I’m not saying I’m aligning with Bywire or any of the opinions expressed there, but I do think that simply drawing attention to the independent media is a good step forward.
Watch it for yourself, and maybe give some attention to the other sites mentioned.
Let’s break out of our ghetto!
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How nice to see that economic expert* Simon Wren-Lewis agrees with This Site’s appraisal of the effect on the UK of Sajid Javid’s Covid-19 policy.
In brief:
Greater strain on hospitals.
More people suffering Long Covid.
Disruption of education (mitigated by the summer holidays).
He makes an excellent point that the government has thrown away the advantages of vaccination because Boris Johnson wanted to sign a trade deal with India…
… which hasn’t happened yet.
We have a race between vaccination and the Delta variant, and the government by delaying putting India on the red list gave Delta a big head start.
This provides ideal conditions for a new variant to emerge that could seriously diminish the effectiveness of a double dose of vaccine.
So Johnson has put us in danger of being sent back to Square One, while demanding that lifting the restrictions that have saved so many of our lives will be irreversible and we’ll just have to “live with Covid” from then on.
I wonder if tribal Tory voters are still happy with their choice at the 2019 general election.
Do they even know their prime minister deliberately endangered them for the sake of a few quid?
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Covid Javid: would he be so keen to whip that mask off in a school, where absence rates due to the virus have quadrupled in the last month?
England is on course to come out of lockdown altogether on July 19 – according to Sajid Javid. There’s just one problem: Covid-19 infections are skyrocketing.
It’s not a good look for a brand-new Health Secretary – trying to gaslight a nation that is tired out after almost 18 months of lies, denials, excuses, self-justifications and, worst of all, false promises.
But on June 28, Javid stood up in the House of Commons and told us all that he could “see no reason to go beyond” that “target date” of July 19.
The rest of us can. Covid-19 infections have shot above 20,000 per day for a second day running, and are likely to pass 100,000 a day by July 19 at the current rate of increase.
Covid cases are over 22,000 today, up 70% in a week. That is 110,000 on 19 July if the trend continues.. If growth is only 50% then it is 75,000 then. And that’s when the government intends to end all Covid restrictions and declare this pandemic all over, which is insane.
Sajid Javid makes appalling judgement call in first move as new Health Secretary, recklessly proposing to lift covid restrictions on 19 July come what may, just as case numbers driven by Delta variant rising exponentially again. This is the mindset of a market fundamentalist!
— Professor Christopher Painter (@PrfChrisPainter) June 28, 2021
Javid says that’s not a problem because the number of deaths is falling. But this is to deny the fact that Covid-19 has other harmful effects.
What about the increased strain on the National Health Service?
Oh yeah, that’s right. Javid reckons the lockdown must end because we must all learn to “live with” the virus.
How perversely appropriate, then, that the first people having to learn to live with it are likely to be our generation of learners – at school.
The infection rate there is already booming after the government decided to tell our kids not to wear face masks.
More than 375,000 pupils – about one in 20 – were out of school for Covid-related reasons, up by more than 130,000 in a week according to the latest official figures.
That’s more than four times as many as at the beginning of June, when the effects of the decision to stop demanding that pupils wear masks (from May 17) started to become clear.
Hands up if you suspect your government might not give a sh*t if our kids catch Covid by the truckload. And hands up again if you suspect they might not really have a clue how dangerous "letting it rip" through schools could turn out to be. 🙌🙌
And let’s not forget that, despite what he says, Javid has already played a huge part in increasing the threat of Covid-19:
Javid says he has been frustrated at not being a minister during the pandemic because it has prevented him from playing his part in responding to the crisis. He neglects to say he made the response much harder because of the cuts he made when he was Chancellor before the crisis.
So now we see that the new boss is exactly the same as the old boss, and Javid intends the government to continue handling Covid-19 exactly as it has all along:
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He’s gone through the book of excuses – several times – but Keir Starmer still won’t take the hint and clear off if Labour loses the Batley & Spen by-election on Thursday.
That’s the message coming from Starmer’s supporters – nowhere more clearly than in a Huffington Post article that not only tries to excuse a loss that hasn’t happened yet, but tells us that Starmer will only go after the Labour Right have rigged leadership elections to ensure that party members can never elect a leader who is capable of winning a national poll.
