The Winston Churchill 'Hero' Myth: The Fanatical White Supremacist is Largely Responsible for Today's Global Mess

“I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

“I hate Indians, they are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

“I am strongly in favor of using gas against uncivilized tribes, it would spread a lively terror.”

"Sir" Winston Churchill
Among his numerous debaucheries, Winston Churchill was literally responsible for deliberately
starving millions of people to death

Among his numerous debaucheries, Winston Churchill promoted eugenics, torture, chemical warfare, and was literally responsible for deliberately starving millions of people to death: "The myth of Churchill is Britain’s greatest propaganda tool because it rewrites Churchill’s true history in order to whitewash Britain’s past imperialist crimes against humanity."

By Garikai Chengu
Sunday marked the anniversary of the death of one of the most lionized leaders in the Western world: Sir Winston Churchill.

The current British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has called Churchill “the greatest ever Prime Minister”, and Britons have recently voted him as the greatest Briton to have ever lived.

The story that British schoolbooks tell children about Churchill is of a British Bulldog, with unprecedented moral bravery and patriotism. He, who defeated the Nazis during World War II and spread civilisation to indigenous people from all corners of the globe. Historically, nothing could be further from the truth.

Noam Chomsky on Winston Churchill and Racism

To the vast majority of the world, where the sun once never set on the British empire, Winston Churchill remains a great symbol of racist Western imperialist tyranny, who stood on the wrong side of history.

The myth of Churchill is Britain’s greatest propaganda tool because it rewrites Churchill’s true history in order to whitewash Britain’s past imperialist crimes against humanity. The Churchill myth also perpetuates Britain’s ongoing neo-colonial and neo-liberal policies, that still, to the is day, hurt the very people around the world that Churchill was alleged to have helped civilize.

The same man whose image is polished and placed on British mantelpieces as a symbol of all that is Great about Britain was an unapologetic racist and white supremacist. “I hate Indians, they are a beastly people with a beastly religion”, he once bellowed. As Churchill put it, Palestinians were simply “barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung.”

In 1937, he told the Palestine Royal Commission: “I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

It is unsurprising that when Barack Obama became President, he returned to Britain a bust of Churchill which he found on his desk in the Oval office. According to historian Johann Hari, Mr. Obama’s Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill’s watch, for daring to resist Churchill’s empire.

Apart from being an unrepentant racist, Churchill was also a staunch proponent of the use of terrorism as a weapon of war.

During the Kurdish rebellion against British dictatorship in 1920, Churchill remarked that he simply did not understand the “squeamishness” surrounding the use of gas by civilized Great Britain as a weapon of terror. “I am strongly in favor of using gas against uncivilized tribes, it would spread a lively terror,” he remarked.

In the same year, as Secretary of State for War, Churchill sent the infamous Black and Tans to Ireland to fight the IRA. The group became known for vicious terrorist attacks on civilians which Churchill condoned and encouraged.

While today Britons celebrate Churchill’s legacy, much of the world outside the West mourns the legacy of a man who insisted that it was the solemn duty of Great Britain to invade and loot foreign lands because in Churchill’s own words Britain’s “Aryan stock is bound to triumph”.

Churchill’s legacy in the Far East, Middle East, South Asia and Africa is certainly not one of an affable British Lionheart, intent on spreading civilization amongst the natives of the world. To people of these regions the imperialism, racism, and fascism of a man like Winston Churchill can be blamed for much of the world’s ongoing conflicts and instability.

As Churchill himself boasted, he “created Jordan with a stroke of a pen one Sunday afternoon,” thereby placing many Jordanians under the brutal thumb of a throneless Hashemite prince, Abdullah. Historian Michael R. Burch recalls how the huge zigzag in Jordan’s eastern border with Saudi Arabia has been called “Winston’s Hiccup” or “Churchill’s Sneeze” because Churchill carelessly drew the expansive boundary after a generous lunch.

Churchill also invented Iraq. After giving Jordan to Prince Abdullah, Churchill, the great believer in democracy that he was, gave Prince Abdullah’s brother Faisal an arbitrary patch of desert that became Iraq. Faisal and Abdullah were war buddies of Churchill’s friend T. E. Lawrence, the famous “Lawrence of Arabia”.

