This article first appeared in the December 2001 issue of Liberator magazine.

The inside front cover of this year’s Conference Agenda carried an advert from the NUT with the slogan “Education is for Children, not for Profit”. That is one view. The problem for Liberals is that it is a Socialist view.

Socialism is not something that many people will openly admit to these days, but readers of Liberator will remember that it is the political ideology of Socialism which was driven by the desire always and everywhere to prevent profit being made. It was Socialism which focussed not on outcomes – in this case, how good an education the pupil gets – but on the technical machinery which produces the outcome. For Socialism, the definition of a good system was one in which no-one – the capitalist, the exploiter, call him what you will – makes a profit out of it.

Fortunately, Liberalism has always taken a different view. We have focussed on empowering the individual, setting them free. In the context of education, for example, this surely means providing the individual with as good a schooling as possible. Who provides that service is a secondary consideration. The state’s job is to make sure they get it.

And, more than that, Liberals have often recognised that the private sector, and competition, can provide a better solution than the public sector. Take, for example, the issue of the Repeal of the Corn Laws in the mid-1840’s. British corn producers – ‘capitalists’, as Marx was soon to call them, or ‘big business’, as we might know them today, had taken the market captive. The public were being prevented by a cartel from obtaining food at a cheap, or market, price.

The solution of the Government which took office exactly a century later, in 1945, would have been to take over the corn-production sector itself, and for the state to deliver food directly to the population. But the solution which the Peelites – a key part of the Liberal intellectual ancestry – actually took was to recognise the state’s responsibility to provide affordable food, but to enforce proper competition among suppliers to deliver it. This, they believed, was the most effective way to provide the outcome which would be most appreciated by the poor.

This is the clear lesson from Liberalism for the current public-private debate.

First, we must be clear that what matters is the service to the public, not the mechanisms of production. The pupil, the patient, or the passenger is interested in getting a good service, not the precise employment status of the person who provides it.

And then we come to the question of how it is best provided. This is the point at which Blair mutters something about ‘no ideological barriers’ – in reality more of a description of Blair’s psyche than an intelligent Government’s thought-through approach to providing public services.

But Liberal Democrats can do better than that – we can be as ideological as we like in saying that pluralism, diversity and competition among providers produces better outcomes for the public. It is a matter of historical record that providers in the private sector, and with competition between them, have often provided better services than those in the public sector. Have Liberal Democrats ever advocated the nationalisation of every last school cleaner, every last taxi driver in the country? No – we have recognised that people employed by ‘private’ companies provide flexibility, value for money, and, above all, good services, which have a valid place in providing publicly-assured services.

Of course this does not mean we support the mythical Liberal creation of ‘laissez-faire’, or no role at all for Government. Government has, first of all, a duty to ensure universal service for traditional public services. In the same way that gas, water, energy and the Royal Mail are required to provide service to all, regardless of geography or wealth, good quality health, education and transport services for all must be assured by the state. Ensuring provision of services like these to all is the reason why we have given power of legislation to Government, and it is their duty to use it.

The Government has too a duty to ensure a level playing field between different providers. There have been some extraordinary stories of PFI deals with hidden dowries, and gravity-defying mathematics in comparisons between service provision by groups broadly in the private sector, and those broadly in the public sector. Clearly distorted comparison is not meaningful comparison.

The particular Government PPP schemes for the Tube and NATS have also brought a bad odour to the word ‘private’ in this context. But just because the first two apples you pick off the tree are rotten, it is not necessarily true that the whole tree is bad. There surely comes a point – after so many bad apples – when you must take a realistic view and condemn the whole tree. But for the moment, trying apples from, say, an entirely different part of the tree, is an approach which might bear, well, fruit.

And in other areas it has. The fact is that there are pupils being taught, patients being treated, Council tenants in housing, and prisoners incarcerated (ok – the last example is slightly less cuddly – but still essential!) in new and modern facilities which would simply not exist if they had not been built by private companies – people motivated – yes, ultimately, by profit.

The public sector tradition clearly has an awful lot to bring to this whole area. But so do the practices and instincts of other groups. The point is that we can try both, and see which provides the more palatable outcomes. Most of us can too think of our own examples of failures of private companies in providing traditional public sector services. But, with great respect, let anyone who has not at one time or another complained of grossly ineffective publicly-provided public services, cast the first stone. There can be distorted comparisons here too – if a service has failed to tackle poor performance year after year in the public sector, do not expect the private sector to turn it around overnight.

Education is not – unlike water, energy, and perhaps transport, mentioned above – a ‘natural monopoly’. If you don’t like a school for your children, there is enough diversity of provision – around 65,000 schools in the country at the last count – that you can usually choose another one. Certainly in metropolitan areas, the same applies to LEA’s.

The point is – do you really care that you prevent someone else’s enrichment so much that you are prepared directly to harm your child’s education – as the NUT demand? Unless you do, it is surely pretty difficult to defend the view that your child’s classroom can be best cleaned by somebody ‘privately’ employed, but that they can’t be taught by anyone tainted by the disfiguring miasma of any employer other than the state.

Liberals defending a state monopoly have forgotten what it is that we are trying to do.

The Government has made mistakes in involving the private sector in delivering public services, and of course we should criticise them for them. But let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater , as some in the party seem to want to do. One regional conference this autumn applauded someone for calling themselves “a socialist”. There was no future for Old Labour in being Old Labour, and there is no future for the Liberal Democrats in being Old Labour.

Pretending that history is not happening has never been the Liberal way. Turning whatever is happening to the purpose of producing the most liberating outcomes for all, has been, and should be now.