I’d go through the article for you – but I don’t have to. Alex Nunns has done it for me:
This article is a goldmine of stupidity. The quotes from Labour MPs and officials show a bunch of people flailing around as they drown, unable to understand the situation they're in.
But amid that, it contains useful glimpses of the Labour right's aims. >https://t.co/OFkOOM0YY4
The justification? "MPs represent millions of voters, whereas party members represent only themselves."
Nah MPs get elected as Labour reps. The idea they're all brilliant individuals whose sheer talent wows voters is quickly disproved by all the quotes from MPs in this article.
Whoever gave this quote should really have kept schtum. I hope Keir reads it.
The Labour right knows he's is a dud and will dump him as soon as it's safe to. This isn't a Catch-22 for Keir—if he has any sense, which is doubtful, he won't build his own gallows. pic.twitter.com/DW2KTxxGod
This is my favourite bit. The biggest thing Keir has got going for him—the BIGGEST thing—is that he's so invisible no one knows who he is. pic.twitter.com/5epKDMr1aF
If the wider electorate has abandoned Labour, it’s because the party’s own members don’t understand that the party doesn’t represent them any more – and should be disenfranchised before they can take power away from those it now represents: suits and haircuts devoid of any policy or direction who are simply holding place to ensure the UK remains in the hands of fascists.
Centrists and right-wingers in the Labour Party are backstabbers who will ditch Starmer as soon as they think they can without turning over the leadership to a popular left-winger like Jeremy Corbyn who could win an election if current party officers were replaced by members who support what Labour originally represented.
Starmer’s supporters think that attacking left-wingers – including with mental health slurs about “loonies” and false accusations of anti-Semitism, for crying out loud – appeals to the wider electorate, even though the evidence of the last 15 months demonstrates the exact opposite. Left-wing voters aren’t stupid. They recognise a gang of shifty, treacherous liars when they see one.
The Labour Right are determined that Starmer is a prime minister-in-waiting and if the electorate disagree, then the electorate are wrong. The problem is, at a general election, it is the electorate who have the final say – not swivel-eyed right-wingers squatting in a party where they don’t belong.
Starmer’s people reckon he’ll be able to demonstrate that he’s a man of the people once lockdown ends – even though he has already proved, categorically, that he isn’t.
The reason?
Starmer’s people also reckon that his best quality is the fact that nobody knows who he is or what he stands for.
Taken as a whole, these people are so contradictory that they are committing political suicide in front of us all. And they call the Left “loonies”!
And what do we think of their excuses? Well, here’s one take:
I reckon that’s accurate – for reasons identified by Alex Nunns:
The aim of the Labour Party under right-wingers like Starmer is not to win elections; it is to keep control away from socialists who would derail their gravy train in favour of running the UK in a competent way that is fair for everyone.
So, after Starmer loses Batley & Spen, he will concentrate on rigging internal party elections to ensure that no socialist can possibly win – and on stuffing the party machine with right-wingers who will cripple the efforts of any left-winger who, by some miracle, actually succeeds anyway.
But here’s a big question:
How does he expect to convince party members to support any changes when his constant demand that he is right and they are wrong has been shown to be false all the way down the line?
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Boris Johnson: who knows how much government business the prime minister has corruptly carried out over his own personal email account, in order to hide it from your scrutiny? And before anybody says they expect honesty from the PM, let’s all remember that we all knew what he is before he won the 2019 general election.
Why is everybody making such a fuss about Matt Hancock carrying out government business on the sly via his private email account now? Tory ministers have been doing this habitually since 2011.
There can only be one reason for it, too – and that is to avoid proper and lawful scrutiny of activities that they know are not acceptable behaviour for government ministers.
Michael Gove was caught using private emails to communicate with Department for Education personnel, all the way back in 2011.
Financial Times journalist Chris Cook established that Gove and some of his special advisers (or Spads) had been using private email accounts to conduct business which appeared to many (eventually including the Information Commissioner) to be Government business. It was suggested that this had been done to avoid potential disclosure of the emails through FOI.
Did Gove receive any punishment for this? No.
Liam Fox’s personal email account was hacked by Russians in 2019 when, as International Trade Secretary, he was responsible for negotiating a trade deal with the United States.
The hackers lifted 450 pages of classified information from the account, prompting Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party to ask why Fox had been using an unsecured personal email address to carry out government business.
Has there ever been an answer to this question? No.
