HMP Birmingham: A case study in failed Tory privatisation mania

In October 2011 HMP Birmingham became the first British operating prison to be fully privatised when the Tory-led government handed operations over to the corporate outsourcing giant G4S.

By 2014 whistleblowers at the prison were reporting widespread violence and drug use, prisoners staying in bed all day, and experienced staff quitting in droves.

In 2016 the prison was rocked by a 14 hour riot involving some 500 prisoners. The Tory government then attempted to bury the report that cited staff shortages as a major factor.

In 2017 the Chief inspector of prisons found a violent, dirty, lawless, drug-riddled hovel rated as the worst prison h'd ever inspected.

In 2018 the Ministry of Justice demonstrate the shocking scale of this ideologically driven prison privatisation folly with the emergency state take-over of operations.

Amazingly the privatisation-fixated Tories knew exactly how bad HMP Birmingham was for several year, yet they just sat back and watched it deteriorate rather than admit their ideologically driven prison privatisation agenda was failing.

Even in the days before the emergency take-over they were still delaying because they were busy negotiating "commercially sensitive" contract terms with G4S!

Imagine how badly the contract must have been drafted if the private sector operators can turn a functioning prison into a violent drug-riddled horror show that even the guards are terrified to work in, and still think they've got a leg to stand on to quibble over contract terms when the the government steps in to take over the mess they've created.

Even more amazing is the fact that the Tory government have announced that they plan to hand the prison straight back to G4S after six months!

So G4S take over a functional prison, turn it into an absolute hellpit for the inmates and staff alike, hand it over to the government to clean up at public expense, and then waltz back in six months later to wreck it all over again!

Instead of negotiating over contract terms and then promising to hand the prison back to the failing outsourcing company after just six months, the government should be immediately banning G4S from bidding for any more Ministry of Justice work, calling a moratorium on all justice system privatisations, and announcing a wide-ranging public inquiry into how the prison privatisation agenda went so wrong so quickly.

To anyone with any sense the whole idea of handing prisons over to private companies is absolutely perverse. Only the most fanatical of hard-right neoliberal pro-privatisation freaks could try to argue that the primary function of prisons should be for private companies to generate private profits at the public expense, rather than keeping the public safe from dangerous criminals and rehabilitating lawbreakers so that they can reenter society with the skills and attitude necessary in order to avoid recidivism.

But this is where were at now. The cult of neoliberalism is so embedded within the Westminster political establishment that the majority of MPs and political journalists never criticise the ideologically driven privatisation of prisons, the forensic science service, electronic tagging of prisoners, the probation service, court translation services, or even front line policing. 

Meanwhile the minority of MPs who espouse renationalisation and a preference for not-for-profit public services are continually derided as the dangerous radicals and extremists!

The polling evidence is absolutely clear that the majority of British people are strongly opposed to privatisation mania, but the Westminster political establishment remain stubbornly impervious to the public view that ideologically driven privatisatise everything agenda absolutely stinks.

And that's the problem with the cult of neoliberalism - you can point to as many privatisation failures as you like (HMP Birmingham, collapsed and fraud riddled academy chains, Carillion, the rail privatisation farce, the G4S Olympic security failure, the G4S electronic tagging fraud, the forensic science privatisation calamity, the shambolic privatisation of the probation service, the absurdly inefficient Work Programme, the rip-off water companies, Royal Mail being flogged off at way below its true market value, flogging off the NHS blood supply, and dozens upon dozens of other examples) and you can point to the polling data that says the public hate it, but the neoliberal cultists will simply shrug their shoulders, ignore the evidence, and adopt their arrogant and elitist "we are the enlightened few, and the public are wrong again" stance.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

12 reasons Chris Grayling was an absolutely dreadful Justice Secretary

The fact that a serial failure like Chris Grayling still has an important cabinet position is indicative of the absolute dearth of talent in the Tory party.

Grayling started off as one of Iain Duncan Smith's henchmen at the DWP, the then spent three years as the worst Secretary of State for Justice imaginable.

Despite his almost unbreakable tolerance for abject incompetence from his ministers* David Cameron finally saw sense in 2015 and moved Grayling into largely ceremonial roles where he had little ability to wreak havoc over ordinary people's lives.

After David Cameron's EU gamble backfired so spectacularly Theresa May gave Grayling a lifeline back into a position where he could cause more damage by making him Transport Secretary.

