Spokesman Books

A new UN report mentions our colleague Dexter Whitfield, from his 2010 work Global Auction of Public Assets . The report, entitled Public-Private Partnerships and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: Fit for purpose? , references Dexter on page 1: 'Whitfield (2010) provided a survey of PPPs around the world, showing how the model has been adapted to the economic, political and legal environments of different countries in Europe, North America, Australia, Russia, China, India and Brazil. It also examined the growing secondary market in PPP investments, “buying and selling schools and hospitals like commodities in a global supermarket” (p. 183) as well as the increasing number of PPP failures, usually as a result of investors’ “miscalculations; states pick up the tab when they walk away”. It found cases of deceptive techniques of assessing value for money (VfM) and manipulations of risk transfer so that PPPs appear to out-perform traditional public provision...

Reviewed by Hugo Radice, University of Leeds, UK for Capital & Class Ten years ago, Dexter Whitfield's Public Services or Corporate Welfare? gave us the first detailed critique of the growing use of private resources to 'finance' public infrastructure projects. With Global Auction , he provides a comprehensive account of just how far and wide these forms of privatisation have now spread. A movement that seemingly began as a technical innovation in project financing now threatens to transfer the design and implementation of infrastructure projects entirely from public to private hands, with taxpayers and service users footing the bill. If this continues, the consequence will be to dramatically restrict the scope of democratic decision-making in this vital part of the economy, while simultaneously redistributing income from the poor to the rich. And as with so many innovations in the history of capitalism, successive UK governments have been the most enthusiastic pionee...