From Private Eye, the otherwise barely-reported story of the recent Treasury paper underlying the UK government's renewed commitment to more! bigger! better! PFI, which draws on the 'analysis' of PFI fee-farmers PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG etc.

    It has screwed scores of hospital budgets, snarled up the school building process and lumbered taxpayers with billions of pounds of hidden debts, yet the private finance initiative continues to thrive.  Why?

Last year's Royal Mail strikes responsded to an ongoing attack on postal workers' conditions, the origins of which can be traced directly to the competitve, 'harmonized' market being gradually introduced under the EU Postal Directives of 1997 and 2002.  The threatened closure of post offices across the UK also falls within the Directives' market logic.  (It remains to be seen if local post office user campaigns, whose bandwagon now groans under the weight of Ken Livingstone and a posse of embarrassed/embarrassing Labour MPs, will manage to organize in solidarity w

From Private Eye, a brief update on the lie detector system soon to be used across the UK on suspected 'benefit thieves'*, i.e. all claimants.  The system comes from Mossad, but what's really alarming is that it is administered by scorched-earth PFI war machine Capita.
*NB. Readers with no sympathy for 'benefit thieves' have come to the wrong website.

Outsourcing
LIE OF THE LAND

Lie–detector technology developed by Mossad for interrogating suspeted Palestinian terrorists is being used in British Jobcentres.

On the pretext of a child sexual abuse crisis in Australia’s Northern Territory the Howard government passed emergency legislation and prepared a land invasion of aboriginal areas by police, doctors and the army. Elizabeth Povinelli locates this latest state of exception in a wider neoliberal project to impose work and austerity. Images and text box by Benedict Seymour

                               Free Software
                         Toni Prug, toni@irational.org
                                August 13, 2007

The vulnerability of illegalised workers forces them to accept the worst pay and conditions and produces conflict within the working class as a whole. Here Seemab Gul examines how the production of this illegality is the main goal of the UK’s immigration laws