Private Agenda / Public Space |
Lorenzo Mele |
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The Artistic Director of 7.84 Theatre explains the political ethos behind the company's latest touring production, Private Agenda. Private Agenda grew out of a desire to examine the state of public services after seven years of a Labour government in Westminster and five years of a coalition government in Edinburgh. Private Agenda focuses on health and education, though there are many other areas of discussion and dispute that could also have been involved, such as the firefighters, nursery nurses, council housing stock transfers or public transport. Private Agenda has been created using only the words of real people working or campaigning in our public services today. As I interviewed frontline workers, the use of Private Finance Initiatives to build a new health and education infrastructure emerged as the dominant issue people wanted to talk about. What on the surface might simply seem like a funding mechanism impacts directly on the quality and delivery of those services. The Skye Bridge was the very first PFI project in the UK and the controversial price of the tolls has been attributed to it being owned by a private company. The now discredited tolls and the promise to have them removed by the end of 2004, is testament to the struggle of the local campaigners. The second part of the play is called Public Space. 7:84 have invited guests to be part of a discussion about your local public services. This is your opportunity to hear first hand the developments for your local schools or hospitals. You can become involved in your local community and you can make a difference.
"Taxation is unpopular, taxation sometimes leads to Governments
being voted out, but if they're sensible that in the long-term is the
way forward. If you compare the taxation system in Britain with Scandinavian
countries, which we look on their education systems with awe, we need
schools like that. You know, teaching conditions like that. I wish we
had a society with as little diversity, you know, in terms of what people
have and what people are capable of doing. I mean, this is a personal
opinion, very much, but we have an elite and we've got an underclass.
Now, I've travelled a little bit in Scandinavia and I don't think there's
much of an underclass if there's any there. And the elite are not an elite
in the same way as they are here, in terms of, you know, their earnings
compared to the average earnings. And that diversity I think is, you know,
caused by the fact that we don't have the social systems in to prevent
these things happening. Obviously, I'm in teaching because I believe through
teaching we can sort of try to address these things. To get children to
a situation where, when given opportunities, they can grasp them." " the whole principle of PFI and PPP is that it was originally designed
for transport and roads because there was the expectation that you would
have a user charge...A toll, like the Skye Road Bridge. Once upon a time
you would have had the people of London cross-subsidising the people of
Skye, just as they cross-subsidise the London Underground. … you
had the idea of risk pooling. Now the Government's broken that link. The
idea of collectivism has gone completely. Collective welfare is when you
spread all the risks and costs of education and health - all the basics
things that you thought important for society" "The Belford in Fort William would have ended up as a day time hours,
eight till eight, GP-led, nurse hospital. No emergency cover. If you fell
on the High Street and broke your leg and it was a serious fracture, you
were going to trundle all the way up to Inverness or all the way down
to Glasgow in the back of an ambulance. The Broadford is the hospital
on Skye, which was exactly the same as this, and it was downgraded. Now,
obviously, there was promises made at that. Recently, we've had a stark
reminder where it took a lady who had lost her child seven hours to get
from Portree to Inverness. Things … don't go smoothly. Erm, …
my own thought is to get the health minister to travel in the back of
an ambulance from Fort William to Glasgow. Hitting every pothole. (Laughter.)" Directed by Lorenzo Mele and featuring Tom Freeman (Romeo and Juliet),
Anita Vettesse (Educating Rita) and Keith Macpherson (The Trial - how
new labour purged George Galloway), Private agenda is the voice of our
public services, a voice that has gone unheard. Until now.
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