Police unions launch petition to force rethink over plan to offer services to G4S (From Watford Observer)

whilst we have a Tory government every state owned assset is at risk of being sold off or privatised even as the harsh reality of privatisation and state owned sell offs from the Thatcher years are coming back to haumt us .i.e high energy bills from foreign owned utility companies,extortiona
te train fares with very poor service from private rail companies, school playing fields been sold off to developers, schools been sold off to devlelopers, You could even go as far as to say that todays benefits culture is an exact result of Thatchers actions in the 80's i.e when she closed the coal mines, all them people in them towns had work! them towns were built around the mining industry and she closed them down overnight,suddenly untold amounts of people were now long term unemployed and so too were there children when they grew to working age, then people soon worked out that incapacity paid out better for longer this ideology spread nationwide and the legacy still stands today with untold amounts of people living off benefits and today we have old people dying in their homes in winter to scared or to skint to turn on the heating because the foreign energy companies that own our utility companies are rinsing us for every penny and this when Britains biggest mineral reserve of coal sits untapped , ok rant over but the police asisted cold heartedly in enforcing these past policys when people tried to defend their jobs during the strkies, but now the wolves are at their own door!

I have just attempted to visit the web site www.petitionbuzz.com
/petitions/hertspoli
ceunison mentioned in the article above but I have viewed a message, "Petition doesn't exist." Can this be checked out?

John Dowdle wrote:
I have just attempted to visit the web site www.petitionbuzz.com

/petitions/hertspoli

ceunison mentioned in the article above but I have viewed a message, "Petition doesn't exist." Can this be checked out?

Works fine for me!!

G4S should never be trusted to do anything ever again, they are a total disgrace and have always been.

No doubt the G4S top dog is a bum chum of a Government top dog, hence being able to constantly screw up every contract they are given and still get more contracts.

After a further attempt at signing the e-petition, I now find it is working. I do not know why it did not work before.
My reason for signing the e-petition is not just because of the mess that G4S made of providing Olympic security but because I am aware of the fact that they also provide staff for prisons in Israel, in which young Palestinian children are routinely held without charge for months - even years - on end and where Israeli "interrogators" (torturers?) routinely employ inhuman and degrading treatment, such as threats of rape - to "question" the children. One youngster was held in solitary confinement for 57 days in a G4S-administered prison facility.
G4S are complicit in war crimes in the Middle East. Are they really the right sort of people to be taking over policing functions in our country?
Another aspect which concerns me is that from November we will have new Police Commissioners who will have been elected to the post. If these changes are introduced before the new Commissioners are elected, it will effectively forestall democratic accountability for policing performance in this particular back office area. The contracting of G4S represents an anti-democratic move on the part of the existing bureaucracy in County Hall. With some degree of democratic accountability in sight, it seems they are hell bent on diminishing that democratic accountability in this and any other areas they can think of.
We all need to wake up and think carefully about these changes and what they mean for all our futures.
If we are not careful, we may find ourselves sleepwalking into a fascist corporate state which will be much worse than a police state, with even less chance of remedying it, as these private operators will be beyond democratic recall.

I'm sure it all comes down to cost, but I can't help feeling that instead of retiring front line police from the force completely when they get too old to run around, they should be doing the office jobs.

LSC wrote:
I'm sure it all comes down to cost, but I can't help feeling that instead of retiring front line police from the force completely when they get too old to run around, they should be doing the office jobs.

This has to to be a better idea than G4S and probably would reassure people as well

Agree 100% LSC. I'd go a bit further though: Make all Plod work until the national retirement age. If they want retirement at age 52 fair enough but tell them they must wait until aged 67 before they can draw their very agreeable pensions which we taxpayers lavish upon them.
Plod: Underworked and overpaid.
Cue: "How would you like to face thugs on a Friday night........

The jobs at risk from this are Police Support Staff not officers - They are unable to retire until 65 and are a lot lower paid - Police Officers are safe and are unable to be made redundant so the lower paid police staff are taking the brunt.