There have been attempts to justify the use of private emails – Tory MP Tom Tugendhat claimed in 2016 that he had received private advice from GCHQ, the government communications centre in Cheltenham, that a Gmail account would be more secure against hacking than the government’s own system.
It’s possible that he was telling the truth – after all, it has been claimed that GCHQ routinely monitors MPs’ private email accounts in any event. Alarmingly, it seems the US National Security Agency is also privy to any information gathered during these sweeps. Why?
And now we have information showing that Matt Hancock, Lord Bethell, Helen Whately and PM Boris Johnson himself have all misused their personal email accounts in order to hide business they have done as members of the government from lawful scrutiny.
You may have heard misinformation claiming that ministers are allowed to conduct some business by private email, depending on the seriousness of the matters concerned and the level of security to be applied.
This Writer heard a mealy-mouthed Tory apologist making such claims on Radio 4’s PM on June 28. They are not true.
Cabinet Office guidance clearly states that “The originator or recipient of a
communication should consider whether the information contained in it is substantive discussions or decisions generated in the course of conducting Government business and, if so, take steps to ensure the relevant information is accessible (e.g. by copying it to a government email address)”.
There is no opt-out. Any and all emails in which government business is carried out must at least be copied into the government’s email system and any failure to do so is a breach of the rules.
Sadly, the guidance note does not describe any sanctions that could be used against government ministers or officers for misuse of private email accounts to carry out government business in secret. This is a common omission that makes the rules themselves a dead letter; worthless.
In other words, while it is entirely possible that Hancock, Johnson and all the others have been corruptly hiding dirty Tory deals for more than a decade, there isn’t a damned thing that can be done to stop them.
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Sajid Javid: look at that blank-eyed stare and ask yourself whether his appointment is good for the UK – or good for the banks who employed him?
Sajid Javid is going to have to try a lot harder if he wants us to think he can do the Health Secretary job better than Matt Hancock.
He has made a a ham-fist of it by trying to put down a vital question over conflict of interest between his new Cabinet role and his extra-Parliamentary jobs with JP Morgan bank and… who’s the other one with? – by failing to answer it.
In the Commons, Labour backbencher Richard Burgon asked – well, see for yourself, along with Javid’s ridiculous non-answer:
The new Health Secretary has been getting paid £1,500 an HOUR over the last year for his second job and for his third job too.
Today I told him that he has absolutely no right to deny NHS staff a proper pay rise.
Yes, the Daily Expressloved it, but that just shows the depths to which national journalistic standards have fallen.
It is perfectly reasonable to want to know whether a Cabinet minister is giving up jobs that might conflict with his duty to the nation.
I want to know if Javid is going to blab government secrets to JP Morgan and I want to know if he’s going to give away information – against the national interest – to his other employer.
That is, after all, the most likely reason they employed him.
He was warned by ACOBA – the Advisory Committee On Business Appointments – that there were “potential risks” that he could provide “privileged information” that would give his employer an unfair advantage over its competitors, in spring last year when he took the JP Morgan job.
ACOBA provided advice on how to avoid “potential risks” but it is easy to circumvent them. The only way to ensure that former ministers don’t blab is to forbid them from taking jobs until any information they had is out of date and useless.
Two years has been suggested as a reasonable period of delay but Javid took his jobs straight away and at the time of writing, the suggested period has still not expired.
It has been suggestted that Javid has already given up his outside jobs.
But if that’s true, where’s the evidence? We cannot rely on his say-so because he belongs to an organisation of liars, headed by a liar. We simply cannot trust him.
And that is the reason MPs – and commentators like This Site – are demanding full disclosure, as you can see from the following representative sample on Twitter:
Now that Sajid Javid has been "re-habilitated" and is now back in the "club" as Health Secretary ; will he forgo his little sideline with JP Morgan ?#AskingForTheWoodPidgeonPerchedOnMyPatioTable
Can Sajid Javid confirm he will resign from his extra-parliamentary role as an advisor to JP Morgan or that he intends to do so at the earliest opportunity to avoid any perception of a conflict of interest as he takes on the role as guardian of the NHS?
Sajid Javid gets paid £1,500 an hour for his whilst Jeremy Corbyn spends his time not on MP work helping out at a #Foodbank & campaigning for a better world for all (& often criticised for it).
Greed valued so much more than care 💔
— Prof Gayle Letherby 💙 #PeaceAndJustice (@gletherby) June 29, 2021
Javid must decide:
He can be a banker, or in charge of our NHS but he cannot do both.
