Following the 9/11 Twin Towers events, a Ms Jo Moore, spin doctor extraordinaire, suggested to the then Labour government that it was a good moment to bury bad news. She had to quit but not before doing the public a great (if unintended) service. She spilt the beans about the way those in power manipulate information. Given the hoo-ha created around the recent UK riots, it is important not to get distracted from the deep and ruthless structural changes being introduced, and not just in the UK, by the prevailing economic system. Those trying to understand the deep causes of the riots refer to these changes but the Media is now so busy with dramatic developments – no silly season *this* year! – that the ongoing onslaught on public services goes unreported, or gets relegated to the back of the queue.
Let us see, for example, more of the “burying bad news” affair denounced by Max Pemberton, a doctor journalist writing for [The Telegraph](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthadvice/maxpemberton/8655242/The-day-they-signed-the-death-warrant-for-the-NHS.html) on 25 Jul 2011: “You might think that historians will record last Tuesday as the day the Murdoch empire was brought to book by MPs. Yet I suspect that in years to come, they will realise the significance of that day, not for the phone hacking scandal but for the health service.
While the nation’s attention was focused on the most powerful man in the media attempting to dodge questions and cream pies, this was a good day to bury bad news. And the Department of Health duly obliged.
Andrew Lansley [UK Secretary of State for Health] explained that from April next year, eight NHS services worth £1 billion, including musculoskeletal services for back pain, wheelchair services for children and adult community psychological therapies, will be opened up to competitive bids from the private sector.… the [Health and Social Care] Bill, which almost exclusively focuses on opening up the NHS to private providers. The Bill is written in dense legal terminology, making any detailed analysis time-consuming and difficult.
But anyone who does study it will find little more than a road map for destroying the NHS, turning it into a cash cow for the corporate sector. The focus is on transforming public sector provision into an entirely market-led system, throwing open every service to private providers”.
On another subject, the almighty markets have responded badly to the announcement that the EU is about to introduce some form of Tobin Tax, that is, a tax on speculative transactions. This has received other names, in the UK there is a campaign for the Robin Hood Tax, and it has been also called the CTT when it refers exclusively to currency transactions tax. What is not widely explained as column inches get filled with more “exciting news” is that speculation is precisely what has got the present system into trouble, it has created the highest concentration of wealth in human history, it created the “subprime” crisis, and is now responsible for the high food prices driving a crisis of hunger in vast parts of the world. Although biofuels have been blamed for high food prices – and Obama’s initiative to invest in biofuels derived from woodchip and corn cobs rather that edible foodstuffs is to be welcomed – the role of speculation in food prices has been neglected.
An EU-World Bank analysis of the causes of the 2007-2008 food price crisis blamed energy prices and financial speculators for the hikes, downplaying the role of biofuels and increased demand in developing countries. Further analysis of the role of speculation on food prices have been published: [EurActive](http://www.euractiv.com/en/cap/energy-prices-speculation-blame-recent-food-price-hike-says-world-bank-news-497158), [The Guardian]( http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/jan/23/food-speculation-banks-hunger-poverty), [The Independent](http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-goldman-gambled-on-starvation-2016088.html), and the outstandingly clear [Video](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpM9XxJ-vo4) in Youtube. The World Development Movement is running a [campaign]( http://www.wdm.org.uk/stop-bankers-betting-food/regulate-food-speculation) on the subject but the need to eliminate speculation altogether from the economic system is not much discussed.
The list of quietly introduced changes would be too long to include in one article. People feel their effects in everyday life, but the variety of attacks on their wellbeing is so diverse that they cannot give coherent responses. Now the punishment introduced for rioting is for the whole family of the rioter to be evicted, loss of benefits, long custodial sentences for ridiculously small offences. No doubt the three days of rioting will be used to keep covering up other fundamental changes, which will make future rioting more likely. And yet the possibility of giving a structural response to the changes in the system seems to be hampered by the great success of the neoliberal agenda: to fragment and atomize society.
We are starting to see some positive developments amongst the young with inclusive non-partisan and non-violent mobilisations in many different countries. The human spirit is reawakening; let us hope it does not get distracted.
