G4S mercenaries, criminal privatisation profiteers

This video from Britain says about itself:

Olympians to Young Offenders – G4S‘s Serious Fraud Investigation?

10 August 2016

Afshin Rattansi goes underground on how long British taxpayers will have to pay for the security company G4S. With OFSTED announcing Medway Young Offenders is in shambles, what else will the Serious Fraud Office investigation uncover?

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Time to call it a day with G4S

Saturday 17th September 2016

SISTERS UNCUT strike a chord with their protest against women’s support services being outsourced to G4S.

That this nightmare “security” firm still manages to snaffle up contracts for anything at all is a miracle.

It has a record for blundering incompetence — anyone remember the 2012 Olympics, when the army had to be drafted in after G4S failed miserably to provide the number of guards it had promised?

Or the prison debacle in Birmingham the previous year, when the company had to spend half a million pounds replacing every lock at Winson Green jail after losing the keys?

Indeed, Labour recently obtained evidence that the firm has been fined at least 100 times since 2010 for breaching prison contracts in this country.

There’s still some controversy over the electronic tagging scandal of 2013, when G4S and rival privateer Serco — which also somehow seems to remain in business — overcharged the taxpayer by tens of millions of pounds for tagging people who were actually dead, or in prison, or had left the country, or had not in fact ever been due to be tagged at all.

Critics are divided on whether this was down to blundering ineptitude or was a brazen bid to fleece the public by companies which realised they could get away with murder.

It’s no wonder that G4S’s record worries feminist activists. It should worry us all.

This is, after all, the firm whose officers were restraining Jimmy Mubenga, a British resident of 16 years being deported to Angola, when he died.

Passengers reported Mubenga’s cries of “I can’t breathe” and “They’re trying to kill me.” Sixty-five “extreme racist” text messages were found on the phones of two of the three guards restraining him at that fatal moment. G4S’s operatives were cleared of manslaughter.

It is also the firm that provided equipment and services to the notorious Israeli prison service — including for facilities in the illegally occupied West Bank — until pressure from the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement forced it to withdraw.

G4S has clocked that Tory outsourcing is an opportunity to be handed hundreds of millions in public money without any obligation to provide a decent service in return.

That’s why, like Serco, Virgin and others, it isn’t fussy about the nature of the services it bids for, which range from running prisons to driving ambulances, from railway franchises to cash cycle management for banks.

In a fortnight it takes over the Equality Advisory and Support Service, a national helpline to provide advice and assistance for people discriminated against on the grounds of sex, race or disability which was formerly run directly by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

As Sisters Uncut point out, it already runs two sexual assault referral centres in the Midlands.

Forty-one rights organisations, including Liberty and the Howard League for Penal Reform, have warned in an open letter published earlier this month of “repeated findings of racism and sexism among G4S staff, and harrowing official reports of G4S mistreatment of children, pregnant women and other protected groups.”

Given that record, what victim of sexist, racist or anti-disability abuse could feel safe in its hands?

Ministers should listen to the outrage this irresponsible act of outsourcing has sparked and cancel the contract. These support services are too important to be palmed off on a reckless privateer concerned only with how much of our money it can siphon off them.