Much like the clumsy actions in Iraq of today’s great Empire, Churchill’s imperial foreign policy caused decades of instability in Iraq by arbitrarily locking together three warring ethnic groups that have been bleeding heavily ever since. In Iraq, Churchill bundled together the three Ottoman vilayets of Basra that was predominantly Shiite, Baghdad that was Sunni, and Mosul that was mainly Kurd.

Ask almost anyone outside of Iraq who is responsible for the unstable mess that Iraq is in today and they are likely to say one word, either “Bush” or “America”. However, if you asked anyone within Iraq who is mainly responsible for Iraq’s problems over the last half century and they are likely to simply say “Churchill”.

Winston Churchill convened the 1912 Conference in Cairo to determine the boundaries of the British Middle Eastern mandate and T.E. Lawrence was the most influential delegate. Churchill did not invite a single Arab to the conference, which is shocking but hardly surprising since in his memoirs Churchill said that he never consulted the Arabs about his plans for them.

The arbitrary lines drawn in Middle Eastern sand by Churchillian imperialism were never going to withstand the test of time. To this day, Churchill’s actions have denied Jordanians, Iraqis, Kurds and Palestinians anything resembling true democracy and national stability.

The intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict can also be traced directly back to Churchill’s door at number 10 Downing Street and his decision to hand over the “Promised Land” to both Arabs and Jews. Churchill gave practical effect to the Balfour declaration of 1917, which expressed Britain’s support for the creation of a Jewish homeland, resulting in the biggest single error of British foreign policy in the Middle East.

Churchill’s legacy in Sub-Saharan Africa and Kenya in particular is also one of deep physical and physiological scars that endure to this day.

Of greater consequence to truth and history should be a man’s actions, not merely his words. Whilst Churchill has become one of the most extensively quoted men in the English speaking world, particularly on issues of democracy and freedom, true history speaks of a man whose actions revolved around, in Churchill’s own words, “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples”.

One such war was when Kikuyu Kenyans rebelled for their freedom only to have Churchill call them “brutish savage children” and force 150,000 of them into “Britain’s Gulag”.

Pulitzer-prize winning historian, Professor Caroline Elkins, highlights Churchill’s many crimes in Kenya in her book Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Professor Elkins explains how Churchill’s soldiers “whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects”, all in the name of British “civilization”. It is said that President Obama’s grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured from Churchill’s men.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proved how in Bengal in 1943 Churchill engineered one of the worst famines in human history for profit.

Over three million civilians starved to death whilst Churchill refused to send food aid to India. Instead, Churchill trumpeted that “the famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” Churchill intentionally hoarded grain to sell for profit on the open market after the Second World War instead of diverting it to starving inhabitants of a nation controlled by Britain. Churchill’s actions in India unquestionably constituted a crime against humanity.

Churchill was also one of the greatest advocates of Britain’s disastrous divide-and-rule foreign policy.

Churchill’s administration deliberately created and exacerbated sectarian fissures within India’s independence movement, between Indian Hindus and Muslims that have had devastating effects on the region ever since.

Prior to India’s independence from Britain, Churchill was eager to see bloodshed erupt in India, so as to prove that Britain was the benevolent “glue holding the nation together”. For Churchill, bloodshed also had the added strategic advantage that it would also lead to the partition of India and Pakistan. Churchill’s hope was this partition would result in Pakistan remaining within Britain’s sphere of influence. This, in turn, would enable the Great Game against the Soviet empire to continue, no matter the cost to innocent Indian and Pakistanis. The partition of India with Pakistan caused the death of about 2.5 million people and displaced some 12.5 million others.

According to writer, Ishaan Tharoor, Churchill’s own Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery, compared his boss’s understanding of India’s problems to King George III’s apathy for the Americas. In his private diaries Amery vented that “on the subject of India, Churchill is not quite sane” and that he didn’t “see much difference between Churchill’s outlook and Hitler’s.”

Churchill shared far more ideologically in common with Hitler than most British historians care to admit. For instance, Churchill was a keen supporter of eugenics, something he shared in common with Germany’s Nazi leadership, who were estimated estimated to have killed 200,000 disabled people and forcibly sterilised twice that number. Churchill drafted a highly controversial piece of legislation, which mandated that the mentally ill be forcibly sterilized. In a memo to the Prime Minister in 1910, Winston Churchill cautioned, “the multiplication of the feeble-minded is a very terrible danger to the race”. He also helped organise the International Eugenics Conference of 1912, which was the largest meeting of proponents of eugenics in history.

