Tag Archives: business

Would you take a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions tour of your town to see who invests in genocidal Israel?

A lamppost sticker promoting boycott, divestment and sanctions.

Spotted on ‘X’ (formerly Twitter):

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What do you think? Is this a good idea?

Would you take a BDS tour to find out who in your locality supports Israel’s genocide of Gaza?


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A German government is supporting genocide – again. Has it learned nothing?

Germany has made a statement in support of Israel’s defence against the genocide charge it has faced in the International Court of Justice.

The hypocrisy of a nation that – having committed the most infamous genocide in history – supports another nation doing the same has not gone unnoticed.

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It would be easy to say that Germany’s stance is based on historic guilt over the Holocaust – but it seems there is in fact a business interest informing this statement:

Sadly, it seems Germany’s statement is doubly unacceptable because it has a history of genocides including against one of the nations that supported South Africa’s charge:

The full statement is well worth reading.

I look forward to finding out how the German government digs its way out of this hole.


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As Jeremy Hunt prepares his autumn budget, are his own finances what they should be?

Jeremy Hunt: he seems to be looking after himself very well. What about the rest of us?

Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is preparing to announce his autumn budget for we mere mortals on Wednesday, curious information is emerging about his own financial affairs.

Treat this with caution as even the author says Hunt could provide information that invalidates it… but take a look at this:

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The part about the inflationary increases on his flats certainly suggests foul play by the Chancellor.

And we’ll await with baited breath his information on charity donations.

Something to bear in mind while listening to him tell us how the government is going to affect our own savings and spending?


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The big Tory lie: new North Sea gas and oil might not even come back to the UK

Grant Shapps: he likes to spout a lot of nonsense from his base in Welwyn Hatfield (this image is from a BBC interview in 2020) but he’s not so smooth when faced with an interviewer who has checked the facts before talking to him.

The 100 new contracts granted by Rishi Sunak for energy companies to drill for gas and oil in the North Sea do not mean those fossil fuels will be used in the UK, as he falsely claimed.

The drilling will be done by commercial firms who will then sell the fossil fuels they find on the international market. Some of it may come back to the UK but most of it probably won’t.

Here are the facts, presented by Sky’s Jayne Secker to a spluttering Grant Shapps:

Notice how he tried to change the subject when the facts were presented to him?

Oh, these substances have to go to the UK because they are processed here. But that doesn’t mean they are used here.

Oh, but not all of them are used for fuel. Some are turned into plastics. But plastic pollution is harming the planet as badly as global warming.

Oh, but some of it is used for medical devices within the NHS. But that’s a tiny amount that would not justify the granting of any more drilling licences.

It seems ever-more-clear that the new licences are more likely to be a way for Sunak to corruptly reward companies like BP for signing contracts with his father-in-law’s firm Infosys than to improve the UK’s energy security.

If Sunak and/or his government wish to deny this, then there is a simple way to clear the air:

Let’s have an independent public inquiry into the awarding of these contracts: what they are intended to do; the way they have been presented to the public; what the actual consequences are likely to be – and who benefits?


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Starmer party is too ‘timid’ to challenge far-right claims or offer alternatives. Why?

Starmer and Sunak: perhaps the reason there’s little difference between them and their parties is that they are chasing sponsorship from big business for their own personal gain, rather than doing what the public pays them to do – which is find solutions to the problems being created by the firms they are courting.

Economist Richard Murphy has published a column highlighting concerns that Keir Starmer’s STP (Substitute Tory Party – formerly Labour) is too “timid” to challenge right-wing claims about immigration, climate change or anything else, or to articulate an alternative vision.

He suggests three reasons for this:

Is it that they spent too much time watching Top Gear over the years and now live in fear of that culture?

Could it be that they have a deep-seated insecurity when it comes to standing up to the interests of big business when the latter so clearly want what the country does not?

Or is that they simply do not do ideology-based politics and so go where the money is, with money filling the vacuum where their convictions should be?

It comes down to the same thing. Starmer has decided to do what the Tories always do: chase the cash that comes from big corporate sponsorship for his own personal gain.

