2. Private companies provide services to the military. What risks are associated with relying on private support in a war situation? Successive UK Governments used to provide public services but outsourcing of them to private companies has become an important feature of the neoliberal state. In Britain, the system was introduced by Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister and expanded by PM Tony Blair. ‘A quarter of the 60,940 outsourcing contracts signed by the government went to 29 big companies’ (Anon, 2018b).

Large companies such as Serco, Capita and G4S often further subcontact work to smaller companies.

Outsourcing provides support services to education, emergency services, health, security, care and justice amongst other parts of the state. Outsourcing amounts to about 11 per cent of the UK’s GDP and has been exported to America, France and the Netherlands. Neoliberalism advocates reducing the state and organizing services around private enterprise in a market economy (Monbiot, 2019). The private sector, it is argued, can provide services more economically, stimulate innovation and improve efficiency, but failures, scandals and fiascos in the outsourced sector led the British Labour Party in Opposition to advocate bringing many public contracts in-house to stop ‘ripoff’ companies from ‘fleecing’ the public

(Anon, 2018b).