Churchill had a long standing belief in racial hierarchies and eugenics. In Churchill’s view, white protestant Christians were at the very top of the pyramid, above white Catholics, while Jews and Indians were only slightly higher than Africans.

Historian, Mr. Hari, rightfully points out, “the fact that we now live in a world where a free and independent India is a superpower eclipsing Britain, and a grandson of the Kikuyu ‘savages’ is the most powerful man in the world, is a repudiation of Churchill at his ugliest – and a sweet, ironic victory for Churchill at his best.”

Amid today’s Churchillian parades and celebratory speeches, British media and schoolbooks may choose to only remember Churchill’s opposition to dictatorship in Europe, but the rest of the world cannot choose to forget Churchill’s imposition of dictatorship on darker skinned people outside of Europe. Far from being the Lionheart of Britain, who stood on the ramparts of civilisation, Winston Churchill, all too often, simply stood on the wrong side of history.

Churchill is indeed the Greatest Briton to have ever lived, because for decades, the myth of Churchill has served as Britain’s greatest propaganda tool to bolster national white pride and glorify British imperial culture.

Copyright © Garikai Chengu, Global Research, 2016
_________________
Garikai Chengu is a scholar at Harvard University. Contact him on garikai.chengu@gmail.com.

Reprinted with permission from Center for Research in Globalization.

"The Australian Dream Is Rooted In Racism" — Debate (Video)

Is Australia really a multicultural safe haven of equal opportunity? Or is racism more prevalent than ever before? Stan Grant took to the stage for the last IQ2* debate of 2015. His speech is widely acknowledged to be one of the most powerful ever heard at IQ2.

Indigenous Australians. (Photo by Global Panorama)

*Intelligence Squared is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization. Intelligence Squared U.S. was founded in 2006 to restore civility, reasoned analysis, and constructive public discourse to today’s often biased media landscape.

___________

___________

Racism is Destroying the Australian Dream: Full Debate at IQ2

Australia’s Day for Secrets, Flags and Cowards — The Slaughter of the Aborigines

The only island continent on earth was taken from its inhabitants; the euphemism was “settled”. It was, wrote Henry Reynolds, one of few honest Australian historians, one of the greatest land grabs in world history. He described the slaughter that followed as “a whispering in our hearts”.

British colonizers brought disease and genocide to an Island off the coast of Australia called Tasmania in 1803. There were as many as 15,000 Aboriginals on the island at the time. By the 1860's only four Tasmanians were left on Tasmania.  Truganini (above) was thought to have been the last full-blooded Tasmanian when she died but about four others (including Fanny Cochrane Smith) were eventually discovered living on other islands. After she died Truganini's bones were dug up and placed on display against her expressed wishes. A century later, Truganini's remains were finally cremated and scattered according to her wishes.

By John Pilger
On 26 January, one of the saddest days in human history will be celebrated in Australia. It will be “a day for families”, say the newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch. Flags will be dispensed at street corners and displayed on funny hats. People will say incessantly how proud they are.

__________

The Voice of Fanny Cochrane Smith, now considered the last Tasmanian.
When she did the Tasmanian language died  with her.

__________

For many, there is relief and gratitude. In my lifetime, non-indigenous Australia has changed from an Anglo-Irish society to one of the most ethnically diverse on earth. Those we used to call “New Australians” often choose 26 January, “Australia Day”, to be sworn in as citizens. The ceremonies can be touching. Watch the faces from the Middle East and understand why they clench their new flag.

It was sunrise on 26 January so many years ago when I stood with Indigenous and non Indigenous Australians and threw wreaths into Sydney Harbour. We had climbed down to one of the perfect sandy coves where others had stood as silhouettes, watching as the ships of Britain’s “First Fleet” dropped anchor on 26 January, 1788. This was the moment the only island continent on earth was taken from its inhabitants; the euphemism was “settled”. It was, wrote Henry Reynolds, one of few honest Australian historians, one of the greatest land grabs in world history. He described the slaughter that followed as “a whispering in our hearts”.