Of course there are also serious questions to be answered about the decision to appoint Javid to the Health portfolio, considering his extremely shady history:
How on earth did a multi-millionaire ex-Deutsche bank Thatcherite landlord that voted against making rented homes fit for human habitation actually end up responsible for the health and social care of an entire nation?
My message to Sajid Javid today : Remember you are now the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care – not the minister for selling off our NHS or gifting contracts to your mates in banking and finance.
As far as his actual ability to do the Health Secretary job is concerned, Javid has already disgraced himself. But that’s another story…
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You could read the BBC news article for the boring biographical details of Sajid Javid – but you don’t want that rubbish, do you? You want the juicy stuff.
So, before discussing his career as an MP, let’s learn from Another Angry Voice, where his pre-Parliamentary career was discussed:
Before his move into politics Javid was a banker at Deutsche Bank, where he sold complex financial derivatives called Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs).
CDOs were economic alchemy schemes designed to turn toxic bad debts into fake gold-plated investments.
The whole thing defied economic logic… they were junk investments that were bound to implode sooner or later.
If Javid was smart enough to realise that the CDOs he was selling were bound-to-fail junk, and he was in on the open secret within the trade that they were certain to implode one day, yet he carried on selling them as safe investments to oblivious customers like other banks, pension funds, local and national governments, and insurance funds as low-risk investment opportunities, then he’s a cynical and duplicitous fraudster.
In other words, it seems Javid is one of the people who caused the financial crisis that swept the Tories back into office – and him into Parliament – on a wave of hypocrisy in 2010.
He first came to light as a Treasury minister in 2013 (a quick promotion as he only became MP for Bromsgrove in 2010), making unfounded accusations about Labour’s plan to abolish the Bedroom Tax (remember that? It’s still going strong!).
He said that Labour would fund more spending on housing benefit with “a tax on pensions and more borrowing”.
How ironic that current Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak is currently planning to cap the annual pensions rise in order to pay off the (nonexistent) Covid-19 debt that he says was caused by more borrowing! (In fact, the government simply created the money.)
As Culture Secretary in 2014, Javid organised commemorations of the centenary of the start of World War One by providing wreaths for political leaders to lay at the cenotaph in Glasgow.
Only Tory leader David Cameron was allowed to write a personal message. Other leaders were simply handed their wreaths on the day; the messages on them were all written by a DCMS employee – but that did not stop the Conservatives and their client journalists from attacking Labour for failing to write a message:
Later that week he came up with a speech attacking Labour’s ability with the economy – that only proved that his understanding of economics was little better than that of a schoolboy.
Not a good look for somebody who would be Chancellor of the Exchequer in only a few short years!
The same year, he tried to reassure us all that “Britain could still prosper if it leaves the EU, despite the possible loss of hundreds of billions of pounds worth of trade deals”.
And now the UK is out of the EU – and floundering. So much for his judgement.
In November that year, Javid was named as one of many Conservative MPs who were profiting from the privatisation of the NHS by receiving a cash donation from a healthcare firm.
By 2015 he had become Business Secretary, in which job he tried to tell us that the one-off return from privatising the Royal Mail would be used to reduce public debt.
This is economically incompetent: he was trying to tell us a one-off payment (of less than the shares were worth) was better than multiple dividends from a profitable concern, continuing far into the future. This man went on to become Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Later that year, Javid tried to gag trade unions by forcing them to give the police two weeks’ notice before posting messages on Facebook and Twitter about strike action – and was forced to backtrack.
The same Bill included a plan to force trade union members to opt in to paying the political levy (their union subscription) rather than being automatically enrolled and having to opt out. The aim was to cut funding for the Labour Party.
In February 2016, a court heard, Javid refused to suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia – despite having been presented with evidence that the weapons were being used to commit war crimes.
Later that year, Javid admitted jeopardising the UK steel industry by blocking the EU from imposing higher tariffs on the import of cheap steel from China. This Globalist attitude meant the UK was in danger of being flooded with cheap and nasty steel while the home-made product went unsold.
Only a few weeks later, the Indian firm Tata – which owned steel works in the UK, announced that it was to sell its sites here. Instead of entering emergency talks to save the industry, Javid went off on a junket to Australia.
This led to confusion among the government as ministers claimed all options were being considered to save the steelworks, only to be superceded by PM David Cameron – who ruled out nationalisation.
