Seumas Milne: G4S should make it easier to beat the privatisation racket

If nothing else, the spectacular failure of G4S, the world's largest security firm, to get even close to meeting its Olympics contract should at least bury the fantasy that private companies are more efficient than the public sector. While G4S staff have failed in their thousands to turn up at one Games location after another, the police and the army have had to sort out the corporate chaos.


You can read the whole of Seumas Milne's Guardian piece on the terrible price we have all had to pay for privatisation and outsourcing,  here.

Neil Clark: G4S's Olympic struggles should derail the drive towards more privatisation

This article, by CPO co-founder Neil Clark, appears on The Guardian's Comment is Free website.



Private companies have one aim: profit maximisation. So expect cuts in staffing levels and everything done on the cheap 

The next time you meet one of those free-market ideologues who tells you private companies are always more efficient than the public sector, don't bother to get involved in a lengthy argument. Instead just use the example of G4S. 

You can read the whole article here.

We're outsourcing the future, to be built by Thatcher and Philip K Dick

Don't be fooled. The drive to privatise goes on. How long till schools, prisons and hospitals all sport flashing corporate logos?

Here, anyway, is what increasingly seems to be the future: slick corporate logos flashing from prisons, hospitals, schools, detention centres, defence facilities, police stations and more, and a cut-price society pitched somewhere between Margaret Thatcher and Philip K Dick. Real-life dystopias, let us not forget, tend to arrive by stealth; whatever the political fashion, we need to start talking about all this again – and fast.

By John Harris, The Guardian, 28th July 2009.