise them. Indeed, do the communities that are being organised ever get to the point where they take on capitalist businesses as the perpetrators of inequality? Or do they simply see McDonalds as a benevolent company that will offer a sanctuary if young people are in trouble? When it comes to community organising, is a structural criticism of society possible, or simply a hindrance to your short-term goals?
This brings us to the second pitfall of community organising: the theory itself. London Citizens, the biggest alliance of community organisers in the UK, bases its work on the theory of three competing powers: the markets, the government and communities. This strikes me as flawed. The three powers are not competing; the markets are swallowing the government and crushing communities.
Despite the hazards of community organising, it’s a useful place from which to begin activism. The building of solid relationships and the understanding of one’s audience are vital principles for any activist wishing to communicate an important political message. There is a middle ground between ideological purism and arch pragmatism; and that’s where Unite’s decision to set up community membership becomes very interesting. Although Unite’s community membership will follow the pragmatic and inclusive principles of Saul Alinsky’s influential Rules for Radicals, it will do so while remaining loyal to the socialist values of trade unionism. Can community membership revolutionise not just communities, but community organising? Only time will tell.

Mind the pitfalls

Research on community union initiatives has highlighted a number of drawbacks and limitations, write Andrew Mathers and Graham Taylor, who research community unionism at the University of the West of England
There are serious and enduring institutional rivalries between trade union and community organisations based on a mismatch in organisational procedures and priorities. While trade unions are formally structured, community organisations tend to be looser and more ad hoc. These rivalries can reflect an imbalance of power and resources between unions and community groups.
Labour movement organisations tend to emerge as the dominant partners or leaders of ‘vanguard coalitions’, which tends to undermine the development of ‘common cause’ coalitions. ‘Community unionism’ may also lack a political ideology or, more specifically, an ‘ideology of labour’ premised on an independent and oppositional politics without which labour lacks coherence as a movement.
There is an essential ambiguity around the concept of ‘community’. It is used in at least three different ways in relation to community unionism: as a geographical space, as a shared set of interests and as a shared sense of identity. The tension between these diverse meanings highlights the complex nature of the relationship between ‘place’ and ‘space’ in labour movement politics.
The focus on community as ‘place’ leads to a rather static conception of community. This ignores the ways in which communities of interest and identity transcend space, and how solidarities (and divisions) traverse the global, regional, national and local levels. There has been a tendency to conflate the various meanings of ‘community’ into a one-dimensional focus on the ‘local’. While local community initiatives can increase the organisational capacity of trade unions, in an age of neoliberal globalisation they can also blind labour leaders and activists to the importance of building community alliances at the national, transnational and global levels.

Community democracy

Community activist James Holland looks to the development of new institutions from the existing grassroots
The aim of genuine local community organising is the creation of grassroots institutions unique to each area – what you might call ‘community democracy’. This is a delicate thing that can’t be pushed forward by an outside organisation using a ‘one size fits all’ political strategy, but only by very sensitive, flexible arms-length support.
Even when organisations superficially have hierarchical structures they often operate in a collective way. This is frequently at least partly due to the their small scale and the attitudes of the people involved. And while there may be very little discussion of what you might call formal ‘politics’, there is often a lot of common-sense understanding of how we can make things better ourselves from the bottom up and a healthy disrespect for authority, politicians and other power seekers.
There is also an acceptance that you have to start where you are and often work within the dominant structures and assumptions and with all kinds of people and institutions, if they are useful, to make the change you want. This must always be done with thought, care and often some discomfort – a perfect balance of idealism and pragmatism.
The people involved in this sort of organising have often been doing it for decades and have deep connections to the communities in which they work. Individuals can be found doing it in every neighbourhood. They need to work together more and start thinking of themselves collectively as legitimate institutions of real community democracy.
It may take people and organisations coming from outside, or with a slightly bigger, longer-term view, including possibly trade unions, to achieve this. But this will have to be gradual, respectful and take place through the individuals who are already part of the communities. If these grassroots institutions do start to gather confidence they could soon form a model that could really grow and spread.

