The two finance ideas that New Labour brought to us when they came to power are actually two ways for the private sector to get very rich from the taxpayer in the long term. If you have had a new hospital or school built near you in the first ten years of Labour's administration, it has probably come about thanks to either the Public Private Partnership (PPP) or the Private Finance Initiative (PFI).
In a nutshell, both of these schemes persuade the private sector to pay up front for the new facilities and then rent them back to the state on a long lease with a huge inbuilt profit margin. In forty years time when the deal has been paid off, the private companies or individuals involved will have made billions from the public purse.
So you need a new hospital? Let us get somebody else to cover the building costs and we will pay them back later. Smart idea you think? If you were going out to buy a house, I am pretty sure that you would not take out a mortgage on the terms being offered by the private sector. No doubt some of our political leaders will be looking forward to lucrative non-executive directorships with some of the big players participating in this swindle.
So you need a new school? Not only can we get somebody else to pick up the initial bill, but we can persuade various interest groups, such as religions, to get involved so that they can have a say in what your children are taught. If you thought that Christian fundamentalism was a disease of the Americans, you ought to look at some of the names that are funding the new city academies, etc. Even Britain's well-known religious institutions, such as the Church of England, are getting in on the act.
The first ten years of new Labour's government have seen public borrowing increase as investment in "education, education, education" and the National Health Service has been partly funded at the expense of future generations. As both PFI and PPP are effectively public sector borrowing this hidden debt will not appear in the Treasury's Public Sector Borrowing Requirement statistics, even though it still is the taxpayer's debt.