Since then he has bee pursuing policies like handing the Southwestern franchise to the Chinese government to operate (because Tory ideology prohibits the UK state from running UK transport networks, but is fine with the Chinese state running UK transport networks!), deciding to hand operation of the UK taxpayer funded HS2 line directly to foreign governments to profiteer from (France, China and Italy are the bidders), and sneakily cancelling several rail electrification upgrades in Wales and the north of England just days before parliament went off on summer break.

Here's a recap of 12 things that make Chris Grayling not only the worst Justice Secretary ever, but possibly even the worst government minister in David Cameron's dreadful coalition of failure with the Lib-Dems.

Unqualified

Since 2007 the role of Secretary of State for Justice has included the job of Lord Chancellor. Before David Cameron appointed Chris Grayling to the position, every single Lord Chancellor for centuries had been a qualified legal professional. 

Grayling was the first head of the legal system to have no legal qualifications whatever, and this Tory anti-expertise trend has continued after his departure in 2015.

Grayling's successor Michael Gove was the 2nd unqualified Lord Chancellor in modern history, Gove's successor Liz Truss was the 3rd, and her successor David Liddington is the 4th legally unqualified Lord Chancellor in succession.

Unlawful Tribunal fees

It's taken four years and an epic battle all the way up to the Supreme Court to get Chris Grayling's discriminatory anti-worker employment tribunal fees declared unlawful (thanks to Unison for fighting to protect workers' rights).

Despite their claims to the contrary this legislation was always intended as a bad bosses' charter to give terrible employers the freedom to abuse their low-income workers and sack them at will, safe in the knowledge they wouldn't be able to afford the employment tribunal fees.

Not only did these fees act as a deliberate Tory barrier to the justice system for low-income workers, they also demonstrably discriminated against women. It's telling that instead of quitly backtracking on this depraved policy of pricing people out of seeking justice Theresa May carried on fighting tooth and nail to keep these sexist Tory rules in place long after Grayling was gone.

Probation service privatisation

Chris Grayling's ideologically driven privatisation of the probation service was criticised at the time as a reckless gamble, and the resulting chaos is probably even worse than predicted.

Grayling decided that the taxpayer should keep responsibility for probation services for long-term prisoners while probation services for prisoners sentenced to a year or less were carved up and distributed to 21 different private outsourcing companies.

A 2016 report found that ex-prisoners are being failed and the public put at risk. Of the 86 released prisoners the research team investigated not a single one of them had any help in relation to training, education or employment. A third were released with nowhere to live, and one registered sex offender simply disappeared after release.

Legal aid cuts

Legal Aid is a fundamental part of the modern welfare system which prevents the justice system from being just a plaything of the rich by providing adequate legal representation to people from poor and ordinary backgrounds.

Grayling is a fanatical right-winger so he attacked legal aid funding with glee, stripping legal aid entitlement from all kinds of cases. The result was a predictable rise in the percentage of people attempting to represent themselves in court, meaning thousands upon thousands of wasted hours in court (especially family courts) as proceedings had to be abandoned due to procedural cockups from self-representing legal novices.

Aside from the costs and the wasted time, there's also the fact that unknown thousands have been denied justice altogether as they simply gave up on the idea of seeking legal redress for the injustices they've suffered for lack of legal representation.

Restrictions on legal aid for domestic violence victims

As part of Grayling's assault on legal aid he decided to slash women's entitlement to legal aid for domestic violence cases.

If a woman couldn't prove that they'd been subjected to domestic abuse with either medical evidence or legal records from the previous five years they wouldn't get legal aid. This attack on domestic violence victims was widely condemned at the time, and in February 2017 it was finally reversed when the government caved into the pressure to accept evidence from charities, solicitors and housing officers.

Tendering for legal aid contracts

Aside from cutting legal aid to the bone another of Chris Grayling's brainwaves was to introduce tendering for legal aid services, so that people needing legal aid would have no longer have freedom to chose their own lawyer (from a local company, or from a firm of legal specialists in the field required) and simply be handed one from a pre-approved government list.

This planned shakeup was designed to benefit big legal companies and drive small independent legal practices out of business. One of the big players in this get-what-you're given strategy was, believe it or not, the haulage company Eddie Stobart!

Thankfully Grayling's successor Michael Gove listened to the absolute chorus of condemnation from the legal profession and scrapped Grayling's madcap plans.

Selling prison advice to the Saudi tyrants

One of Grayling's most widely condemned schemes was the establishment of a shady commercial offshoot of the Justice Department called Justice Solutions International which won a £5.9 million contract to advise the brutal Islamist tyrants in Saudi Arabia how to run their prisons.

In October 2015 Jeremy Corbyn forced one of his first significant U-turns out of the Tory government by calling for the contract with the Saudi tyrants to be scrapped, which Grayling's successor Michael Gove eventually did due citing "human rights concerns".