State-sponsored cruelty

admin — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:15:20 +0000

Abolition of child immigration detention appeared close last year when a decade of campaigning by charities, medical practitioners, human rights lawyers and detainees led to Nick Clegg pledging in the coalition agreement to end what he called ‘state-sponsored cruelty’. Yet despite this promise, one year on the practice is continuing in a rebranded guise with a new, euphemistically-named ‘pre-departure accommodation’ centre.
To the shock of many, one of the UK’s major children’s charities, Barnardo’s, has been hired to run welfare and support services at the site. While Barnardo’s says it still supports an end to child detention, it has endorsed the facility, with chief executive Anne Marie Carrie claiming government reforms add up to ‘a system which has ambitions to be fundamentally different – which seeks to safeguard children and treat families and children with compassion’.
Despite government claims that the centre will be run on a ‘care model rather than a secure one’, families are to be detained there pending their imminent deportation. The site itself will be surrounded by a 2.5-metre perimeter fence with an extra internal barrier creating a ‘buffer’ between occupants and the outside world. It is to be ‘supervised at all times’, with ‘routine observation of all parts of the grounds’ and will be monitored by HM Inspectorate of Prisons. Families held there may be permitted short day trips during their stay, but only subject to strict supervision and individual risk assessments. Security will be provided by the multinational company G4S.
The facility is intended to hold nine families at a time for up to a week, although the UK Borders Agency says ‘stays will normally be limited to 72 hours’. Up to 4,445 children per year could be deported through the centre, according to calculations by Professor Heaven Crawley, director of the Centre for Migration Policy Research and former chief Home Office researcher, who wryly dubbed the site ‘not quite the end of detention anyone had in mind’.
Nevertheless Barnardo’s, which previously campaigned against child detention, argues its presence is necessary to aid the ‘most vulnerable’ families who ‘desperately need our support’. The charity states it will ‘not be afraid to speak out’ if detention becomes routine, a ‘revolving door’ for children, or if its workers ‘witness any member of staff not keeping a child’s welfare front of mind’.
Yet as former children’s commissioner Sir Al Aynsley-Green pointed out in his 2010 review of conditions at Yarl’s Wood, detention remains inherently ‘harmful to children and never likely to be in their best interests’. In March he further questioned how far Barnardo’s, reliant on service fees and grants for 75 per cent of its income, would be able to maintain its independence, asking ‘how will they do this when receiving government funding for their services?’
Many warn that the charity’s very presence will aid the government’s political agenda in falsely claiming it has ended child detention. Emma Gill, spokesperson for the campaign group Medical Justice, says: ‘The danger with Barnardo’s is they may give the impression to the public that it’s stopped, because they’ve spoken out against it in the past.’
Indeed, many elements of previous child detention policy remain. Raids to arrest families unwilling to move to the centre are still permitted as early as 6.30am according to UKBA operational guidance notes, despite the well-documented traumatic effects of dawn raids. For example, the recent Medical Justice report State Sponsored Cruelty found four out of five children involved with the study who had suffered dawn raids were ‘terrified’ by the experience, with reactions including ‘sobbing, weeping and hiding’.
Child detention doesn’t stop there either, with a slip by Green last March revealing that ‘high risk’ families will still in ‘rare’ cases be held at Tinsley House detention centre, whose family wing is undergoing a £1 million refurbishment. Not to mention the recent condemnation of Heathrow airport’s 24-hour holding centres, exempt from the requirement to end child detention, as ‘degrading’ and ‘unacceptable on grounds of humanity’ by government watchdogs.
With asylum seekers under increasing pressure as a result of changes to legal aid, a government committed to speeding up deportations and the countries of Europe increasingly determined to close their doors to refugees, hopes of a new ‘compassionate’ migration system may have to wait.

