Image via WikipediaBy Clare Sambrook
At the bustling Counter Terror Expo in London’s Olympia this week they are giving top billing to the security industry’s favourite politician. ‘The most experienced cabinet minister of modern times’, they call him: Dr John Reid.
Home office colleagues say Reid — Labour hard man, former secretary of state for health and defence, and home secretary — is the minister who brought business in from the cold. These days relations are warm and cosy. Marketing their wares as vital to the war on terror, while dreaming up everyday applications for intrusive high security kit, Reid’s friends have quietly advanced deep into the public sector — running schools, GP clinics and police investigations.
Out of government but still a serving MP, Reid has been taking £50,000 a year from G4S — the Group 4 Securicor giant.
He has been hosting ‘business breakfasts’, and talking up the scary threats and looming crises — cyber attacks, pandemics, global warming, energy shortages, mass migration — that spell opportunity to his friends.
(They’ve made him honorary professor at the shadowy new Institute of Security and Resilience, at University College London; staff aren’t allowed to say whether industry is paying the bills.)
Life is good for G4S whose annual revenues have doubled to £6 billion in the past five years. Last month they picked up contracts for guarding foreign office buildings in the UK and in Afghanistan. They can afford to pay chief executive Nick Buckles (pictured) £3,835 every day.
G4S — slogan ‘Securing Your World’ — runs prisons, secure training centres and immigration centres including Tinsley House, where last year an asylum seeker who had been forcibly arrested and locked up, let go, arrested and locked up again, got predictably distressed — she was only ten years old — and tried to strangle herself.
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