The national interest can go hang, as far as he is concerned.

I’m willing to bet we’ll find evidence of this if we have a look around. Or have you found some already?


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The news in tweets: Monday, July 3, 2023

Tory tactics: remove large amounts of funding, then give back a little and tell you how grateful to be

Labour promises to have a ‘really good relationship’ with businesses that are ripping us off…

… and here’s what firms that have been ripping us off have done with the money

Civil servant broke rules in discussion about job with Labour Party – but it had no effect on her work

It turns out that the fuss over Sue Gray, who led a Cabinet Office inquiry into Partygate, talking with Labour about taking a job there was about nothing, after all. She broke the rules, but none of her work was affected, and certainly not her Partygate inquiry, which was long-finished by the time she began her discussions with Keir Starmer’s crew.

This is a non-story. If the mass media go big on it, you’ll know they’re hiding something else.


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We’ve been told lies about Thames Water’s profits – and the cost of cleaning the sewage

This is now proved true: in a bid to save privatised water firms’ profits, the Tory government is asking them to spend less money on cleaning our water than is needed to do the job. You will drink dirty water; it will make you sick.

Earlier today, This Site reported that Thames Water – the privatised water firm that is in danger of collapse – has not paid any dividends to shareholders in six years.

That was the best information available to This Writer at the time.

However, new information has come to light:

Economist Richard Murphy has examined the finances of all the privatised water companies, and has come back with several conclusions:

  • Their operating profit margin is a staggeringly-high 35 per cent. From this, we may conclude that there is no reason for Thames Water to be in danger of insolvency.
  • Every single penny they have made in profit has been paid out to shareholders in dividends. None was reinvested in infrastructure or equipment (borrowing paid for equipment and the infrastructure was ignored). So Tories like those on the BBC’s Politics Live on June 28 were wrong when they said money has been invested in improving infrastructure. We can’t say they were lying because they may have been misinformed, but someone definitely lied to them.

Mr Murphy’s conclusion on this is stark: “The public is being fleeced by these companies who are simply treating the fact that the English consumer has had no choice as to who to buy water from as a means to extract profit from them.

But that’s not all!

  • The industry has made investments – £77bn on equipment, the rest on other financial investments. This has been funded mostly by borrowing, with £13bn coming from shareholders. This means the claim (when water was privatised) that private capital would fund water after privatisation was nonsense gibberish; it is being funded by borrowing.
  • Mr Murphy’s figures show £13bn invested by shareholders, who have received £25bn in dividends, meaning that for every pound they have put into the industry, they have received nearly two pounds in return.

Finally:

  • It is clear that the water companies are environmentally insolvent. This means their business structures are not sustainable in terms of reducing pollution and if they are made to put in the necessary money to do so, they will go bankrupt.

What this means, of course is that the water firms have been polluting the UK’s waterways to a staggering extent. I’ll republish the part of Mr Murphy’s thread that covers this, so you have it straight from the horse’s mouth:

In simple language: because they decided to take their massively-overinflated profits for themselves rather than invest them in improving the sewage system, the water companies and their shareholders have created a problem that will cost £260 billion to solve – and if they are made to shell out that money now, they will all go out of business.

The government is therefore asking them to pay slightly more than one-fifth of that amount – but as a result, your water supply will be polluted by the sewage and other rubbish that the water companies have pumped into the ecosystem.

This means the Conservative government – and you need to bear it in mind if you have a Tory MP – has said that it is happy for you to be made ill by polluted or infected water, in order to allow privatised water firms to continue making a profit.

The answer to all this, of course, is re-nationalisation.

Ah, but the government says this is too expensive, because of the cost of buying out the shareholders!

Is it, though?

Mr Murphy says no compensation should be offered to shareholders at all, because they have behaved in an irresponsible way that means it will cost more money to fix the problems they have created than they originally paid to own their parts of these firms.

He adds that providers of loans to the water firms may have to take a hit as well, because they made bad decisions in lending to these companies.

The Tories in government are unlikely to accept this because, even though it is in line with a basic principle of business that if you invest in something unprofitable, you lose money, it diverges from their strategy in privatising water in the first place: that the profits would go to private shareholders and it is the losses that will be paid for by the public and customers.