Big Society? Big deal

admin — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 23:30:26 +0000

The government says that its ambition is to shift ‘power away from central government to the local level – to citizens, communities and independent providers so they can play a role in shaping services’. In the October spending review last year, it set out its aim of working with these ‘independent providers’ to build ‘a society where everyone plays their part – the Big Society’.
David Cameron is often fond of painting this as a fresh and radical scheme to break the ‘big, giant state monopolies’. In reality, it was under New Labour that the industry of privatised services grew to be worth 6 per cent of GDP. A third of British public services are now contracted out to the euphemistically named ‘independent sector’, which as the spending review helpfully spelled out consists of both ‘social and private enterprises’.
Under the terms of the Big Society – not exactly a bottom-up process – small community groups are being pushed even more strongly than under New Labour to embrace this marketplace and ‘compete to deliver services’ by bidding for public sector contracts. But what is this industry they will be entering?
One example is the market in benefits, as represented by the lobbying group, the Employment Related Services Association (ERSA). ERSA describes itself as delivering ‘government and charitably funded services to help people achieve sustained employment’. Its members have a collective turnover of £700 million, or two thirds of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)’s annual spend. Yet although large national charities do have a presence, there are few if any local community groups involved. Instead, several of its members are large private companies, such as G4S, Reed and A4E, who stand to profit from further contracting out of welfare services.
Charities do have some market presence, although to put the rhetoric of community ownership in perspective, private contracting giant Serco’s annual £4 billion turnover alone is almost half the size of the total £9 billion in public sector contracts held by voluntary organisations, according to figures from the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO). Despite this, contracts are increasingly important as the lifeblood of many medium and large voluntary organisations, comprising just under two thirds of the government funds they received in 2007. Rather than facilitating community control of public services, competition has caused power to pass directly from the state to private businesses, with charities often subcontracting themselves to organisations run for profit.
A major factor in this is the increasing centralisation of contracts. Local government currently accounts for nearly half of all public funding for charities, but councils are being forced to slash costs by 7.1 per cent each year over the next four years to meet the government’s cuts. Funding for voluntary organisations is likely to prove a tempting target, undermining the ability of voluntary groups to access funds from local sources.
Central government is also consolidating its own contracts in order to ‘leverage the scale and buying power of the whole government’, in the words of Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude. Leaving aside the question of why contract out at all, it is a solution built around convenience to the state rather than the ability of local communities to own their own services. The narrowing of the market into prime and subcontractors has allowed companies to collude, leading a March 2010 report to the DWP select committee to denounce the practices of some prime contractors nominating one another as their own subcontractors as ‘a cartel’.
The Work Programme, a contractor-operated welfare-to-work scheme that will be introduced in summer 2011 and intended to become the main employment programme, is an example of this logic in action. Bidding is highly consolidated, with the country divided into 11 lots and between three and eight prime contractors permitted per lot. Few charities can hope to compete at this level and while some are merging into consortia, most will be subcontractors.
Cheap labour
Rather than being an empowerment, this arrangement sees charities often used as cheap labour. Terms for subcontractors are frequently exploitative, with a National Audit Office evaluation of a similar employment scheme – Pathways to Work – finding that subcontractors were often denied service fees to cover vital core costs and were paid a quarter less per job on average than prime contractors. Confidential feedback recently passed on to the London Voluntary Services Council (LVSC) from another London employment organisation highlighted the pressure many are under, warning how ‘some of our members . . . have even been asked to provide services free of charge as “they are charities after all.”’
In spite of these concerns, influential voluntary sector leaders have supported the entry into this industry. The amount of money entering the voluntary sector rose sharply under Labour, with the influx allowing many middle-income charities to close the income gap on their largest rivals, according to a recent Third Sector Research Centre (TRSC) study. Steve Bubb, head of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, praised this shift and said ‘our sector has become stronger and more professional. It has grown. These are good things.’
Yet this industry has largely bypassed community groups, organisations run and led by volunteers and operating on little to no money. Such groups make up the bulk of the sector, with the recent National Survey of Third Sector Organisations finding that almost 60 per cent of registered charities possess incomes of less than £25,000 a year and NCVO figures showing that 75 per cent of charities receive no government funds. The state is not irrelevant to them, though, as the ability to influence local decisions was ranked first in their priorities by the survey, an ability set to be undermined by local cuts and the outsourcing of services to national and multinational organisations.
Furthermore, the gap between community groups and larger voluntary organisations has grown, according to the TSRC. Such grass‑roots groups are the focus of the Big Society’s rhetoric, but in practice the focus is on contracts.
Grass-roots community groups often arise as a response to both government and market inadequacy, with a May 2010 TSRC working paper finding that most such groups saw themselves as an ‘important response to needs that were currently unmet either due to lack of resources, or the failure of the state and other agencies to identify or address need’ (see case study, next page).
Sceptical
Many in the community sector are sceptical of the relevance of the government’s schemes. Matt Scott, of the Community Sector Coalition, explains how ‘most groups don’t have any money in the first place and we’re not motivated by contracts. It seems strange to prioritise this when we’re independent of the state and the market.’ The government believes otherwise, hoping to entice them into delivering services through payment by results, the logic being that, in a free market, funds follow what works and enable local community groups to exploit their specialised knowledge to meet local needs and win bids.
This does not calm fears of the government guarding its right to determine which results it wishes to reward, enabling it to keep tight control while giving the illusion of empowerment. Some fear that non-profit groups will lose the right to set their own agendas. Andy Benson, of the National Coalition for Independent Action, argues that ‘the proper role of the voluntary and community sector in the 21st century is not to provide services for the state, it is to hold the state to account.’
State control may not be the only threat to the autonomy of voluntary groups, with indications emerging that the pressure to deliver contracts to businesses run for profit is subordinating some charities’ social goals. Feedback to the LVSC protested about the dangers of ‘effectively privatising’ some charities and reported of organisations ‘using charitable donations to subsidise contract income from prime contractors … where a charity brings additional resources to public service delivery this is to be applauded; when they do it to facilitate profiteering it is grotesque.’ Nevertheless, many contractors are confident of future good times. The National Outsourcing Association has predicted a ‘surge’ in opportunities as ‘the UK’s banking bailout will put pressure on public sector managers to cut costs.’ It is a lucrative market, with A4E and Reed estimating past profitability of between 5 and 10 per cent on government contracts.
In contrast to the benefit to businesses, many contracting charities will struggle in the face of public spending cuts, having been offered a relatively modest £100 million as part of a transition fund to help them sustain their contracts. The frequent blurring of the lines between the different interests and objectives of charities and ‘independent providers’ has prompted scepticism, with a 2006 report to the Public and Commercial Services Union arguing that ‘it suits the private sector providers to ally with the voluntary sector because it muddies the water about privatisation.’
A common industry term for charities is that they are the goose that laid the golden egg, offering a cheap and effective alternative to public services. One wisecrack doing the rounds lately has been that this goose is turning into a battery hen.

This article is the result of a collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University’s Community Audit and Evaluation Centre and the Manchester‑based Centre for Democratic Policy-Making