Criminal court fees

In 2015 Chris Grayling introduced fees for defendants found guilty at a magistrates court to pay £150 and those convicted at crown court to hand over £1,200.

People complained that the fees were incentivising innocent people to plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit out of fear of being hit with Grayling's fees if they tried to plead their innocence.

Over 100 magistrates resigned over the charges. Grayling's successor Michael Gove scrapped the charges saying the "intent has fallen short".

Cutting legal aid for prisoners

Chris Grayling loved playing up to the hard-right press by devising policies to be tough on prisoners. One of these schemes was a 2013 ruling banning legal aid for prisoners.

In my view you don't have to be a tree-huggling liberal leftie to believe that a prisoner who has been denied any kind of education, offender behaviour programmes or training while locked up should have the right to seek legal intervention to ensure they do get the help they need to avoid re-offending in the future.

In 2017 Grayling's cuts to legal aid for prisoners were ruled unlawful and overturned.

Banning books

Another of Grayling's attacks on the prison population was his ruling banning them from receiving books. This one really hit the headlines because there's nothing quite as right-wing authoritarian as banning books.

In December 2014 a High Court ruling found that banning prisoners from receiving books was unlawful, and Grayling's successor Michael Gove sensibly decided not to bother appealing against the judgement and binned the policy.

Unlawful prison absconder policy

One of Grayling's most ridiculous blunders came when he decided to introduce a knee-jerk policy after the right-wing press whipped up a huge fuss when an armed robber called Michael "Skullcracker" Wheatley went on the run from day release.

Grayling's new policy was to rush through a ban on any prisoner who had absconded from serving in open prison. The problem was that this new policy glaringly contradicted a previous Grayling policy that inmates serving indeterminate sentences should go through a phased release from closed to open prisons "in order to test their readiness for release into the community".

In 2015 Grayling's knee-jerk prisoner absconder policy was declared unlawful at the High Court after a case was brought by a prisoner called John Gilbert who technically absconded from day release because he missed his last train, but handed himself into a police station first thing in the morning.

The judges said the inconsistency between Grayling’s new absconder policy and his long-standing directions to the parole board was "irrational", and they were also "not impressed" by Grayling's absurd claim that since the ban and the parole board directions had both been issued by him, he had the power to ignore or contradict either of them at will!

Making Michael Gove look good

Michael Gove is a Rupert Murdoch hack turned politician. As education secretary he vandalised the education system by privatising thousands of state schools into the hands of unaccountable private psuedo-charities (many operated by major Tory party donors). He also oversaw a proliferation of unqualified teachers into our classrooms and once famously claimed that all schools should attain above average status!

The fact that a bumbling right-wing fanatic like Michael Gove had to come in and clear up so many of Grayling's messes just goes to show how utterly crap he must have been.

Just imagine how ideologically extreme and incompetent a person would have to be in order to end up making a right-wing fruit loop like Michael Gove look level-headed and competent in comparison!

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

* = Despite their serial incompetence Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne and Theresa May were never sacked, but Grayling's monumental blunders at Ministry of Justice were so huge, and so regular that even David Cameron couldn't ignore them.

The UK prison labour industry

In August 2016 the US department of Justice announced that they are going to set about phasing out their use of private prisons, which triggered a spate of moral high-horsing from British people who tried to claim that our private prison riddled system is still superior to the US system because at least here in the UK we don't use prisoners as a cheap source of labour.

The map in the article header proves how wrongheaded this attitude is. Just because they haven't heard of Britain's prison labour management company One3One, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, or that it isn't farming out prison labour to ever increasing numbers of private companies that are queuing up to take advantage of prison labour for as little as 30p an hour.

Prisoners in England and Wales are being used as a cheap source of labour in all kinds of industries including printing, textiles, engineering, woodwork, laundry and even assembling plastic poppies for the Royal British Legion.

The idea of training prisoners up with skills so that they are less likely to reoffend when they get out of jail is a vary good idea in principle, but the problem with farming prison labour out to the private sector is absolutely obvious. If scores of companies all over the UK are taking advantage of prison labour for as little as 30p an hour, then this availability of extremely cheap labour has an obvious downwards effect on wages and employment rates in whichever business sectors they become involved in.

Since the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power in 2010, British workers have suffered the longest sustained period of long-term wage deflation in recorded history. The real terms value of British wages has slumped 10.4% since the economic crisis, a wage decline only matched in severity by Greece out of all of the most developed economies in the world.

