Private Good, Public Bad?

Apparently it is quite normal for private firms to fail to meet their contractual obligations on large scale government contracts. According to the Secretary for State for Murdoch, Jeremy Hunt, that is. In yet another extraordinary statement from a government minister, the Culture Secretary came out with this as some kind of explanation for the fact that, having accepted millions of pounds of public money to provide security at the forthcoming London Olympics, G4S has now admitted that it can't provide all the security personnel required under the contract. But don't worry, says Hunt, the known inability of the private sector to deliver is why we've got a contingency plan to bale them out by using yet more public sector resources in the form of policemen and soldiers. I must admit that it is news to me that the government accepts it as given that private contractors won't fulfil their contractual obligations. Particularly as the Tory bastards are always telling us that the private sector is far superior to the public when it comes to service delivery, which is why we should be outsourcing all our public services to private contractors.

Still, if this is true, it does mean that we public service workers can legitimately take a new approach to our own work. As we're always being told that we should be emulating the private sector, we can now tell our bosses that we have no intention of meeting any of our work targets as it is perfectly normal for the private sector to do the same. If it is OK for them to take public money, then not deliver the services they have been paid for, we need feel no qualms about taking our pay and just going home. Of course, the government isn't going to admit that this G4S fiasco finally nails the myth that private is always better than public when it comes to providing vital services. This is just a temporary glitch and is undoubtedly being blown out of all proportion. Just like the reports that G4S was using unpaid labour to provide security during the Jubilee river pageant apparently were. Bearing in mind that they were supposedly using that event as some kind of rehearsal for the Olympics, alarm bells should surely have been ringing that they could only make up the numbers of required guards in this way. But Hell, we shouldn't expect anything else in this banana republic we find ourselves living in, where lucrative government contracts are viewed by money-grabbing private sector bosses as subsidies. They want the money, but know they'll get away without actually supplying any services in return.