HMP Birmingham prison rioters will “face the full force of the law,” Justice Secretary Liz Truss has said. Well, thank goodness for that. I was worried, for one moment, that the authorities might just call it “one of those things”. She’s going to hold a “thorough investigation”. Phew. But none of this will make any difference. The prison riots came about as a direct result of government policy.
Winson Green is run by G4S, a private company with a dubious record of being able to run anything properly (remember the Olympics?). The reason the prison is run by G4S is because the government is trying to run the prison service on the cheap. This is how privatisation works. You contract out a vital frontline service to the lowest bidder who then pay the lowest number of staff on the the lowest wages they can get away with, all in order for the company, in this case G4S, to make a handy profit. This is the wonder of Thatcherism, set in train when she came to power in 1979, flogging off all the things we owned or simply closing them down to enable us to import stuff instead of produce stuff. And to run the country on the cheap.
And what happens when everything goes to rat shit, as it has in Birmingham? Frontline public sector workers, in this case police officers, who run towards danger when everyone else runs away from it, restore order and for their sins get attacked by nasty little politicians like Theresa May. I’m not sorry this is getting all political but the problems caused by flogging off public services is a matter of political choice. There is a flimsy economic case for handing control of public services to run-for-profit companies but always we come back to the point: public service is not compatible with private profit.
I do not pretend that public service managers are the best you can get. In my experience, certainly the senior executives upwards in the civil service show considerable levels of ineptitude, managers who could not run a bath properly, never mind a multimillion pound operation, but the frontline workers are, generally speaking, committed to providing the best service they can. At Winson Green, the line has been well and truly crossed.
The prison riots represent a failure of philosophy as much as anything else. Of course prisoners should never riot, under any circumstances. They are there for a reason and it’s usually a good reason. I’m all for rehabilitation but I am not impressed with mobile phone footage from the riots that is emerging on social networks. Mobile phones in prisons? Pardon me? Perhaps we might also provide prisoners with MacBooks and state of the art flat screen tellys, too. You see – even a soggy wet liberal like me gets a bit bonkers when I read stories like this.
Get a grip, Ms Truss. Prisons are there to punish and rehabilitate, roughly speaking in that order. They are not holidays camps (I know they aren’t really but stories like this do make you wonder) and they should not be controlled by people who are there because they broke the law. By all means punish those responsible after checking their mobile phones for evidence. But if your raison d’être is to make money from what is meant to be public service, what do you really expect to happen?