Aborigine at Echo Point, Katoomba (Australia). (Photo by Steve Austin)

The original Australians are the oldest human presence. To the European invaders, they did not exist because their continent had been declared terra nullius: empty land. To justify this fiction, mass murder was ordained. In 1838, the Sydney Monitor reported: “It was resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks in that quarter.” This referred to the Darug people who lived along the great Hawkesbury River not far from Sydney. With remarkable ingenuity and without guns, they fought an epic resistance that remains almost a national secret. In a land littered with cenotaphs honouring Australia’s settler dead in mostly imperial wars, not one stands for those warriors who fought and fell defending Australia.

This truth has no place in the Australian consciousness. Among settler nations with indigenous populations, apart from a facile “apology” in 2008, only Australia has refused to come to terms with the shame of its colonial past. A Hollywood film, Soldier Blue, in 1970 famously inverted racial stereotypes and gave Americans a glimpse of the genocide in their own mythical “settlement”. Almost half a century later, it is fair to say an equivalent film would never be made in Australia.

In 2014, when my own film, Utopia, which told the story of the Australian genocide, sought a local distributor, I was advised by a luminary in the business: “No way I could distribute this. The audiences wouldn’t accept it.”

He was wrong — up to a point. When Utopia opened in Sydney a few days before 26 January, under the stars on vacant land in an Indigenous inner-city area known as The Block, more than 4,000 people came, the majority non-Indigenous. Many had travelled from right across the continent. Indigenous leaders who had appeared in the film stood in front of the screen and spoke in “language”: their own. Nothing like it had happened before. Yet, there was no press. For the wider community, it did not happen. Australia is a murdochracy, dominated by the ethos of a man who swapped his nationality for the Fox Network in the US.

The star Indigenous AFL footballer Adam Goodes wrote movingly to the Sydney Morning Herald demanding that “the silence is broken”. “Imagine,” he wrote, “watching a film that tells the truth about the terrible injustices committed against your people, a film that reveals how Europeans, and the governments that have run our country, have raped, killed and stolen from your people for their own benefit.

“Now imagine how it feels when the people who benefited most from those rapes, those killings and that theft – the people in whose name the oppression was done – turn away in disgust when someone seeks to expose it.”

Goodes himself had already broken a silence when he stood against racist abuse thrown at him and other Indigenous sportspeople. This courageous, talented man retired from football last year as if under a cloud — with, wrote one commentator, “the sporting nation divided about him”. In Australia, it is respectable to be “divided” on opposing racism.

On Australia Day 2016– Indigenous people prefer Invasion Day or Survival Day– there will be no acknowledgement that Australia’s uniqueness is its first people, along with an ingrained colonial mentality that ought to be an abiding embarrassment in an independent nation. This mentality is expressed in a variety of ways, from unrelenting political groveling at the knee of a rapacious United States to an almost casual contempt for Indigenous Australians, an echo of “kaffir”-abusing South Africans.

Read More

Australian Government Contractors Will Now Go to Jail for Reporting Child Abuse in Detention Centers

Photo by Michael Coghlan.

By Lauren Gillin
Last month the Australian government, with the support of the opposition, passed the Border Force Protection Act through both houses of Parliament. It will come into effect on July 1.

If the act defines you as an "entrusted person," you might be facing jail for up to two years if you reveal anything about what happens in Australia's immigration detention centers to anybody else.

An "entrusted person" is anyone working directly or indirectly for the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, so that's doctors, nurses, psychologists, teachers, counsellors, security staff, maintenance workers, or anyone who has signed a government contract. This puts medical professionals and those who work with children on Nauru or Manus Island in bizarre circumstances. Outside of detention centers, they're legally obligated to report child abuse. As of July 1, they can't do the same with abuse witnessed on the inside.

Read More

Pro-Israel Lobby Has Stranglehold on Australia — Suggests Ex-Foreign Minister: Foreign Policy ‘Subcontracted’ to Jewish Donors Who Have 'Unhealthy' Influence

Bob Carr: Much of big media ignored his charges about the pro-Israel lobby in Australia and focused
on his dietary and exercise habits. (Screen capture from YouTube video)

“I found it very frustrating that we couldn’t issue, for example, a routine expression of concern about the spread of Israeli settlements on the West Bank — great blocks of housing for Israeli citizens going up on land that everyone regards as part of the future Palestinian state if there is to be a two-state solution.”


