Book Review
SOME COMMON CONCERNS:
IMAGINING BP’S AZERBAIJAN-GEORGIA-TURKEY PIPELINES SYSTEM
PLATFORM, The Corner House, Friends of the Earth, Campagna per la Riforma della Banca Mondiale, CEE Bankwatch, Kurdish Human Rights Project.

This is an excellent exploration, focused on the AGT pipelines system, but also more generally about BP - a thoroughly deserving target for an in-depth study of corporate behaviour. The oil and gas pipelines proposed by BP and nine other companies would run for 1087 miles from terminals near the Caspian Sea, through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Eastern Turkey, ending at the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean, passing close to or directly through seven conflict zones on the way. The likely problems with the project include the exacerbation of climate change, seismic activity, an increase in corruption, human rights abuses and increased militarisation of the route, exacerbation of conflict, and the threat of explosions and leaks. Being used to breakneck-speed bullet-pointed horror stories about large infrastructural projects, at first I found myself chivvying this fascinating book along to reveal its key points. I rapidly became ashamed of my consumer-style expectation of instant gratification, though, and began to feel the strands of the story coming together. The gradual unfolding of the narrative about the pipelines is essential in order to understand the magnitude of this project and for the likely problems to be fully dealt with. Since the pipelines haven’t been built yet, it’s a particular strength of the book that the likely effects of the project are explored in an extremely thorough and well-grounded way, which, as the book sets out to do, does indeed allow the reader to ‘imagine’ the pipelines system, without ever seeming speculative or far-fetched. If you think that a whole book about pipelines sounds excessive, think again. The magnitude, both of the physical scale of the project and of its likely effects, means that nothing smaller will do it justice. It’s also much more than a pipeline project: it’s a story about people, places and politics, which kept me gripped from start to finish. As a story, it has everything: action, war, intrigue, natural disasters, corruption, baddies... the only thing missing is the hero who stops the project going ahead. So, what are we waiting for?
Pippa Gallop

The PRIVATE sector

Review
PFI vs. Democracy, Melanie MacFadyean and David Rowland, Menard Press, 2002

Three pamphlets
‘The case of Birmingham’s hospitals’ ISBN 874320 31 4 £5
‘School governors and the Haringey Schools PFI scheme’ ISBN 874320 32 2 £5
‘Selling off the twilight years: the transfer of Birmingham’s homes for older people’ ISBN 874320 33 0 £5

This series of pamphlets offers case studies which critique the implementation of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and similar schemes. The pamphlets do not focus on the internal issues of cost effectiveness, excessive profits for private companies and risk transfer, because, as the Foreword to the series notes, ‘the government steadfastly refuses to enter into the debate’. Instead, they address the impact of private finance on local democracy, looking at the wider questions of public accountability and participation in the planning process for PFI and similar projects.
Each of the case studies looks at a particular scheme and the experience of a local group which attempted to question it. The key issues in each case vary: school governors concerned at having repair and maintenance budgets committed 25 years in advance, with possible negative effects on funds for other areas; a Community Health Council concerned about bed numbers and service provision; care home residents’ families concerned about care standards and accountability under the Human Rights Act, which would not apply to a private care provider as it would to a council.
In each case, the groups were faced with concealment (as when the crucial Best Value Review of care homes, which showed council provision beating private sector provision on every criterion but cost, was kept secret until leaked by a sympathetic councillor); deliberately confusing information (when they finally got information on the project, Haringey school governors were bombarded with higher mathematics and technical information even professionals among them described as ‘gobbledegook’) and attacks on their own legitimacy (the chairman of the NHS Regional Health Executive told Community Health Council members they should resign if they could not support PFI, ‘the CHC must work within government policy not dispute it’ – although the CHC is supposed to be an independent scrutiny body).
These pamphlets document the creeping corruption of local authorities by bad policy imposed from above. The officials themselves cannot bear the full responsibility – they are told that PFI is the only option – so the only way they can even attempt to provide services is by sacrificing local democratic accountability, hoodwinking concerned stakeholders and kowtowing to developers.
In general, this series of pamphlets is very accessible: the profusion of people and acronyms is sometimes confusing, but the processes are explained in a way that should be clear to readers without prior knowledge of the system. This level of detailed analysis and critique of private finance is enormously valuable and has been needed for a long time: PFI has largely slipped in on a piecemeal local basis with little discussion or understanding, let alone national debate. To be even better, these pamphlets should have appeared as a series of articles in the mainstream press two or three years ago, monitoring these schemes as they happened, to inform and strengthen national opposition to PFI. That is scarcely the authors’ fault, however, so the best we can do is to make use of them now.