Tendring Topics......on Line

‘Securicor’ to G4S

            In the distant days of the late 1940s, World War II was an all-too-recent memory. My wife and I had married in 1946 and  had not yet started our family. Tony Blair was unborn and New Labour undreamt of.  In politics Left was Left and Right was Right, and Kingsley Martin was Editor of The New Statesman, the leading journal of the ‘intellectual left’.  I was one of its avid readers, on one occasion winning first prize (I think it was all of £5!) in the weekly literary competition.  It was a proud moment.

            The content of one article that I read in the NS at that time has stuck in my memory.  It warned of the danger of private armies growing, competing with, and possibly supplanting, the country’s armed forces and police forces,  ‘Securicor’ was mentioned, a firm of which, at that time, I had never heard.

            I wonder what the author of that article would have said had anyone told him that some sixty years later, Securicor (then providing uniformed protection for cash transfers from banks and similar security operations) would have evolved into G4S an enormous international organisation with its base in Britain but its tentacles world-wide.

              Most people in Britain today probably know of G4S only as the private security firm that signally failed to fulfil a £300 million contact with the government (that actually means with us, the tax payers!) to provide security cover for the London Olympics. They admitted their inability to honour their promises when it was too late to set things right except by dragging soldiers, on leave and war-weary from Afghanistan, and police officers from off their beats, to take their place.   They then had the nerve to demand a £57 million  management fee!

            That is what everybody knows.  What I have learned quite recently, largely from an article by Clare Sambrook in the Friend, a Quaker weekly journal (though I have since confirmed the accuracy of its content on the internet), is that G4S is an international organisation based in the UK now employing 657,000 people in 125 countries!

 ‘Company employees protect oil, gas and mining companies all over the world.   They have served the Israeli prisons service and businesses in the Occupied Territories. For G4S the Arab Spring’s popular uprisings seemed more about business opportunity than democracy.  Last year their executives told shareholders that civil unrest had sparked a rising demand for private security services. In Egypt and Bahrain G4S gained visibility among government heads of security and built the brand.  In Saudi Arabia the company’s support for the regime during popular protests earned local staff, by royal decree, a two-month bonus’.

Clare Sambrook writes that here in the UK, where G4S is based, the company is a leading beneficiary of outsourcing – the transfer of government functions and service provision to the private sector.  Its success is helped by an ability to nurture cosy relationships with ministers and civil servants.  In this year alone G4S will receive more than £1 billion in long-term contracts with the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Department of Work and Pensions and local Police Authorities!

In Britain G4S activities include building and managing prisons, running children’s homes, monitoring tagged offenders, training magistrates and reclassifying benefits claimants.  Lincolnshire is the scene of one of G4S’ most comprehensive outsourcing triumphs.  In that county, they are managing custody suites for the police, dealing with both routine and emergency phone calls and are in charge of firearms licensing and court protection.  They have been commissioned to build and run Britain’s first for-profit police station and they stamp their corporate logo on police staff uniforms!

Simon Reed, vice-chairman of the Police Federation says of ‘out-sourcing’ what I have said over and over again in this blog:  The bottom line is that the priority for private companies will always be shareholders and profit margins.   That is why we have voiced real concerns about the future negative impact of public safety if the government’s drive to privatise mass swathes of policing comes into fruition………..it is very clear that these private contracts are built upon an expectation that the public sector will step in to pick up the pieces if private industry fails to deliver.

When that prophetic New Statesman journalist in the late 1940s warned about Securicor and similar organisations ultimately rivalling and coming into conflict with the police he could hardly have imagined that nearly seventy years later Securicor’s successor would be slowly taking over not only the police but large amounts of Britain’s other vital public services.  Nor that they would be doing so with the connivance of a government blinded by its obsession that private enterprise is always better than public service – a proposition that has been demonstrated time and time again to be untrue.

The Olympic Legacy

          The United Kingdom’s summer of almost unbelievable sporting success is over.  It began with the winning by a British cyclist (for the first time ever) of the Tour de France!   Hot on its heels came the Olympics, which began with an opening ceremony that was acclaimed world-wide, and continued with day after day of successful and extremely watchable, athletic and sporting events from which Great Britain harvested an unprecedented crop of medals.  Although we came third in the ‘medals table’, if we take populations of the leading countries into consideration, we were ahead of both the USA and China!