By Raphael Ahren
Australia’s former foreign minister has lashed out at the country’s “Israel lobby,” lamenting that during his time in office it reached “extraordinary” and “unhealthy” levels of influence over Canberra’s foreign policy — mainly because of campaign contributions by Jewish donors...

Australian foreign policy had been “subcontracted” to Jewish donors, Carr writes in the book, according to the Guardian.

One of key passages in “Bob Carr: Diary of a Foreign Minister” details a disagreements he had with then-prime minister Julia Gillard over Canberra’s stance vis-à-vis the Palestinians’ admission to the United Nations General Assembly as a nonmember state.

“What I’ve done is to spell out how the extremely conservative instincts of the pro-Israel lobby in Melbourne was exercised through the then-Prime Minister’s Office,” Carr said Wednesday in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“I found it very frustrating that we couldn’t issue, for example, a routine expression of concern about the spread of Israeli settlements on the West Bank — great blocks of housing for Israeli citizens going up on land that everyone regards as part of the future Palestinian state if there is to be a two-state solution.”

Carr said that “party donations” and programs targeting journalists were the reason why the numerically small pro-Israel lobby wields so much political influence. These were legitimate measures, he continued, as other interest groups do the same. “But it needs to be highlighted, because I think it reached a very unhealthy level,” he said, regarding pro-Israel forces in Australia.

Read More

Australia Is Again Stealing Its Indigenous Children

 Kaawirn Kuunawarn (Hissing Swan), Chief of the Kirrae Wuurong
(Blood Tip Tribe) - (Photographer Unknown)

By John Pilger
The tape is searing. There is the voice of an infant screaming as he is wrenched from his mother, who pleads, "There is nothing wrong with my baby. Why are you doing this to us? I would've been hung years ago, wouldn't I? Because (as an Australian Aborigine) you're guilty before you're found innocent." The child's grandmother demands to know why "the stealing of our kids is happening all over again." A welfare official says, "I'm gunna take him, mate."

This happened to an Aboriginal family in outback New South Wales. It is happening across Australia in a scandalous and largely unrecognized abuse of human rights that evokes the infamous Stolen Generation of the last century. Up to the 1970s, thousands of mixed-race children were stolen from their mothers by welfare officials. The children were given to institutions as cheap or slave labor; many were abused.

Described by a chief protector of Aborigines as "breeding out the color," the policy was known as assimilation. It was influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis. In 1997, a landmark report, "Bringing Them Home," disclosed that as many 50,000 children and their mothers had endured "the humiliation, the degradation and sheer brutality of the act of forced separation ... the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state." The report called this genocide...

Today, the theft of Aboriginal children - including babies taken from the birth table - is now more widespread than at any time during the last century.

Read More

Fail and Prosper: How Privatisation Really Works — Getting Filthy Rich Taking Over Government Services, then Selling Third Rate Services Back to Government

Ruby McGregor-Smith, chief executive, Mitie (Ed Robinson/OneRedEye)

By Clare Sambrook
Want to make £10 million and more? Become an accountant. Learn how to make austerity pay.

Ruby earns more than maybe anybody you have ever met. She is not an Oscar-winning movie star. She hasn't won Wimbledon. Ruby McGregor-Smith is an accountant who runs a British company called Mitie (pronounced Mighty).

She pays herself £1.4 million a year. Her Mitie shares, worth £2 million, bring another £60K in annual dividends. On the side, as a part-time director, she picks up £60K more.

Last September she 'bought' more shares. They cost her absolutely nothing. She sold them straightaway, making £730,000 in a moment. And now, thanks to British taxpayers, Ruby is about to get richer.

On the eve of her 51st birthday last month, the Home Office gave her a gigantic contract: eight years' work, worth £180 million, running two immigration lock-ups in West London.

Mitie got the job — holding 1000 men at Colnbrook and Harmondsworth Removal Centres — only three years after entering what Ruby calls the "market".

What's Mitie's experience? They run buildings for Lloyds Bank, clean Odeon cinemas, print and distribute documents, and maintain school buildings under Private Finance Initiative contracts.

For almost three years they have run Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre, near Oxford. It isn't going well.

Campsfield Oct2013 (CampaigntoCloseCampsfield)

Last October one suicidal inmate set fire to his cell. The blaze spread quickly — there was no sprinkler system. Ten fire engines rushed to the scene; 180 people had to be evacuated.

