When Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, his party faced a public sector that had endured two particular problems, one relatively recent, the other longerterm and thus deeper-rooted. The more recent problem had been the decade of stringent financial constraints imposed as part of the austerity programme implemented by the Conservatives since 2010, to tackle the economic problems accruing from the 2008 financial crash. As the public sector consumed the vast majority of government expenditure, it naturally bore the brunt of cuts intended to reduce the fiscal deficit and borrowing. Of course, the Conservatives could have raised taxes in order to pay off some of the deficit and/ or sustain public services, but this option – apart from increasing VAT (a regressive tax) from 18 to 20 per cent – was largely rejected on ideological grounds. Indeed, the post-2010 Conservative governments actually cut the top rate of income tax from 50 to 45 per cent and reduced corporation tax, suggesting by their actions, rather than their words, that “we were most certainly not all in it together”.

The longer-term and deeper-rooted problem endured by the public sector since the late 1980s has been the dual processes of “marketization” and “managerialism” introduced by the Thatcher and Major governments, but zealously continued and extended by the Blair and Brown governments, and then consolidated, under the auspices of austerity, by the post-2010 Conservative-led governments. Marketization compelled public services either to incorporate private sector principles and practices – through the adoption of “business models”, “internal markets” and enforced competition, both within and between, public sector institutions, with funding often linked to success in competing against “rival” institutions (and thus imitating the profit motive) – or to “contract-out” some of their activities to the private sector. The latter reflected the neoliberal– Thatcherite premise that the private sector was inherently superior to the public sector because of competition driving up standards, and the need to make a profit in order to survive, which could only be achieved by attracting and retaining enough customers, rather than relying on guaranteed annual taxpayers’ subsidies to monopolistic services which were deemed to lack incentives to improve their performance.