A vey special Paralympian.  Unable to use his legs from birth, David Weir MBE, has won a total of six gold medals at the Paralympics of 2008 and 2012 and has also won the London Marathon on six occasions! This was surely a triumph of courage and determination over adversity that is an example to us all. David Weir won for Great Britain the very last gold medal for the very last event of the 2012 Olympics

           

The Paralympics that followed were, in their own way, even more successful.  They too had a universally acclaimed opening ceremony.   They were, I believe, watched much more widely than ever before and the spectators’ seats in the Olympics Park and at the other venues were full day after day.  It was perhaps unfortunate that they were available for viewers only on Channel 4 television, where viewers had to endure regular ‘commercial breaks’ for adverts!   Those on the spot cheered with enthusiasm athletes who ran, jumped, swam, rode or manoeuvred their wheelchairs, with disabilities that would have anchored most of the rest of us to our armchairs, if not our beds.

            And then, when it was all over, there was that wonderful ‘Victory Parade’ through the streets of central London before a million cheering spectators.  Among that multitude were my elder son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene who found a vantage point in Trafalgar Square from which they managed to get ‘close-ups’ of some of the athletes we had been cheering on during the games.

            Even that wasn’t quite the end.   As a postprandial treat after a very satisfying meal, we had Andy Murray, who had already achieved a gold medal in the games, win the American Open Tennis Championship – the first Brit to have done so since I was a schoolboy (and that was a long time ago!)   What a wonderful few weeks – even the weather cheered up and smiled on the athletes!  

And after the Games were over?   The example of the athletes and of all those who had striven to make them a success (in particular perhaps the thousands of volunteers who, without hope of either financial reward or Olympic glory, had welcomed visitors, directed, helped and supported them) was supposed to instil us with patriotism, an enthusiasm for personal participation in sports and games, and a new respect for and appreciation of our disabled fellow-citizens.

I think that it has inspired a sense of national pride that revelled in the prowess of our own athletes, but honoured and applauded too the successes of those from other lands.  It was wonderful to see those thousands of red, white and blue flags displayed by Brits of all skin colours and ethnic origin.  They demonstrated that our national flag is not, as it has sometimes seemed in the past, the exclusive property of the White Anglo-Saxon far right!  Perhaps an enthusiasm to follow those Olympians’ example will emerge in due course, but I have seen little evidence of increased respect and understanding of the disabled.  I was shocked to read a headline on one national newspaper announcing that there had actually been an increase in the number of ‘hate crime’ attacks on disabled people.

The government isn’t setting a very good example. They want to encourage public participation in outdoor sports and games – yet all over the country government cuts are doing the reverse.  Cash-strapped local authorities are closing public swimming pools and fitness centres and removing tennis courts from municipal parks and recreation grounds. In Colchester OTT (Opportunities through Technology) is a thoroughly worth-while charity that through the use of technology, helps disabled people to lead independent lives and to find work.   The Gazette records that, ‘as well as finding equipment suitable for each individual’s disability such as specially designed keyboards or computer programmes that read text for blind people, the charity’s technical team have also developed new kit to meet users’ varying physical needs’. All this threatens to end before Christmas unless OTT can find funding to replace the grant of £25,000 a year that has been withdrawn as a result of government cuts.

Then, of course, the government is ending the Disability Living Allowance that enables many disabled people to survive.  Existing recipients of this allowance will be re-assessed (by a foreign corporation to whom the task has been ‘outsourced’!) and may or may not become entitled to a new PIP (Personal Independence Payment).  Small wonder that when Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne had the temerity to visit the Paralympics he was greeted with boos and derision!   

As my son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene followed the Olympics from start to finish and supplied the photographic illustrations to this blog, perhaps Pete should have the last word:

                It occurred to me that we have witnessed talented MPs /ex MPs from both sides of the Commons working together to put on a really excellent show for the whole world, and now we come back to earth and have to witness incompetent amateurs fighting it out for the right to wreck the Economy. I would put Seb Coe and Tessa Jowell in charge of the economy rather than have them bother with the “Legacy”!