Mr Murphy makes another excellent suggestion – which is that, because the water industry will need to be supported with borrowed funds, it should issue water bonds to the public via ISAs. You could save in a way that ensures we get clean water in the future.

I appreciate that this is a lot of information but it is very important information that could affect your health, and that of your family and children in the future.

So please share this article to ensure the information in it is seen by as many people as possible.


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Keep track of corporations that break the law with this handy tool

Sewage dumping: it’s the most visible example of corporate rule violations in the UK right now – but not the only one.

This is another public service announcement:

The site’s introductory statement says:

Violation Tracker UK is the first wide-ranging database of enforcement actions brought against companies by government regulators in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

It contains more than 80,000 cases involving issues such as financial misconduct, workplace abuses, environmental offences and anti-competitive practices.

It combines cases resolved since 2010 from over 50 regulatory agencies. Violation Tracker is produced by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First.

This Writer would guess that Prem Sikka has found Violation Tracker UK because of his interest in infringements by the privatised water companies.

But now that he has found and publicised it, we can use it to check up on anyone we like, including privatised utilities and companies owned by political donors.

Feel free to give it a go – and let us know about any really shocking breaches you find!


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Is this the reason Keir Starmer is so timid about the economy?

Funded by private business: Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves both receive donations from private businesses, and it is reasonable to conclude that they receive advice (let’s call it that) from those people too. Given that they don’t seem to have much personal understanding of how the economy works, this may be the reason they are now following right-wing, Establishment, ideas that will help billionaires and crush people like you.

That rising star of left-wing journalism Grace Blakely has written an interesting piece for Tribune, stating that Keir Starmer is too timid to run the UK economy for the people – basically because he doesn’t know enough about it.

Starmer relies on his economic advisers, she says, and they adhere to right-wing dogma that prioritises the rich over the poor:

It is no longer radical to argue that the UK economy requires deep, structural transformation. With the power to set taxes, levels of public spending, wages in the public sector, and regulation in the private sector, the British state is the only institution capable of enacting such a transformation… The British electorate is in favour of a radical shift in economic policy.  

Keir Starmer is undoubtedly a timid and conservative leader… His expert advisers inform him, allegedly objectively, which kinds of policies would be good for ‘the economy’, and he rigidly adheres to their advice.

Without ever providing any evidence, policymakers will state that ‘the economy’ requires tax cuts, or public spending cuts, or deregulation. Experts will nod along and, without the ability to challenge them, most people will simply accept their word as gospel. 

And the policies these ‘experts’ promote just so happen to privilege the interests of the already wealthy while eroding the power of the working classes.

An example of this in action is the National Health Service. When he was campaigning to be Labour leader in 2020, Starmer said he would follow Jeremy Corbyn’s policy to increase income tax on the top five per cent of earners.

This would allow more spending – for example, on the NHS. But now Starmer has rowed back on this pledge, despite the fact that it would help re-balance the economy, which the Tories have tilted to give more money to billionaires:

And now we learn that he’s giving a speech today (Monday, May 22, 2023) saying that the NHS doesn’t need more money – he thinks it is “not serious” to suggest that the NHS’s current issues can be fixed solely with more money.

He won’t say how he’ll change the way the NHS works in order to fix those issues, though – probably because he doesn’t know.

His favoured solution is to bring in more privatisation – as advocated by his Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting.

Why does he say this? Would it be unreasonable to suggest that it is because they are both receiving donations from private firms that make a profit from the UK’s health industry?

Private companies don’t make donations to MPs without wanting something in return; we all know that – right?

And if you think that’s bad, what about the money going to MPs so they can employ staff and pay for “office costs”? If private firms or donors are paying this money, are they dictating who gets the jobs – putting their own people in a position to advise our MPs?

If so, then we should be deeply concerned that almost half of the £1 million that has gone to MPs for this purpose was given to just four Labour MPs – including Streeting.

Another major beneficiary is Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves.

