Tendring Topics........on line
Once again – Public Sector to the Rescue!
Why on earth, I wonder, is the
present government so obsessed with the idea that ‘the private sector’ can always perform more economically and
efficiently than ‘the public sector’? Public authorities, they believe, should no
longer actually provide the services
for which they are responsible (refuse collection and disposal, maintenance of
public buildings, parks and recreational facilities, care of the disabled and
elderly, highway maintenance, catering and routine cleaning of schools and
hospitals to name but a few) but merely
‘facilitate’ them. All these services must be put out to competitive tender and
given to the contractor who undertakes to perform them at the lowest cost.
The government
is continually trying to extend the field of the private sector further (into
the provision of health, policing and educational services, for instance) and to
reduce that of public authorities.
This devalues
or undervalues the loyalty that long-serving staff feel towards an employer who
treats them fairly and respects their expertise and experience. It undervalues
too the pride that permanent employees take in making sure that their canteen or staff restaurant
provides the very best meals in the most welcoming atmosphere, that their ward is the cleanest and neatest
in the hospital, that their park is always safe and welcoming to visitors, or
that the service that they render the public is the very best of which they are
capable.
The prime
motive of private contractors is not to
give the best possible service but to maximise profits by giving as little as
they can get away with, for as much as they can get. Cost effectiveness,
profitability, productivity, the three persone of Mammon’s unholy trinity, are
the only criteria of the market place – and of the economic jungle.
Over
and over again we have seen the results of this. Private enterprise has failed to set or mark
examination papers efficiently or in the time required. Private contractors have failed to pay out
badly needed grants on time. Public
money poured into banks has been squandered, and call centres have been located
in distant lands and staffed with people who can barely speak English – for no
other reason than that their labour is cheap and they are prepared to put up
with appalling living and working conditions.
The private sector was unable to cope with the effects of the
nation-wide foot-and-mouth disease epidemic.
The public sector (the army) was called in to help clear up the mess.
The
latest example of this, and the one with the potential to produce the most
catastrophic results, is of G4S the private contractors employed to ensure
security at the 2012 Olympic Games that are about to begin. Many people, it seems, had been well aware of
the inadequacies of this private organisation but the Home Secretary remained
blissfully ignorant until the last moment.
Then, just days before the Olympic Games were due to begin, she called
on the public sector – war-weary troops from a government-depleted army many of
whom were denied their well-earned leave
- to step into the breach and, as Houseman put it in quite a different
context, 'save the sum of things for
pay’. For army pay, of course, not
for the millions of pounds that private sector entrepreneurs G4S had been
expecting.
In
Manchester and
other urban areas accommodating Olympic athletes or otherwise associated with
the Olympics, where G4S claimed to have recruited and trained sufficient
private security staff, only a fraction of those needed reported for duty when
required*. Their place too has had to be
taken by the public sector, by already hard-pressed police officers (also from
government-depleted forces) working overtime to remedy private sector failure.
There are
already plans to privatise some aspects of police work. No-one, as far as I know, has yet thought of
privatising the armed forces. It wouldn’t surprise me though to learn that
there are those who are wondering if re-introducing 17th century
style privateering might prove to be a cost-effective way of strengthening our
government-depleted Royal Navy!
*It was interesting to hear Jeremy Hunt,
Culture Secretary and Minister in charge of the Olympics, making excuses for
G4S on tv. He didn’t feel that there was anything particularly surprising or specially reprehensible in a
private contractor promising a hundred trained operatives when required and
then supplying only twenty or thirty. This was, of course, the same Jeremy Hunt who hadn't noticed that his principal adviser was virtually on kissing terms with News International.
Preventing an Olympic terrorist attack!
A
warship in the Thames, anti-aircraft defences on the flat roofs of high
buildings in the vicinity of the stadium, fighter aircraft patrolling the
skies, thousands of troops on patrol – I am not at all sure that if I lived in
London, particularly in the stadium area, I would be sleeping more easily in my
bed in the knowledge of all the precautions against terrorist attack that are
being taken.
We
are told that if an unknown plane approached the Olympic zone and refused to
obey orders to change course ‘lethal force’ would be used against it; it would
be either shot down or blown up. And
what, one wonders, would happen to the bits of the suspect plane? We haven’t yet, as far as I know, perfected a
means of vaporising them so we can only assume that they would fall on the
buildings and people below, also possibly with lethal force!
I think that if I were the commander of a terrorist
gang, intent on having maximum ill-effect at the time of the Olympic Games, I’d
give East London and all other Olympic venues
a complete miss. I would think that, with all
eyes and all counter-terrorism measures concentrated on the games, this would be
the best moment to strike at quite
different but prestigious targets in East Anglia ,
the Midlands or the North.
The Chilcot Enquiry
The Leveson Enquiry, the
revelations of jiggery pokery (I don’t recall ever before using that expression
in a blog, but I can’t think of a better one!) in the world of finance, and the
failures of G4S, have all but driven the Chilcot Enquiry out of our minds. This, you’ll recall, was into the causes and
conduct of the Iraq War and its aftermath, and ran from 2009 till February
2011. I understand that the Chilcot
Committee’s report is now almost complete and that it runs to two million
words. For those like me who can’t even imagine
what two million words look like, it is roughly twice as long at Tolstoy’s
mammoth historical novel War and Peace!
It had been confidently
expected that the report would be published this summer. We now learn though
that this will be delayed for at least a year because of a dispute about the
inclusion of just a few thousand words! It is unfortunate that these are the words that
many of us are particularly eager to read.
I
am not greatly interested in the conduct of the war or even about the
mismanagement of its aftermath. I do
know that Saddam Hussein was a cruel and autocratic dictator with many innocent
deaths on his conscience. I am quite sure though that he had no time at all
for Al Qaeda, nor had they any time for him. Consequently he had played no part whatsoever in the 9/11
terror attacks on the USA.
Furthermore I was
sure that at the time of our invasion of Iraq he had no weapons of mass
destruction, and I am convinced that Tony Blair and George Bush Junior were
well aware of this too. Yet a majority of MPs and a large section of the
national press were persuaded to support the invasion on the grounds that Iraq was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks
on the USA and that Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction that
threatened Britain.
How
did this mass deception happen? It
resulted in thousands of deaths and many thousands more damaged lives, the
almost total destruction of Iraq ’s
infrastructure, a boost in the recruitment of volunteers for terrorist organisations,
and the beginning of ethnic and sectarian acts of terror and violence that still continue (to this very week in fact!)
I
think it likely that emails and recorded conversations between the American
President, George W. Bush and Tony Blair the British Prime Minister during the weeks immediately prior to the invasion may help to
throw light on the matter. A record of
these exists and has been seen by the Chilcot Enquiry Committee. It had been intended to publish them with the
final report – but the all-powerful Cabinet Office has objected. It is thought
that public access to those emails and the records of those conversations might
harm USA/UK relations and inhibit the future sharing of intelligence
information. Tough luck! If USA/UK good relations depend upon the
British electorate continuing in ignorance of a conspiracy of deception, then those good relations are hardly worth having. Nor is it of
any value to us to be permitted to share lies and carefully
selected half-truths.
If
for no other reason that Tony Blair is now our ‘special peace envoy’ in the Middle
East (it was rather like making one of the Kray brothers a Chief Constable!) we
are surely entitled to know what he was discussing with George Bush immediately
before he persuaded a majority of MPs to support the invasion of Iraq in our name.