The Tories have been doing everything they can to reduce wages and the disposable incomes of ordinary people: They've reduced public sector wages in real terms by imposing below inflation 1% pay rises (whilst accepting an 11% pay raise for themselves), they've overseen an exponential rise in people employed on exploitative Zero Hours Contracts, they've repeatedly slashed in-work benefits like Tax Credits and Housing Benefit, they've massively increased the amounts charged for university education and the interest rates charged on this appalling form of Aspiration Tax, they've unlawfully used unemployed people as a massive pool of free labour to distribute to their corporate mates and they've massively expanded the number of prisoners working for private companies too.

The economic effect of prison labour driving down the wages of ordinary workers is bad enough in itself, but there is evidence that the availability of prison labour is actually resulting in real job losses as unscrupulous companies lay off their paid workforces and replace them with prison labour.

Here are some specific examples:

DHL According to the One3One website the global distribution company employs over 800 UK based prisoners to receive orders, pick, pack and ship. Meanwhile they have been shutting distribution centres, laying off hundreds of paid staff across the country (including 330 jobs in Droitwich, 200 job losses in Swindon and further job losses in Scunthorpe and Corby), and slashing wages across their distribution network prompting strike action. This is how Chris Taylor, DHL General Account Manager described the scheme on the One3One Solutions website: "Once you are through the prison door we like to create an environment identical to any DHL workplace". 

Going Green
A Cardiff based loft insulation and solar panel instillation company that laid off 17 workers at their call centre and replaced them with prisoners from Prescoed prison at an hourly rate of just 40p an hour. 

Speedy Hire A tool hire company that sacked 800 workers and shut down 75 depots in 2010. Since then they have massively increased the size of their prison contract to service and repair the tools they hire out, paying Erlestoke, Garth and Pentonville prisons £114,012 for the services of around 100 prisoners during the 2010-11 financial year. 

Timson Ltd
The boss James Timson is happy to act as a propaganda mouthpiece for the government's prison labour scheme, but what he fails to mention in his praise for the programme is that his company's increased use of prison labour coincided with a wave of redundancies that wiped out some 30% of the paid workforce at the company.

CiscoCisco is mentioned by the Tory MP Andrew Selous as being a big player in the government's prison labour scheme. In August 2016 the company announced that it plans to lay off 5,500 workers worldwide. Perhaps they could prevent a few job losses in the UK by bringing the services they've outsourced to prison labour schemes back in-house?

The Tories have tried to dress up their move to massively increase the number of prisoners doing work for private profit-seeking companies as being a socially responsible policy, and with all good propaganda narratives there is a kernel of truth to it. Research clearly demonstrates that prisoners who are engaged in productive activities are less likely to behave violently while in prison, and prisoners who have been trained up with skills are much less likely to re-offend after being released.

The problem isn't that prisoners are being given the opportunity to work, it's that allowing private companies to profit from very cheap prison labour clearly has a downwards effect on jobs and wages in the wider economy and there are numerous clear examples of companies like DHL, Speedy Hire and Going Green laying off paid workers and then outsourcing work to prisons.

For all of the reassuring guff from the Tories and their buddies at the CBI about how the government's prison labour schemes don't undercut established businesses or destroy jobs, the evidence is absolutely clear that they do.

It costs the taxpayer an average of over £33,000 per year to keep a person in prison, yet the Tories have been busy using this prison population as an almost free source of labour for unscrupulous businesses who want to undercut their rivals by cutting down on their payroll costs.

In my view the clearest solution to prevent unscrupulous businesses using prison labour as a kind of taxpayer subsidy to undercut their business rivals (who actually choose to pay their staff) is to ensure that employing prison labour costs the employer an hourly rate of at least the minimum wage.

The prison could then deduct a proportion of the wage to contribute towards the enormous cost to the taxpayer of keeping the prisoner housed and fed (Accommodation charge). Part of the remaining sum could be contributed towards compensation for the victims of the crime(s) committed by the prisoner.

The problem isn't actually that prisoners are being given the opportunity to work, it's that this Tory drive to provide prison labour to private profit-seeking businesses has created an opportunity for the most unscrupulous profiteers to take advantage of cheap prison labour to lay off their existing staff, or to undercut business rivals who employ workers on real wages.