Seven years ago, after a similar fire in the same Campsfield block, Oxfordshire Fire & Rescue Services strongly recommended sprinklers. It didn't happen.

Mitie are experts in fire prevention. They tell potential clients: "our fire and security team can integrate fire prevention, detection, and suppression with your security equipment, including fire detectors, fire alarms, extinguishers, sprinkler systems . . ."

Why didn't Mitie heed the Fire Service's warning and install sprinklers when they got the Campsfield contract? Phil Miller, a Corporate Watch researcher, asked Mitie. They wouldn't say.

How does this 'market' work? Less than three years' experience of guarding immigration detainees. One massive fire. And then a gigantic government contract to run two more detention centres. Why didn't the work go to a company more experienced than Mitie?

The competition

The UK's most experienced immigration detention companies are G4S (the London Olympics security bunglers) and Serco (where Ruby spent nine years; it's a small world).

G4S guards killed asylum seeker Jimmy Mubenga (on a British Airways plane at Heathrow Airport) while trying to deport him. Serco guards have subjected vulnerable women to sexual abuse at Yarl's Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire. These things didn't stop G4S and Serco winning more government contracts.

Home Office ministers and their civil servants have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect their 'commercial partners'. They buried medical evidence that children were being harmed at Yarl's Wood, and rebuked doctors and lawyers who published evidence of assault. Border Agency chief executive Lin Homer four years ago complained that doctors who expressed concerns about dangerous restraint techniques were "trying to damage the reputation of our contractors".

But then last year G4S and Serco were caught doing dodgy accounting. They'd charged the Ministry of Justice for tagging ex-offenders who hadn't been tagged, they'd even charged for tagging dead people. Now all their government contracts are under scrutiny and the Serious Fraud Office is going through their books.

G4S's failures don't stop in the UK. In South Africa last year the government had to take command at G4S-run Mangaung Prison after the company lost control. The Australian government is trying to find out how one detainee died from multiple head injuries and many more were badly injured at G4S-run Manus Island detention centre.

Who else could the British government have chosen to run Harmondsworth and Colnbrook?

There's the American prisons company GEO Group — a spin-off from the sinister old Wackenhut Corporation. They've run Harmondsworth since 2009. Why weren't they given the new contract?

When the Chief Inspector of Prisons paid a surprise visit to Harmondsworth last Summer, he found that one wheelchair-bound low-risk detainee who'd suffered a stroke had been handcuffed on a hospital visit. Another man was handcuffed while sedated and undergoing surgery.

For five hours in hospital GEO guards kept a frail 84 year old Canadian handcuffed. Then he died. Unhelpful headlines followed, there were questions in Parliament, just as GEO's contract came up for review.

Why didn't the Home Office choose an experienced contractor with a proven record of providing secure and safe accommodation and good value to the taxpayer? Because no such private contractor exists.

The losers

Privatisation hurtles on in the UK, regardless of the damage. Even David Cameron and George Osborne acknowledge that we have been badly served by the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), under which companies build hospitals, schools and prisons, then lease them back to the state, locking taxpayers into decades long maintenance contracts.

In Yorkshire, to take one modest example, the cost of rebuilding Calderdale Royal Hospital is £65 million. The public will end up paying £773 million. For providing one extra grit bin (value £200) outsourcer Amey charges Birmingham Council £4,500, the BBC reported the other day.

PFI will ultimately cost the taxpayer £300 billion, a Guardian investigation has revealed. "The irony is that we privatised the buildings but nationalised the debts. It's crazy," said Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee that is supposed to guard taxpayers' interests.

The outsourcers are making a mess of things. There's the contracting out of court translation services (Applied Language Solutions and then Capita), the army recruitment fiasco (Capita again), the degradation of asylum housing (Serco, G4S and Capita), the dangerous experiment that is Birmingham's Oakwood Prison (by G4S).

Last week disability minister Mike Penning had to make an 'unreserved apology' after news got out that the government's back-to-work assessors Atos had relentlessly pursued a woman in a coma.

Having made what's known in the jargon as a total bollocks of the task, Atos is trying to negotiate an early release from its obligations, blaming death threats.

Regardless of all that, the government has invited Atos to manage the extraction of our personal health data for commercial exploitation and medical research.

Is there no better candidate than Atos? Apparently not.

