When a government decides policy in line with decisions made by consulting the public and in line with the opinion of that public, you could say that you have some form of democracy. However, when government policy is guided after consultations with those with vested interests in policy that is contrary to the wishes of the public, then it is safe to say that democracy is an illusion and the government and those vested interests are working in unison against the public interest. That's where we are at at the moment.
The following is an extract from SCOTTISH LEFT REVIEW:
Read the full article HERE:Another story that stuck in my mind: in 2006-07 the then Scottish Executive policy was to keep Scottish Water in public hands (with a bit of an open mind on the question of mutualisation). The Water Industry Commission for Scotland is a Non-Departmental Public Body (quango) with the role of regulating the publicly-owned Scottish Water. It’s Chief Executive then was Alan Sutherland. That year WICS privately commissioned a London-based consultancy to ‘consider different options of ownership for Scottish Water’ (against government policy). They called this ‘Project Checkers’ (perhaps because this game is about ‘capturing’ passive opponents) and kept it completely secret – it was never published. The project cost £209,000 of public money. Of this £17,606.00 went to a non-executive director of two private water companies owned by the world’s biggest transnational water corporation which would clearly benefit from privatisation. The report concluded that privatisation was the way forward.That story again; a senior civil servant (effectively) who is there to implement government policy decides to use public money to build a case to lobby against government policy and does so by employing (at significant public expense) someone with a very clear commercial conflict of interests, producing the only outcome that was possible given the methodology used – a plea for another giant handover of a profitable public asset to the private sector.
