Neo-liberals don't die, they just amortise

While calm waves lap against the shingle of Felixstowe's pretty little beachfront, giant ships tower over the horizon, headed to every corner of the world and back again. Watching them glide from one side of the sea to another seems unreal, as though they belong to another world, the vast container port they've been visiting just an alien outpost tacked onto the end of a semi-retired resort. Surely, things shall continue much as they have always done?

If only it were so. The wake of those leviathans as they push on to the edge of vision has been problematic, throwing weird waters onto the seafront that were never expected. Now they're here, Felixstowe warps and changes. Millions of lorries pound the roads around it, clog up its arteries. Vast numbers work there and day in, day out, there is the constant noise of commercial distribution. Suddenly Britain seems to turn on the winds around Suffolk's coast.

And like the ships themselves, this change is damn near impossible to turn around. Recession will not make Felixstowe as it was, it won't tear down the massive metal cranes or empty the roads of their boxes of goods. Liverpool wont regain what it has lost and the new generation of dockers have not yet learned to make war like their scouse uncles. A downturn will not break this fortress of capital.

Neither will it slow the process of privatisation which has finally caught up with its school system, as two perfectly good comprehensives are merged into a 'villages within a super-school' model to provide that all-important excuse for private-sector involvement, despite widespread anger. It won't stop the closure of the community hospital, fondly known as Bart's, or its prime bit of real estate being sold off while private firms put take up the slack and impinge on the functions of the NHS.

Neither will the privatisation of the fire control system or the rolling back of full-time firefighting cover to the town stop, and the outsourcing of social care to private concerns. It certainly won't hold back the huge sums being ploughed into PFI road and rail schemes to keep them afloat now that the private money men have backed away. Plans to build new housing along the road to Ipswich, so that the town faces being swallowed by its larger neighbour, continue onwards.

By now, my sledgehammer tactics should have alerted you to something. I'm not just talking about Felixstowe. This is just one small town where the downturn has not meant the end of the grand neo-liberal project. It is certainly not the only one.

As I revealed in Freedom at the end of last year, much of the huge sum being borrowed and taxed for the budget could go into bailing out the private sector in faltering PFI projects. As I'm set to show in the next issue, the government's plans to bring the NHS into competition with the private sector are no less advanced. As has been roundly condemned by almost everyone except New Labour, Royal Mail is still looking as a partial sell off. And there has been no let-up in moves to divest the state of its schools commitments.

While the liberal and left press crow daily about the demise of neo-liberalism and the return of Keynes from the grave, the power brokers of Britain are quietly getting on with doing exactly what they have been doing for the last 20 years. They are privatising anything they can and shining up whatever they can't for a future sale. If we are to change the direction of our society during the deepest crisis in a generation, we must stop pretending that we're winning, and start considering the fact that at the moment, we are managing to lose when almost everything we predicted about the inability of neo-liberalism to deliver real wealth to the masses has come true.