Come election time and politicians’ promises fly thick as clouds of swifts. Imagine if a candidate aiming for high office were to promise at the hustings – after the usual guff about government not interfering with ordinary people’s lives, of course – that their party also intended to keep its distance from providing public services and would strip those that remained to the bone. Political suicide, one might think.
Yet after decades of an ideological war on the public sphere, when tirades against ‘big government’ are shorthand for the privatization and marketization of the vital goods and services that governments would normally be expected to provide, such a claim would not be far from the truth.
