Quacking like a dead duck

So, despite Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude's attempt to quack like a supporter of co-operative solutions, his duck-walk is recognisable as marching in step to a tune played by big business.

When he urges public-sector workers to form co-operatives to take over and run their services in a spirit of mutualism, his intention is to undermine public services not to enhance them.

If, as Maude insists, "pent-up ideas and innovation" are rife within the public sector, there must be ways of harnessing such inspiration to improve services.

Such "pent-up ideas and innovation" exist in private business and, once again, it makes sense to utilise them, but neither Maude nor any other government minister would suggest that new mutualised models should replace existing companies.

It is no secret why this Tory minister wants to mutualise the public sector and leave the private sector unchanged.

He is ideologically committed to a slimmed-down state with free rein for big business to build up its profits, not least by privatisation of the public sector.

His quaint idea that public services are unique in being weighed down by bureaucracy ignores the fact that every large organisation or business has to have an administrative framework to facilitate service delivery.

In fact, when public services such as the NHS have been penetrated by the private sector through marketisation, bureaucracy has expanded exponentially.

Maude's phoney mutualisation model for the public sector has already been tried in the area of social work concerning children and it has manifestly failed.

Breaking up services into bite-sized mutualised morcels will leave staff unsupported and inadequately financed, opening the way to small co-operatives either going bankrupt or being swallowed by rapacious private companies that have targeted public services as an area for expansion.

The Con-Dem coalition is intrinsically hostile to the public sector because of its adherence to neoliberalism.

And it is able to take advantage of the current budget deficit - caused by the adventurism of the private banking sector - to indulge its ideological convictions by attacking the public sector and the living conditions of working people and the poor.

The Tories and Liberal Democrats are shedding crocodile tears about the predicament of the least well off in society, but in reality they couldn't give a damn.

Their priority is private profits and they will not allow human need or compassion to get in the way of corporate profitability.

Despite Maude's oily flattery of public-service workers' "pent-up ideas and innovation," neither workers nor those who use their services have been clamouring for a change of service delivery model.

They recognise that there are problems in the public sector, not least the tendency of governments, especially this one, to restrict the cash available to it.

So, when they examine what lies behind the mutualisation quack-quack, they will see the reality that the Con-Dem free-marketeers are intent on trimming still further the cash available to essential public services.

The public sector has bitter memories of previous governments obsessions with privatisation and cuts in public spending.

After giving these coalition plans a quick but detailed going-over, they will reach the correct conclusion that this mutualisation charade is just a dead duck.