The winners

When contractors' failures come to light, privatisation's defenders step forward to say that we shouldn't let the odd slip up blind us to the benefits of outsourcing.

Here's economist DeAnne Julius, given a 700 word advertising opportunity by the Financial Times: "It would be wrong to use the cases of G4S and Serco, and their contracts with the Ministry of Justice, to condemn the industry, especially before an investigation of the circumstances has concluded," she wrote. And:


"Using a specialist provider whose reputation and share price are on the line, commissioned and monitored by an in-house procurement team, results in higher reliability, better quality and cost savings – it is better than doing it yourself. It’s a hat-trick too good for the public sector to pass up, especially when money is tight."

Where's the evidence?

The FT describes Julius as "a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee" who "led the Public Services Industry Review (2008) for the department for business".

They neglected to mention her part-time directorships — at Serco (the outsourcer), at Roche Holdings (healthcare and pharmaceuticals), at Jones Lang LaSalle (global real estate), at Deloitte (the Big Swinging Dicks of PFI).

Ruby McGregor-Smith become chair of the CBI's Public Services Strategy Board last year, not long after she'd scooped that £730,000 windfall. “UK business plays a hugely important role in delivering many public services around the country," she said. And:

"It is crucial, at a time when private provision is under intense scrutiny, that we demonstrate the positive impact that the private sector can make in transforming services and generating value for taxpayers through greater competition."

Four years ago she was one of 35 business leaders invited to sign a letter in the Daily Telegraph, urging Chancellor George Osborne to cut public services. Reducing the budget deficit quickly, they claimed, would "deliver a healthier and more stable economy".

They said: "everyone knows that when you have a debt problem, delaying the necessary action will make it worse not better."

The BBC's Robert Peston noted: "there is a whole school of economists . . . who would describe that statement as laughable."

Nick Buckles, ex-G4S

Austerity politics creates work for outsourcers regardless of whether they do things more efficiently than the public sector, or not. The PFI model that accountants have dreamed up keeps capital spending off the government's balance sheet, making the official budget deficit smaller. Pushing public money into private hands shrinks the state and weakens organised labour.

Who gains?

The big accountancy firms who frame the contracts that serve taxpayers so badly are reckoned to have made £1 billion in fees from the Private Finance Initiative.

The winners include management consultants like McKinsey.

And politicians who have taken fees, donations or directorships — like Michael Gove, (Christofferson Robb & Company), Lord Reid (G4S), Alan Milburn (PricewaterhouseCoopers), Virginia Bottomley (Bupa), Lord Darzi (GE Healthcare) . . .

Capita's founder, Rod Aldridge, lent the Labour Party £1 million.

Who gains? Civil servants like David Griffiths. He led the government's review of "probation efficiency", developed the commissioning policy, then jumped ship, becoming director of probation and community services at G4S.

Chris Hyman, ex-Serco

Financier David Metter has made more than £80 million for himself. He owns or co-owns 28 NHS hospitals, 269 schools, the Ministry of Defence HQ, a Scottish motorway and a Welsh jail, according to the Daily Telegraph. (The chief apologist for PFI, here he is running rings around flatfooted MPs on the Public Accounts Committee).

Who gains? The accountants who run the outsource companies: G4S's chief executive Nick Buckles built a fortune of more than £20 million before the fraud scandal forced him out last year. Serco's departed multimillionaire chief executive Chris Hyman (Ruby's former boss) races Ferraris for fun.

Capita's chief executive Paul Pindar trousered £8.5 million last year after cashing in £6 million worth of shares to fund his divorce. He retired last week, to "establish a portfolio of private equity opportunities".

Austerity pays.

Ruby McGregor-Smith's £730,000 windfall is unlikely to be her last. On top of her £1.5 million-a-year, and assuming Mitie's share price keeps rising, this year she is due another mighty windfall. Next year, same again . . .

__________________

Liked this piece? Please donate to OurKingdom here to help keep us producing independent journalism. Thank you.

Thanks to Phil Miller, Tamasin Cave, Jeremy Fox and They Work for You.

Ruby McGregor-Smith's remuneration details appear on pages 52 & 54 of Mitie's Annual Report & Accounts 2013 (PDF here). Her "nil cost" share trade is noted in director dealing records here.

Reprinted with permission from openDemocracy.