By October of that year, Tata had announced 5,000 redundancies and, rather than provide a voluntary statement, Javid had to be ordered into Parliament – where his claim that the government was “doing everything in its power” was met with derision by Labour MPs – and by those of us who recalled his history in this matter.
The following April, Javid turned down a chance to attend crisis talks on the future of Welsh steel in order to attend a conference of right-wing libertarians.
In September 2016 – and now as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government – Javid killed by-now-former Chancellor George Osborne’s “Northern Powerhouse” plan.
In October he gave permission for fracking to take place in Lancashire. At the time, I said it seemed he was keen to see the county suffer a few earthquakes.
That’s exactly what happened, until the plug was pulled on the project.
In November of that year, Javid spat in the face of democracy by claiming that a High Court ruling that Parliament must vote on any plan for the UK to leave the European Union was an attempt to “thwart the will of the British people”.
The fascist undertones of this claim indicate why Javid was a perfect choice for Boris Johnson’s government: like Johnson, he believes that the UK’s prime minister should be allowed to behave like a dictator by bypassing democratic accountability and making up the law as he goes along.
In December of that year, Javid proposed that holders of public office should all swear an oath to uphold “British values” – as defined by the Tory government. He was laughed out of it:
In 2017, Javid become embroiled in the so-called “Nickileaks” scandal in which Tory-run Surrey County Council was said to have been offered a “sweetheart” deal to keep its council tax down – while Labour-run councils were not.
The story is particularly relevant to Javid’s new job as Health and Social Care Secretary, because the rise was allegedly due to the Tory government devolving social care to local authorities after cutting £4.6 billion from the national budget.
Surrey had to find a way to replace its share of the lost money and it was suggested that this necessitated the council tax rise. It was then suggested that the government had made a deal to prevent that rise from happening.
Then-prime minister Theresa May claimed no deal had been made – but she was later shown to have lied to Parliament after recordings came to light showing that a deal had been struck between Surrey CC and Javid:
It later became clear that Javid had given assurances he was trying to identify £30-£40 million for Surrey County Council – and for no other authority; and that he had been asked to consider taking money away from every other county – no matter how impoverished – in order to provide public cash for Surrey, one of the richest counties in the UK:
It was alleged that Javid used the 2017 general election as an opportunity to urge May to drop plans to cap energy prices in UK homes, saying the Tories should get back to their “free market roots”.
In November 2017, Javid tried to tell Parliament the National Health Service was in great shape, during a debate in which the government revealed it was starving the service of more vitally-needed funding – and he was contradicted by a serving nurse:
Yesterday I made an intervention in the House after Sajid Javid described a rosy situation in our NHS. As a nurse, that certainly isn't the way I see things: pic.twitter.com/ZgbaVMuw8N
The following month it was alleged that he was claiming expenses money to pay his membership subscription for the far-right pro-Brexit organisation, the European Research Group (ERG).
At the time, the organisation was said to have claimed around £32,000 from public funds.
This was allegedly a conflict of interest that breached the Ministerial Code, which prohibits ministers from becoming “associated with non-public organisations whose objectives may in any degree conflict with government policy”.
Javid was caught trying to deceive the nation in January 2018 when he said homelessness peaked under Labour in 2003 and had fallen by 50 per cent since then.
What he neglected to mention was that homelessness fell from 2003-10, due to Labour policies. It started to rise again in 2010 – practically from the instant the Conservatives were returned to office.
In February 2018, as Secretary of State for Housing, Javid was forced to surrender £72 million intended to fund affordable homes that he had not bothered to spend.
He returned it as “no longer required” that year. This Site suggested that he didn’t spend it because he doesn’t like people who need a home – but does like money.
In March we learned that, after blaming “Not In My Back Yard” (NIMBY) councils for stopping housing developments, Javid had consistently fought for NIMBYs in his own constituency – fighting against construction of 4,200 houses.
In May 2018, Javid was appointed Home Secretary to replace Amber Rudd after she resigned to save Theresa May’s face during the “Windrush” scandal.
His first act was to tell a falsehood about that very scandal: asked whether he would restore the protections that were taken from the Windrush migrants in the 2014 Immigration Act, he said: “No such protections have been removed. People who arrived pre-1973 – they have the absolute right to be here and that has not changed.”
In fact, a clause giving longstanding Commonwealth residents protection from enforced removal was taken off the statute book by the 2014 Act.
