Offending Management

Those efficient G4S people, who took over the running of HM Prison Birmingham five years ago, have got everything so shipshape that riots have broken out and personnel from the hated public sector have had to be called in to help restore order. In keeping with the prevailing religious doctrine, which specifies that all forms of employment for which the Government does not wish to pay are merely a matter of sitting around, being paid and waiting to collect the platinum-plated pension (see also teachers, nurses, junior doctors and train drivers), those efficient G4S people abolished ninety-eight staff posts at their new warehouse and cut the salary for new recruits. At the moment, they are advertising to fill twenty-five full-time prison officer roles for which no previous qualifications or experience are required, much like the role of Secretary of State for Justice. The present incumbent in that exalted office, whose illustrious predecessors include such worthies as the book-banning Chris Graybeing and the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove, has followed her forebears' lead in ignoring repeated warnings about a gathering crisis, on the grounds that any crisis to which further privatisation is not the answer cannot really be a crisis at all. She has also promised a thorough investigation of this particular symptom, and the full force of the law for the malefactors responsible, because Westminster religious orthodoxy also dictates that the most effective treatment for lung cancer is to stifle the coughs.