It wouldn't actually take much effort to prevent unscrupulous profiteers from taking advantage of prison labour to line their own pockets at the expense of wages and jobs in the real economy, but the Tory attitude to Workfare schemes (using the unemployed as another pool of free labour to distribute to their corporate chums) is illustrative of their attitude. The Tory objective is to help unscrupulous profiteers by providing them with cheap or free labour, and the impact of their policies on jobs and wages in the real economy is utterly irrelevant to them. In fact, many Tories would likely celebrate the downwards effect on wages as a brilliant outcome in line with their wage repression policies of the last six years.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The US is turning against the Prison Industrial Complex, but it's thriving in Britain

On Thursday 18th of August 2016 the US Department of Justice made a hugely significant announcement that they are planning to end the use of private prisons after a report found that private prisons are less safe and provide inferior correctional services than government run facilities.

The huge growth in the US prison population, the widespread use of private prisons in the US and the use of prisoners as cheap labour is a phenomenon commonly referred to as the Prison Industrial Complex. This describes the situation where private companies that profit from running prisons and exploiting prisoners as cheap labour lobby for ever harsher laws in order to boost the prisoner population and their own profit margins.

Civil rights campaigners and hip-hop artists have been complaining about the Prison Industrial Complex for years, noting how non-white people are far more likely to be imprisoned for non-violent offences like drug possession.

When it comes to private prisons the conflicts of interest are absolutely obvious. Government operated prison services have an interest in reducing prisoner numbers through correctional services like education, apprenticeships, anger management courses etc because a lower prison population means either lower taxes, or tax revenues that can be spent on other valuable services like education or infrastructure. Private prisons have an interest in keeping prisoner populations as high as possible in order to boost their profitability, meaning that any efforts to rehabilitate prisoners and reduce the chances of re-offending are utterly counter-productive.

The obvious scope for corruption was highlighted by the appalling 2008 "kids for cash" scandal where two Pennsylvania judges were caught taking bribes from the owner of a private youth detention company in return for sentencing kids for utterly trivial offences like mocking a teacher on MySpace and trespassing in a vacant building!

Another scandal broke in 2016 when an undercover reporter from Mother Jones wrote a damning expose on the private prison business. This was followed soon after by the damning inspector General's report into the private prison business.

The US Senator Bernie Sanders has campaigned against private prisons and the Prison Industrial Complex for decades. Here's his response to the announcement that private prisons are to be phased out.

"It is an international embarrassment that we put more people behind bars than any other country on earth. Due in large part to private prisons, incarceration has been a source of major profits to private corporations. Study after study after study has shown private prisons are not cheaper, they are not safer, and they do not provide better outcomes for either the prisoners or the state.   

We have got to end the private prison racket in America as quickly as possible. Our focus should be on keeping people out of jail and making sure they stay out when they are released.  This means funding jobs and education not more jails and incarceration."

The the announcement that the US Department of Justice is planning to let all of their private prison contracts expire over the next five years resulted in an immediate slump in the stock values of private prison companies like GEO.

Even though the evidence against the private prison industry has been compelling, the announcement of the phase-out of private prisons in the US is still surprising because of the predictable freefall in private prison stocks. It's clear that taking away their opportunity to get rich on the back of the US taxpayer, and by exploiting prisoners as free labour is going to make a lot of rich and powerful people very angry indeed.

It's also surprising because the obvious insanity of private for-profit prisons in the US has long been seen as one of the factors that makes the radically right-wing US version of capitalism so much worse than the more social democratic versions of capitalism.

The irony for British people is that we'll no longer be able to high-horse about American capitalism being so much more rabid than our own version because our governments have imitated the US system by introducing a load of private prisons and detention centres in the UK, and they've also been allowing private companies to undercut the legitimate employment market by taking advantage of the UK prison population as a cheap source of labour.

Instead of getting angry about their lost opportunity to profiteer out of the US justice system, these companies could consider shifting their attention to the ongoing Tory marketisation of the UK justice system.

The Tories are creating huge profiteering opportunities by carving up and privatising all elements of the UK justice system. They're not just intent on building more and more privately operated prisons and detention centres and allowing private companies to use prisoners as cheap labour, they've also been busy trying to privatise front line police services (Theresa May is a big advocate of police privatisation), court facilities and services, electronic tagging (subject to a massive £180 million tagging fraud by G4S and Serco), and probation services. They've also been trying to reform legal aid in order to drive smaller specialist practices out of business and hand a bigger market share to multinational behemoths like Serco, G4S and Capita.

The conflicts of interest are absolutely obvious when the privatised police unit that makes the arrest, the forensic science unit, the legal aid lawyer, the courtroom facilities and services, and the private prison are all operated by the same small cabal of corporations, then upon release the probation officer and the electronic tagging company are run by the same corporations too.

