Carillion: When private service providers keep proving so inept and unethical, how can we be asked to back privatisation?

Photograph: Future site of the Library of Birmingham, from 2009, by Elliott Brown (License) (Cropped)

Carillion, a services behemoth, has collapsed. With it, it takes billions in government contracts and puts tens of thousands of jobs at risk. The construction and services company accrued £1.5bn in debt - of which £600m was owed to it's pension fund.

Fortunately, despite Carillion's own recklessness, the Pension Protection Fund (PPF) has stepped in to assure workers that their pensions will be protected - despite the complete failure of the company to meet it's commitments to workers.

However, numerous government projects, and smaller businesses to whom Carillion outsourced work, face an uncertain future. A result of what David Lammy described as, "privatise profits when things go well and nationalise risks so the taxpayer picks up the bill when things go wrong".

This government has tried to convince us of, or slip past us, a privatisations agenda, trusting private companies in the public sector. But how cane we back privatisation, when private sector providers keep proving so inept and unethical?

Carillion is not the only major private concern, even in the past year, to go bust and to do so revealing a massive pensions deficit - having taken profits for executive pay, but left workers' futures in peril, in what must surely be a major ethical breach.

When the steel industry nearly collapsed with the Tata Steel decision to close it's plants, workers' pensions were a huge block on a deal to save the industry. Incoming buyers did not want to take on responsibility for the pensions.

The unwillingness of private sector companies to take up their responsibilities in this case left workers with steel pensions in uncertain circumstances, where they have been prey to financial advice groups - now under investigation over their predatory behaviour.

The thing is, the government isn't just pushing privatisation for services, but for things like social insurance and pensions. It wants us all to do these things on personal, private terms, rather than in big collective government funds.

Yet, how can we trust the government's much vaunted workplace pensions scheme, when private companies treat workers' pensions as the first thing to drop when their isn't enough money for every commitment the company has made.

And what about Virgin? A global corporation that bitterly scraps for government contracts, even to the point of suing commissioners when they don't get them - suing parts of a cherished health service in financial distress. It was later awarded a huge contract, to much public outcry.

The government must now move to salvage what it can of Carillion, nationalising projects and departments to keep their vital work going and keep people employed. But what shape that takes is yet to be seen.

The speculation is that the government will continue to it's neoliberal trend of nationalising failure and debt, while returning the profitable parts to the private sector for executives to enjoy the benefits.

It would be refreshing to see something. Like the private sector picking up the tab for it's colossal failure? Yeah, right. Perhaps less fanciful would be consolidating parts of Carillion into a cooperative, run by it's workers?

As a cooperative, the still functional, still profitable parts could serve workers. The profits would deliver dividends for the workers, that would be of direct benefit their communities.

Whatever the government chooses to do, take note. This is one of those 'true colours' moments, where the rhetoric is paper transparently thin and the tropes are well known, enough to allow us to see what the governing party really values.

May's foreign policy has the contradictions, nuances and cynicism of the twentieth century and it's alienating a generation who want fair, earnest and ethical government

Demonstrators in London turnout in large numbers to show that the Trump brand of exclusion isn't welcome. Photograph: Women's March London, 21 January 2017 by David Holt (License) (Cropped)

Prime Minister Theresa May's past week looks like the scary version of life after Brexit. To Washington, to play chief diplomatic sycophant to Trump. Then off to Turkey to sell Erdogan some British manufactured arms.

Diplomacy has always been about picking friends carefully. That has often meant making unsavoury friends and condemning the more reasonable ones. But now, more than ever, striking that delicate balance must account for the public.

Diplomacy and foreign policy is an art practised as far inside the 'corridors of power', and as far away from the citizens on the street, as any element of government. That cannot continue. It needs to change.

It is no longer sustainable for the Prime Minister to jet jet off around the world to gladhand, and do deals with, leaders who have human rights questions - inadequately answered - hanging over them.

In the US, Trump has the lowest approval ratings in history (Carlsen, 2017), and has faced protests against nearly every policy he has announced in his first two weeks - not just in the US, but around the world. But May is there on business.

May wants to talk trade, wants an exclusive deal. The trouble is that any deal is likely to be disadvantageous to all but American corporations and fraught with many of the same problems as EU-US trade talks: TTIP, food quality standards, private competition in healthcare (Umunna, 2017).

And what about Erdogan? The backlash from the PM's visit to America had not settled down when she arrived in Turkey, almost unnoticed in the furore, to sign a £100m deal for fighter jets (BBC, 2017).

The UK's cynical role in the arms trade has already caused a lot of controversy, waved away with denials, bluster and the promise of jobs. The UK-Saudi relationship has been a frequent embarrassment and horror - from the suppression of women's rights (Withnall, 2016) to, and particularly apt for May's visit to Turkey, British arms being used in the ongoing war in Yemen (Graham-Harrison, 2016).

In Turkey, 140,000 people rounded up, academics fired, and journalists suppressed or arrested, in a consolidation of power following last year's attempted coup (Lowen, 2017).

That these are likely to be the UK's new and enduring friends after leaving the European Union, as the UK scrambles to accumulate trade cash, will not endear Britain's new horizon to progressives.

It will be even harder to comprehend for many of the younger people who are turning out to protest, even many into their thirties, who did not grow up amidst the nuance and cynicism of twentieth century international politics.

Their formative years were under the governments of Bush and Blair. They saw dodgy dossiers lead to invasions, lead to countries collapsing, lead to extended occupations, lead to the selfish, almost gleeful, extraction of fossil fuels while all hell broke loose - and then the subsequent rise of terrorism.

It's not a mystery what these young people, whose views on international relations were formed in the years, want: ethical government. To be represented honestly. That's why Theresa May's visits to Trump, to Erdogan, can set people aflame and launch protest movements.

When Britain preaches its values one moment, threatens to withdraw from international human rights agreements and undermines the independence of the judiciary in another, then jets off for smiles and handshakes with the oppressors of minorities in the next, it is hard to find consistency.

Trump promises America First, and May to make a success of Brexit, but that sense of narrow interest belies the reality that many people now have broader horizons and greater empathy. This national-level cognitive dissonance, between the official voice and the citizens, will be expressed today in more protests.

Across Britain, Theresa May's foreign policy will face protests in solidarity with Muslims everywhere and with refugees who flee from violence and oppression just to be labelled and shunned by official acts of exclusion. And those demonstrations will carry with them the progressive call for the idea of a government, and international relations, based on deals that are fair and ethical.