Gee, for that we coulda done it ourselves, yes?

If you haven't followed the G4S/Olympic security story, you can get a sense of it many places, such as in this story: London Olympics' security woes overshadow questions about how much is too much?. It's about the outsourcing of security services for the London Olympics to a company that boasts 600,000 employees but failed to get the 10,-20,000 it promised and needed for the job.

A timely warning about dogma and outsourcing

Consider what this fiasco means for the members of the armed forces, who learnt this week that thousands of army jobs are to go in the next few years, men returning from duty in Afghanistan who are now being told they must stand in where a private company has failed to fulfil a contract. The people who appear to be angriest of all are the chief constables. They, too, face the loss of thousands of staff, yet they are being asked to provide cover for a firm being handsomely paid to do a job that the police will usually do for far less.

For purposes of comparison, the nation's highest-paid policeman, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, was paid £260,088 in 2011. The Chief of Defence Staff was paid £240,000. Mr Buckles's pay was recorded in the company's accounts as £830,000, but that does not include bonuses and extras which will have taken his total packet to around £1.2m. He is paid four times as much as the heads of the armed forces and police who must now dig his company out of this mess.

The one thing that can be said in G4S's defence is that it was originally contracted to provide 6,500 security staff, a figure that was revised upwards at the end of last year to an alarming total of 23,000. That was a massive task, but the company undertook to do it and, according to the Home Secretary, Theresa May, gave no warning until 11 July that it was in difficulty.

Mr Buckles told MPs that he did not know until 3 July. As recently as 6 July, G4S's account manager for the Games, Ian Horseman-Sewell, told Reuters that the firm would be able to handle an event in Australia at the same time as guarding the Olympics.

A bigger political question is about outsourcing, under which private companies are hired to perform tasks previously undertaken by the State in the belief that they will do a better job. There certainly are circumstances in which private firms subject to market discipline outperform agencies of the State – but this has not been one of them. It provides a salutary warning to those who hold an ideological conviction that private is necessarily good, and public necessarily bad.

Finally, there is the question of G4S's £57m fee. "Even after all that has happened, you still want to claim the management fee? I find that astonishing," the Home Affairs Committee chairman, Keith Vaz, exclaimed yesterday. Mr Buckles responded that he did.