With so much apparent influence from business people promoting their own selfish interests, is it any wonder that Starmer and his cronies are toeing the Establishment line, rather than supporting the radical, transformative policies of his forerunner Jeremy Corbyn?

Source: How Starmer Abandoned Left-Wing Economics


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Former Grenfell MP quits Labour, saying she’s ‘not welcome here’

Emma Dent Coad: even when she was the Labour MP for Kensington she said, ‘We’re feeling marginalised and neutralised.’

The woman who represented the residents of Grenfell Tower after an entirely-preventable fire involving flammable cladding gutted the building and killed 72 people has quit her political party, saying she feels “not welcome here”.

This Writer remembers Emma Dent Coad as being absolutely committed to the well-being – and, indeed, protection – of the survivors of the Grenfell blaze.

She was a Labour MP, and in the 2019 general election that was presented to the public as a huge defeat for that party, she was one of those who lost their seats – but in her case it was by a tiny margin of 150 votes. That probably reflects her commitment to the community, even in a Tory landslide.

And in her absence, how has the Labour leadership treated the Grenfell survivors?

Well, here’s what she had to say about it:

with many North Kensington residents acutely aware of the nationwide cladding scandal, and indeed in contact with campaigners around the country, we were shocked to read that the Labour leader had accepted over £1000 worth of tickets to a football game, from Mullaley, a contractor fined over £10m for works on high-rise buildings in Portsmouth in a case very similar to Grenfell, using flammable insulation and very poor construction standards. For many it was a slap in the face, the kind of antics we expect from senior Tory Cabinet members, not the Labour leader.

It gets worse, though:

When our Group of Councillors refused to allow publication of a public statement challenging this outrage, as it would upset the leader, I saw that sadly they were right. We could, as a Labour Group, be suspended, and London Region would be delighted to do so.

This realisation has been just one more straw in a very long line of last straws for me.

She was saying that the Labour group on Kensington and Chelsea Council is unable to represent its constituents properly for fear of saying something that will provoke the anger of party leader Keir Starmer – and precipitate one of the purges for which he is becoming, rightly, infamous.

That’s no way to represent people.

So you can understand why she said the following:

After a great deal of soul-searching, I decided to resign from the Labour Party as of today, 27th April 2023. I’ve been a member for nearly 40 years, and in that time I’ve been a critical friend, but have always felt part of the broad church of the labour movement. I have campaigned for every leader, London Mayor and parliamentary candidate. That is loyalty.

Sadly I no longer feel welcome in the party. Members who campaign for peace, against nuclear weapons, in support of refugees, for equity to reduce inequalities, for an end to the persecution of Palestinian civilians by Israeli military forces, are being hunted down and forced out or expelled.

When a million people protested against the Iraq War, no one was suspended or expelled from the Labour Party. Our MP at the time was Karen Buck, and I know she had a difficult conversation with Blair, but he didn’t force her out.

Today, no more broad church. No more armies of inspired students to help door-knocking. Not welcome here.

It is simply incomprehensible that the Party which created the world’s first National Health Service is now complicit in destroying it, while some senior members of the Party are accepting funds from the private health care industry – and hospitality from contractors involved in the cladding scandal. How can the Party of the workforce refuse to stand by the right to strike? How can the Party that set up the welfare state penalize benefit recipients?

We have video of the next bit:

I doubt that Keir Starmer could care less.

But he should.

The criticisms Ms Dent Coad voiced above will hit home for many people reading this article – and could be relevant to many, many more if they have a chance to hear them.

“No more broad church. No more armies of inspired students to help door-knocking. Not welcome here.

“The party which created the world’s first National Health Service is now complicit in destroying it.

“Senior members of the party are accepting funds from the private health care industry – and hospitality from contractors involved in the cladding scandal.

“How can the Party of the workforce refuse to stand by the right to strike?

“How can the Party that set up the welfare state penalize benefit recipients?”

Those are all relevant today, but Starmer seems complacent. He thinks left-wingers simply have nowhere else to go.

He might be proved right next week. I guess it depends on how many people hear what Emma Dent Coad has said – and stop to think about it.

Source: Not welcome here – Labour Hub


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