the Secret History of Our Strets he recent BBC TV documentary series
depicted a virtual class history of six London streets over a 125 year period. A common story emerged of initial poverty and squalor being replaced by post war social democratic improvements, but then of forty years of working class displacement and loss of assets. The London street par excellence is Portland Road in Notting Hill. Here the class divide is laid bare, with one end of the street inhabited by the nouveau riche, bankers and hedge fund managers, the other by working class families yet to be priced out and ousted from their homes. Representatives of the top 1% of earners face the bottom 5%. In the programme's most telling moment a banker openly states that this is where the bailout money Capital circulating in the financial sector, bolstered by billions of pounds in bailouts from the public purse and redistributed in the form of bonuses and executive pay increases, is being sunk into property ownership. Effectively a process begun with the sell-off of council housing under Thatcher is culminating in an expansion of private property ownership for an elite few. If the finance sector can receive such hand-outs simply to enable it to continue its orgiastic excesses of bonuses, reckless speculation and wealth accumulation, why could not the same luxury at least be afforded to the NHS and a bailout of its disastrous PFI debt? Indeed are there parallels with what is now happening with NHS infrastructure and the effective public funding of private property expansion highlighted in Portland Road? Private Finance Initiative (PFI) was introduced by the Tory Government in 1992, but it underwent a massive expansion from 1997 as it was embraced by New Labour. Its basic premise is funding public sector infrastructure with initial outlay of private capital, and its purpose is ostensibly to write hefty budget spends off the books whilst maintaining capital spend in infrastructure. Private money finances public infrastructure which is subsequently owned by the private investor and leased back to the state over the lifetime of the PFI agreement. These contracts often have a lifespan of up to 30 years, tying public sector institutions into often unsustainable Of course any outlay of private capital will not come without an expectation of profit, institutions participating in PFI projects will 9