If a rare display of evidence based policy making drives the private prison profiteers out of the US justice system, they can be assured that the Tories will welcome them with open arms to help them with their project to turn the UK justice system into a conflict of interest riddled free-for-all for corporate profiteers.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Gulag Britain

It amazes me every time I hear the Thatcherite stalwart Kenneth Clark described as a "liberal". It just goes to show how far to the right the UK political spectrum must have shifted if a right-wing windbag like Ken Clarke appears liberal compared to the new breed of rabidly right-wing Tory politicians.

The only reason I can see for this absurd redefinition of Clarke as a liberal was his widely publicised "rehabilitation revolution" and his statement that "locking people up for the sake of it is a waste of public funds". On the surface, the idea that the justice system should attempt to rehabilitate prisoners in order to turn them away from the life of crime sounds like a liberal idea, especially when it is being presented by a Tory, a party normally noted for their lock 'em up and bring back the death penalty attitudes. However, on closer examination, Clarke's "rehabilitation revolution" is clearly just another Tory scheme to grub immense private sector profits out of the public purse.

This absurd caricature of Ken Clarke the liberal is best summed up by a quote from the foul mouthed reactionary Rod Liddle written in December 2010:

"I’m getting a little weary of watching Ken Clarke smirking at various bunches of skaghead offenders and telling them he wants them out of prison, pronto, so that they can stab your wife and crap on your living room carpet."

To see Clarke taking such flack from a right-wing fanatic like Liddle is quite ridiculous. During his time as justice secretary he slashed legal aid in an attempt to price the poor out of the justice system and set about devising ways to generate profits from "the prison sector". Hardly the actions of a leftie liberal.

When Clarke's tenure as Justice Secretary was ended by David Cameron's in his 2012 cabinet reshuffle, it was widely reported as part of an effort to "shift the government to the right", however Clarke retains his place in cabinet, as "Minister without Portfolio" and his prison profiteering schemes remain in place too.

The BBC, in their typically understated way described Clarke's prison plans as a scheme to "pay private firms and voluntary groups according to how many prisoners they rehabilitate", without the slightest mention of the fact that the plans actually involve allowing private sector firms to use prison labour in order to cut their costs, a scheme that could actually be referred to as "Gulag Britain" rather than the "rehabilitation revolution".

Under Clarke's plans, the old Prison Industries Unit has been re-branded as One3One Solutions, as an effort to prime it for privatisation. Under Clarke's scheme, the objective is to get 20,000 prisoners working in the private sector and generating profits of £130 million by 2021. The beneficiaries of such schemes are the private sector organisations that get a supply of labour at way below the minimum wage. Typical salaries in the prison labour industry are well below £1 per hour.

On the One3One Solutions website, the Chief Executive Michelle Jarman-Howe describes the service they provide as: 

“We are open for business. This enterprise provides exciting opportunities for your business and your future. Our ambitions to develop these unique opportunities into really exciting business relationships. We can provide you with a competitive and flexible service. I am confident that you will be pleased with the results."

Of course she is confident that companies will be pleased with the results, given that the "competitive and flexible service" she is talking up, is nothing but a scheme to provide virtually free labour to corporate interests at the taxpayers' expense.

The right-wing CBI have roared their approval of schemes to provide British industry with a virtually costless labour source. The head of the CBI John Cridland is quoted on the One3One website as saying:

"The CBI fully supports One3One Solutions and the initiative to bring more commercial work opportunities into prisons."

It is hardly surprising that the private sector fully supports this scheme, it will, after all, allow them to boost their profits by eliminating labour costs. It will also give business owners a very strong bargaining position when it comes to inflicting pay cuts and attacking labour rights. If their employees won't comply, the owners can begin openly contemplating the replacement of their labour force with prisoners.

It seems that very little attention has been paid to the economic effects of such free-labour schemes. Steve Gillan, general secretary of the Prison Officers Association, said that allowing companies to employ prisoners at such low wages is both "exploitative" of prisoners and risks damaging the wider economy.

"We have concerns about simply using prisoners as 'cheap labour' for companies to cut their costs... Many prison are based in parts of the country which are very deprived and there is a real risk that companies will choose to go for the cheapest option and outsource work to prison."

The One3One website boasts that they are already involved in several industries. The products and services page implores us to "check out" some of the industries they are involved in, then lists; machining, sheet metal work, powder coating, welding and fabrication, assembly,  printing, woodwork, textiles and laundry.

Has nobody thought that allowing companies to source their labour in prisons might have a detrimental effect on the labour market in these sectors? What hope of a job has an experienced printer, sheet metal worker or laundry worker got, if they live near a prison that provides labourers that cost only £3-4 a day in wages?

Is it not easy to see that such schemes create a perverse incentive for employers to sack their workforce and replace them with virtually free labour? In fact, wouldn't it be against their commercial interests not to take advantage of such a cost cutting scheme?

