The UK’s health and social services have become tools of surveillance and control, with working class women the most vulnerable to state intervention. Madame Tlank reviews the State’s policies, targets and pilot-projects and uncovers the warped logic and fragmentary effects of marketised welfare

Private Eye looks back at the birth of PFI and makes a not-so-surprising discovery.

A reader alerts the Eye to a 1940s history of Benito Mussolini, uncovered by a US think tank, and makes an unkind comparison with Gordon Brown's current favourite policy.  
   
More strapped for cash than Brown ever was, "Mussolini resorted to a subterfuge to pay contractors without increasing his budget.  He would make a contract with a private firm to build certain roads or buildings.  He would pay no money but sign an agreement to pay for the work on a yeraly instalment plan.  No money was paid out by the government.  And hence nothing showed up in the budget.
    Actually the government had contracted a debt just as much as if it had issued a bond.  But because no money passed, the whole transaction was omitted from the country's books.  However, after making such a contract, each year the government had to find the money to pay the yearly instalments which ran from ten to fifty years.
    In time, as the number of such contracts increased, the number and amount of the yearly payments grew.  By 1932 he had obligated the state for 75 billion lire of such contracts.  The yearly payments ran to billions.  What he did by these means was to conceal from the people the fact that he was plunging the nation ever deeper into debt."
   The author, American John T. Flynn, added in a footnote: "For a full and interesting discussion of this wierd chapter in fiscal policy see 'Twelve years of fascist finance', by Dr Gaetano Salvemini, 1935".  So yes: the private finance initiative, cornerstone of 'eleven years of Brownite finance', was in fact one of Il Duce's barmier ideas.

From Private Eye, the otherwise barely-reported story of the recent Treasury paper underlying the UK government's renewed commitment to more! bigger! better! PFI, which draws on the 'analysis' of PFI fee-farmers PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG etc.

On March 26 a Financial Times 'Lex' columnist wrote:
"Happily for nuclear power, there are new bogeymen in town.  Flatulent cows and coal fires are heating up the planet, while autocratic regimes seem to control most of the fossil fuel reserves.  As democratic Canada and Australia sit on plenty of uranium, and nuclear power generation is relatively clean once the plants are up and running, the industry seems set to make a comeback. [...] Russia announced this month that it expects to build as many as 42 new domestic reactors by 2030, compared with the 31 it is running now.  Its nuclear holding company, Rosatom, created in another fit of state-led industrial reorganisation, hopes to export another 60.  Some of these will go to China, which has 11 reactors in operation and five in construction.  The plan is to increase Chinese nuclear generation capacity fivefold by 2020, and then triple that by 2030.  In the US, plans for 30 new plants have been announced, and several developed countries are eyeing the replacement of similar reactors.
   So a burst of activity similar to the 1980s, when building work on half of the world's 438 nuclear power stations began, seems likely over the next two decades..."
    All of which makes now seem like a good moment to return to this 1986  article from German Wildcat (http://www.wildcat-www.de/), which argues that nuclear expansion was never just an 'energy' question: rather it has always played a key role in the restructuring (i.e. casualization, contracting-out, 'precarization', as it's now known) of labour on a  geographical and technological basis.  The article gives a concrete account of how this worked and how it was resisted last time round in Europe.  The analysis of work in a construction boom based on outsourced casual labour is obviously pertinent right now; as for state-initiated, privately implemented nuclear projects, it looks like the implications could be seen soon on a much bigger scale in Russia and China.