THE NEWS that the coalition government has very quietly slipped a clause into the contracts being handed out to private companies to run probation services that guarantees their ‘expected’ profits for ten years has been denounced as ‘unprecedented’.
It may be unprecedented but it will not remain that for long as all the indications are, that in the run-up to any future general elections, the Tory-led government intend to embark on a campaign of mass privatisation in all the public services and every one will contain this clause.
Any attempt by a future Labour government to cancel these contracts will trigger a multi-million pound penalty clause.
In the case of the probation privatisation contracts – which the Labour party has committed itself to ‘unpicking’ – this would work out at the privateers pocketing between £300m and £400m.
Given the Labour leadership’s slavish support for Tory austerity cuts and its commitment to keep Osborne’s policy of slashing public expenditure to the bone, these clauses provide Miliband and Ed Balls the ready-made excuse for reneging on any election promise of cancelling the controversial plan to hand probation services over to the likes of Serco and G4S.
These two companies, which are amongst the preferred bidders for a whole host of government contracts, are the two that the Tory justice secretary, Chris Grayling, promised MPs last year would not be awarded any new government work as they were being investigated by the police over serious fraud accusations.
These accusations emerged in July 2013 when both firms were involved in overbilling for a prisoner tagging service they ran. Serious Fraud Office and Metropolitan Police inquiries are still continuing into five separate government contracts awarded to these two companies, contracts worth in excess of £200m.
Despite ongoing fraud inquiries, both G4S and Serco were cleared by the government’s auditors to work on government contracts in January this year. So accusations of multi-million pound fraud are no bar to these privateers not just bidding for further contracts but also being guaranteed their ‘expected’ profits for ten years.
Contrast this treatment of companies being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office for multi-million pound frauds with the vicious treatment dished out to the unemployed.
They are demonised by the government as work-shy scroungers, living off the state and choosing unemployment as a ‘lifestyle’. This lie that the unemployed and low paid are guilty of defrauding the system has been used to justify a relentless campaign of cuts designed to smash the whole benefit system.
This lie was nailed this week by a study conducted by academics from Teesside University who went looking for what they termed Benefits Street style culture – named after the repulsive Channel 4 programme of that name that sought to portray the occupants of one street as precisely the feckless layabouts the Tory minister Iain Duncan Smith dreamt up to justify his policies.
In fact, they found precisely the opposite, not an aversion to work but families having to exist by going in and out of low-paid jobs. They are forced onto benefits because there are no full-time jobs offering decent employment, only a succession of low-paid part-time jobs on zero-hours contracts.
Yet while the working class is demonised and penalised by having their benefits cut or stopped altogether for the slightest infringement of the ridiculous, labyrinthine rules laid down by the government precisely for that purpose, the real criminals, the privateers, are invited to stick their snouts in the trough over and over again.
The only way to deal with this obscenity is to demand that the TUC leaders stop bleating about injustice and actually take action to put an end to this corrupt and bankrupt system once and for all by calling a general strike to kick out this government of privateers and bring in a workers government that will go forward to a socialist system – where all the exploiters of the working class will be consigned to history’s rubbish tip.