Well for anyone that thinks that this is unlikely, that no private sector organisation could possibly be so cynical, there is a growing body of evidence that this is exactly what is happening. There are dozens of companies already taking advantage of the One3One prison labour schemes, many of which have laid off many paid full time employees in the recent past, then taken on virtually free prison workers, paid for at the taxpayers' expense. Here are just a few examples of companies cashing in on "Gulag Britain":

DHL
According to the One3One website the global distribution company now employs over 800 UK based prisoners to receive orders, pick, pack and ship. Meanwhile they have been shutting distribution centres, laying off hundreds of paid staff across the country (including 330 jobs in Droitwich, 200 job losses in Swindon and further job losses in Scunthorpe and Corby), and slashing wages across their distribution network prompting strike action. This is how Chris Taylor, DHL General Account Manager describes the scheme on the One3One Solutions website: "Once you are through the prison door we like to create an environment identical to any DHL workplace".

Going Green
A Cardiff based loft insulation and solar panel instillation company that laid off 17 workers at their call centre and replaced them with prisoners from Prescoed prison at an hourly rate of just 40p an hour.

Speedy Hire
A tool hire company that sacked 800 workers and shut down 75 depots in 2010. Since then they have increased the size of their prison contract to service and repair the tools they hire out, paying Erlestoke, Garth and Pentonville prisons £114,012 for the services of around 100 prisoners during the 2010-11 financial year.

Calpac
A food packaging company which increased their contract with Kirkham prison from £34,321 in 2010 to £154,267 in 2011. The company payroll showed that the highest-paid prison job is an office manager at just £1 an hour. The company payroll also showed that many of the prisoners work overtime, taking them up to 60 hours a week. Mike Perry, a director of Calpac, is quoted by One3one saying: "The costs of setting up a business within a prison are considerably lower."

Aside from the issue of labour rights, has nobody considered that allowing one company to employ prisoners at minimal cost gives them a huge unfair advantage in the market, especially in labour intensive sectors? Is it really in the best interests of the British economy to drive certain businesses to bankruptcy because they can't compete with other companies in their sector that use prisoners at a tiny fraction of the minimum wage to drive down their labour costs?

Has nobody thought of the wider economic impact of allowing a labour force of 20,000 to undermine the pay and conditions of existing workers? It should be obvious that every worker that is put out a job to be replaced by a prison labourer represents a fall in aggregate demand, since workers have a much higher marginal propensity to consume than corporate executives and shareholders getting rich on their zero-labour cost business model.

The first and most obvious conclusion from "Gulag Britain" is that this is yet another demonstration of the Tory contempt for the whole concept of labour rights. This is exactly the same kind of exercise as Workfare, allowing selected private sector interests to bypass the minimum wage and undermine labour rights, all paid for at the taxpayers' expense.

"Gulag Britain" doesn't just demonstrate contempt for labour rights, it is also a crystal clear demonstration of Tory contempt for the taxpayer. It costs an average of £38,000 a year to keep someone in prison. Simply hiring these prisoners out, without expecting the beneficiaries to contribute towards the cost of keeping them in jail is absurd. These companies should not just be paying a few quid a day in cigarette money to the prisoners. Any shortfall between what they pay the prisoners and the minimum wage should go towards the cost of running the prisons. This would have two positive impacts, it would cut the taxpayer burden of maintaining the prison in question and it would prevent the companies in question from gaining an unfair labour cost advantages over their competitors.

A third conclusion is that this is yet another example of Tory economic illiteracy. They didn't bother to carry out any evidence based analysis before expanding this scheme. It is an ideological experiment supported by a feeble justification narrative built on resentment (why should prisoners laze around doing nothing whilst you work hard?) aimed at squeezing private sector profits out of the prison system. It is absolutely criminal that no analysis was done to consider negative economic impacts such as rising unemployment, falling aggregate demand and unfair competition between companies with paid workforces and those using prisoners provided by One3One Solutions.

Returning to where I started; my final conclusion is that if you still believe that Ken Clarke is some kind of cigar smoking hippy liberal after reading about "Gulag Britain", you must be as dementedly right-wing as the noxious Rod Liddle.

See also

Tory policy: All narrative, no substance
 
What is... a justificiation narrative?
 
 What is... Confirmation bias?

Tory economic illiteracy
  
The Workfare-slavery debate
 
The Tory contempt for labour rights 
 

Credit: The information relating to Calpac and Speedy Hire as well as the quote from Steve Gillan came from this article in the Independent.

