Documents why austerity failed and its disastrous economic and social effects in Europe and North America and highlights why Australia should not adopt these policies. Government debt continued to increase, reduced demand intensified the recession, negative or weak growth prevailed and the private sector failed to invest. The cost of lost output, reduced wealth, mass…

Your Choice Barnet Ltd (YCB), planned to make £2m profit over a four-year period from residents with physical disabilities and learning difficulties to subsidize London Borough of Barnet taxpayers. It is, as predicted, in financial crisis. This analysis for the Campaign Against the Destruction of Disabled Support Services (CADDSS) exposes the scale of the company’s…

Review by Dexter Whitfield of European Welfare States after the Crisis: Changing Public Attitudes (by Policy Network, Institute for Public Policy Research and The Foundation for European Progressive Studies) in The Spokesman, No. 120, May, 2013 – http://www.spokesmanbooks.com. The paper does not recognise the financialisation, personalisation, marketisation and privatisation of public services and the welfare…

http://climatemarkets.org is a collaborative project of the Institute for Policy Studies, Washington DC and the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America. It sets out to understand what climate change means for the financial sector, and what financial sector involvement means for the funding of climate change projects. Reader covers financial trends, private sector actors, international financial…

Twenty years on from the introduction of the private finance initiative (PFI), Dexter Whitfield examines the effect it has had – and how it’s set to get worse under new Tory plans (PF2) – Red Pepper, Feb/Mar 2013, Issue 188, pages 16 – 18. http://www.redpepper.org.uk/fingers-in-the-pfi/

The Posted Workers Enforcement Directive and the ‘Monti II’ Regulation: The temporary posting of workers to a member state other than that to which they are based has brought together a complex set of social, economic and regulatory issues within EU law. This paper examines the conflicts of free movement and social rights and the…

The average annual return on the sale of equity in UK PPP project companies was 29% between 1998-2012 – twice the 12%-15% rate of return in PPP business cases at financial close of projects. The excess profit could be £2.65bn, all of which benefits private sector companies. This report exposes the real level of profiteering…

A paper written for Studies in Social Services, Li Bing, Vice Professor, Department of Sociology, Beijing Administrative College, China. Social services are at the forefront of the continued neoliberal transformation of public services and the welfare state in the UK. The paper applies the In Place of Austerity framework to examine the changes in social…