Investors were right to sell Carillion shares when they spotted trouble ahead

The fallout from Carillion’s bankruptcy spreads in slow motion — just as the outsourcing and construction giant’s finances gradually stretched to breaking point over the months before it went down in January. The company’s auditor, KPMG, was rightly under the spotlight this week. But the impact on the ground seems to have been less disruptive than early reports predicted. Receivers have made 1,000 redundancies but have re-let many contracts, securing thousands of other jobs. Construction of the £335 million Royal Liverpool Hospital — one of the overrunning contracts that contributed to Carillion’s cash crisis — won’t now be completed this year, but outsourced services in many other places have been seamlessly reorganised.

The attention of politicians who regard outsourcing as Satan’s work has accordingly focused less on the plight of workers and service users and more on which set of capitalist lackeys to lambast: the overpaid bosses, the eye-off-the-ball accountants, the easy-lending bankers or the footloose shareholders.