More Tory attacks on employment rights

The Tory contempt for Labour rights is so severe that
 they let multi-millionaire capitalists like Adrian
Beecroft draw up labour reform proposals for them.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Tories have absolute contempt for the rights of ordinary working people. I've written about this subject before, in the context of their plans to cancel the May Day bank holiday, which also happens to be International Labour Day.

One of the most blatant attacks on the rights of workers was written by multi-millionaire private equity fund manager Adrian Beecroft, who also happens to have donated £millions to the Tory party. The Beecroft report is a corporatist's wet-dream. It proposes attacks on labour rights, sack-at-will legislation, cutting unfair dismissal compensation, facilitating the asset-stripping of companies by removing carry-over employment rights when companies are bought out and removing the obligation from corporations to check that their employees are even eligible to work in the UK.

It is absolutely disgusting that the Tory party allow their rich donors to draw up their legislation for them, but what is even more shocking is that Beecroft's private equity fund own the parasitic payday loan company Wonga.com. If the Tories do pass Beecroft's sack-at-will legislation then parasitic lenders like Wonga will be direct beneficiaries as tens of thousands of newly unemployed people are forced to take out 4,000% APR loans from predatory lenders like Wonga in order to keep their heads above the water. Another massive conflict of interest is that private equity funds would be direct beneficiaries from the scrapping of carry over legislation, which would allow them to asset strip British companies at will without having to worry about the pesky employment rights of the staff they need to sack in order to maximise their profits.

Beecroft's plans are misleadingly sold to the public in right-wing rags like the Telegraph and the Daily Mail as nothing more than a simple exercise in cutting "pointless bureaucracy" and "red tape", when in fact they are quite clearly fundamental attacks on the rights and working conditions of ordinary working people. The sad thing is that so many of the unthinking reactionaries that take their opinions directly from the right-wing press will support "cutting red tape" even though the slightest amount of critical thought would reveal that Beecroft's proposals are quite clearly against their own best interests.

The Tories notorious mandatory unpaid "Workfare" schemes have rightly attracted a lot of criticism. Some people have described these work-for-your-benefits schemes as a form of modern corporate slavery. I can't say I disagree, "mandatory unpaid labour" would seem to be an adequate definition of the word "slavery" to me, however I don't consider slavery comparisons to be particularly useful. In my opinion it is always a better strategy to stick to facts and analysis rather than raising simplistic appeal to emotion arguments.

There are plenty of rational arguments against these schemes, ranging from the simple argument that "if the work is worth doing, it is worth paying someone to do" to the growing body of evidence that very few Workfare trainees ever get taken on by their corporate workmasters and that they are simply being exploited as a supply of free, right-less labour.

Another argument against Workfare is that if the Tories provide a near unlimited supply of free low-skilled  labour for the corporate sector, they can simply sack their unskilled workers in order to save themselves the cost and inconvenience of having workers that actually have to be paid and are capable of asserting their employment rights. Thus forcing people to work for their benefits can actually exacerbate the unemployment problem by incentivising corporations to make their paid staff unemployed.

The argument that the state provision of free labour can lead to paid workers losing their jobs was strongly reinforced when Shiv Malick posted an article in the Guardian describing how a company called Becoming Green have started busing in prisoners in order to staff their call centre for as little as £3 a day and then set about laying off at least 17 of their full time staff.

Of course there are always plenty of unthinking reactionaries who use their vindictive attitudes towards the unemployed and imprisoned in order to justify their exploitation. Sadly the revenge fantasies of unthinking reactionaries against those that they feel are beneath them will always take precedence over any kind of rational socio-economic analysis, even if the analysis demonstrates that such schemes cause significant socio-economic harm by costing working people their jobs.

The Tory policy of using prisoners and the unemployed as free labour in order to undermine the minimum wage and employment law is an utterly contemptible policy which creates market distortions and exacerbates the unemployment situation. Allowing their rich donors to draw up their fantasy wishlist of which employment rights they want to destroy is possibly even worse, especially given the massive conflicts of interest.

If you ever find yourself questioning whether the Tories are actually that malicious, just remember Thatcher's famous description of the Trade Union movement as "the enemy within". Whether you agree with the Trade Unions or not, you have to accept the fact that it is their job is to protect the interests of ordinary working people. There can hardly be a clearer demonstration of the Tory the contempt and malice towards ordinary working people than Thatcher's callous words about her own countrymen.

See Also

The Tory contempt for the value of labour

Is it useful to compare Workfare with slavery?

The Beecroft Report, nothing more than a corporatist wishlist

No new ideas, just more Tory cuts