Donating for no reward provides a warm glow, but pay for it – or profit from it – and that glow disappears
Fulfilling his constitutional duty to puncture the pomp of Queen's speech day, Dennis Skinner last week responded to Black Rod's command to attend to Her Majesty, with the cat call "Royal Mail for sale. Queen's head privatised". The pending disposal was once unthinkable. Britain's most determined denationaliser, Margaret Thatcher, once said that the "royal" tag made her hesitate to order a mail sale.
Braver hearts on the left imagine that the financial crisis is drawing a line under the post-1970s neoliberal agenda, just as the oil shocks did for the Keynesian-corporatist consensus that went before. But the privatisation element of that agenda is rolling forward as if nothing has changed. In the US, Barack Obama's budget proposal floated the sale of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a symbolic utility since Roosevelt signed it into law as part of the battle against a previous depression. In the UK, the few remaining public industries are overseen by the so-called Shareholder Executive, a team of officials disproportionately recruited from the City to work to a commercial remit. The new boss, Mark Russell, formerly of KPMG, does not disguise his desire to put himself out of a job by selling everything off: "We don't believe government makes a particularly good shareholder." The Land Registry, the Met Office and Ordnance Survey are all in his sights, while – despite strong opposition registered in the polls– the chancellor seems bent on an early sale of the public's forcibly aquired stake in RBS, even if this incurs a loss.
But one pending sale particularly chills the blood. Plasma Resources UK was set up after a bout of deregulation in another sector, cattle feed, gave rise to mad cows and variant CJD, and so meant certain blood-based products could no longer be safely sourced from British donors. The outfit buys American plasma, and supplies it to the NHS as well as exploiting various derivatives globally. Lucy Reynolds of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine writes of infection risks, including HIV and hepatitis, that the profit motive could encourage plasma collectors to run. Sufficiently smart regulation might over-ride these dangers – so long as it can be devised.
Blood donation is a classic case study for behavioural economists. Donating for no reward provides a warm glow, but pay for it – or profit from it – and that glow disappears. Donations from the healthiest can dry up, while blood flows in from cash-strapped addicts and others. Plasma Resources' sale does not directly subvert British donations, but it could retard the World Health Organisation-endorsed objective of national self sufficiency, a goal that gives the best chance of keeping blood and money apart. It is the kind of point Whitehall's "nudge unit" might have made – had it not recently been put on the market.