When Labour releases its manifesto on Thursday, all eyes will be on the policies, from high-speed broadband, scrapping prescription charges and ending tuition fees to free dental check-ups. What’s really interesting, though, isn’t the policies themselves but the principle that binds them: universal services.
Be it healthcare or access to the internet, the message that comes with these measures is one of collective politics – the notion that the state has a duty to provide top-rate services for all, and that a society is better when it pools resources to ensure no one misses out.
Predictably, it has come under fire from critics. “Why not throw in free Sky TV? Free iPhones? Netflix and Xboxes all round?” asked the former Labour MP Chris Leslie. Or, as the Times journalist Iain Martin put it in his aghast response to Labour’s broadband announcement last week: “Everything is horribly, brutally possible.”
The arguments against universal services are noticeably weak. Take the notion that wealthy Conservatives would prefer to pay for their own services out of concern for the poorest. Even progressives have questioned a strategy that, on the face of it, gives perks to the rich (I’ve been torn on whether free tuition would be better spent on equalising early-years education, for example), but this dilemma means little without a desire to invest money elsewhere.
I don’t recall many of the commentators outraged over high earners getting free antibiotics expressing concern when disabled people were having to choose between buying medicine and food. Indeed, those claiming the funds needed for universal services could be better spent on the poorest are typically the same people who eagerly supported austerity measures that have left many to live on a pittance.
Others point to how much blanket provision would cost. While it’s true there’s a considerable price tag to universal services, it saves money in a number of ways. Providing universal effective broadband will increase productivity, for example; free dental check-ups will save on hospital bills from the many people who can’t afford to visit dentists – the 515,000 patients who go to GPs or A&E with toothache cost the NHS more than £38m every year alone.
Besides, means-testing is notoriously ineffective and costly – why not spend all those resources on alleviating the problems themselves rather than gatekeeping who “deserves” help?
Underneath resistance to universal services sit certain assumptions that have long plagued British politics – ones that equate shrinking the state with common sense. The same social and economic orthodoxy that favours making large cuts during a recession contrary to evidence consistently presents means-testing – and privatising key services – as efficient. It suggests that “grownups” understand how politics is about accepting the unequal circumstances we find ourselves in and making minor tweaks where we can. A society where people have been forced to do DIY dentistry because they can;t afford to go to a registered dentist is, apparently, seen as the rational option.
In reality, universal programmes tend to be better precisely because they are used by the whole of society. When only marginalised people rely on a service, politicians can easily keep the quality low, whereas if the middle class has a stake in a service, standards are typically expected to be higher – and there is more fuss if they fall. Compare attitudes to the NHS with those to out-of-work disability benefits. Both are, in theory, similar: they provide support for people in times of bad health but receive very different treatment by the public, and subsequently politicians. While the NHS is typically seen as a “good service” that should be protected, out-of-work disability benefits – which are relied on by the poorest and disabled – can be cut or run terribly with widespread acceptance.
As the UK faces a general election after a decade of deep cuts to services, there couldn’t be a better time to question these ideas – to ask what life in one of the wealthiest nations on Earth should really be like. Whether financial or human, there is great value in investing in world-class health, education and technology that we build and use together. A politics that is defined by such universality is the real commonsense solution. It’s the secret that critics want to keep hidden: everything is hopefully, beautifully possible.
• Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist and author of Crippled: Austerity and the Demonisation of Disabled People