He was later alleged (although he denied it) to have blackmailed victims of the scandal into signing “gagging” orders in order to receive fast-track compensation payments.
But how could we trust Javid’s word? When it was revealed that victims of the Windrush scandal had been denied services including NHS treatment, he couldn’t even tell us how many of them had been treated in this despicable way.
It later transpired that, after the “hostile” – or indeed “compliant” – environment policies deprived members of the Windrush generation of their right to work in the UK, and then denied them the right to claim benefits, if any of them had been forced to resort to crime in order to survive, Javid was using this as an excuse to deny them the citizenship they had been promised.
Isn’t that racism? Not a good look for somebody of Pakistani – and therefore ethnic minority – descent.
Indeed, it was pointed out that Javid himself would probably not have been allowed to settle in the UK under the immigration policies he was enforcing in 2018:
May sings the praises of Sajid Javid: the son of a Pakistani immigrant can become Home Secretary.
under May's new immigration policy, would his dad have even been allowed in the UK? not sure the hostile environment policy would have made them feel very welcome…
Then Javid exhibited racism against Asians. In a tweet celebrating the success of the prosecution against the Huddersfield grooming gang, he referred to [italics mine] “sick Asian paedophiles”.
His words potentially endangered the innocent by stirring up hatred on the grounds of race.
In October, Javid had to admit another racist – and illegal – Home Office policy. The Home Office had been forcing hundreds of people to take DNA tests as part of its “hostile environment” policy against illegal immigrants. This practice is banned by law in the UK.
Two months later his plan to fake a reduction in immigration statistics was exposed. The idea was to claim that immigration was reduced by up to 80 per cent by changing the way immigration figures were recorded.
Over Christmas that year, Javid claimed that French authorities were not doing enough to stop refugees from entering the UK illegally. He was accused of whipping up a false “crisis” ahead of a possible new vote on Brexit:
He managed to undermine his own arguments in January the following year – less than a month later – when he had to admit that his own government’s cuts meant the Home Office’s Border Force did not have enough ships to patrol the English Channel properly:
He compounded his fault by suggesting that the UK should refuse asylum to genuine refugees who crossed the English Channel and sought sanctuary in the UK. This would be a breach of the Geneva Convention and international law.
In April that year, Javid tried to palm off responsibility for increasing knife crime among young people onto teachers by suggesting they should have a “public health duty” to identify warning signs that a young person could be in danger, such as worrying behaviour at school, issues at home, or “presenting at A&E with a suspicious injury”.
But teachers already had such a duty, to work together with police to safeguard children. As Home Secretary, he should have known that.
In the same month, Javid announced a compensation scheme for victims of the Windrush scandal that would pay them as little as £200.
Not only that, but the loss categories were defined in such a strict way, and the requirements regarding evidence necessary to prove entitlement to compensation were so onerous, that it would be extremely difficult for some people to make claims – especially as he made no reference to Legal Aid.
In July 2019, Javid’s Home Office was found to be still forcing “hostile environment” policies on us, by trying to pressgang homelessness charities into becoming border guards.
The idea was to get charity outreach workers to pass on the personal details of homeless people to the Home Office where, if they were found to be from foreign countries, enforcement officers would deport them.
The scheme deliberately ignores data protection and privacy laws by demanding that personal information be passed to the Home Office regardless of whether the subject gives their consent.
This breach of national and international law was imposed to make it easier to deport people.
In September, after he had been appointed as Boris Johnson’s (first) Chancellor of the Exchequer, it emerged that the Home Office under Javid had denied life-saving medical treatment to a cancer sufferer – who subsequently died.
The excuse was that there was confusion over whether the patient should have been charged for the treatment – but the immediate concern was to ensure that she did receive treatment, not who paid for it.
In November 2019, a month before a general election, Javid blew any integrity he had as Chancellor by claiming that a Labour government would spend an additional £1.2 trillion that the nation did not have.
Even Andrew Marr challenged the claim as “bogus numbers and dodgy accounting”.
Ouch!! BBC give the Tories both barrels. Your smears against Labour are "bogus numbers & dodgy accounting". That has to hurt. pic.twitter.com/v44jxP24EA
He re-emerged in August last year, when it was revealed that he had gone back to his banking roots with a part-time job at JP Morgan – despite having been warned by ACOBA – the Advisory Committee On Business Appointments – that there were “potential risks” that he could provide “privileged information” that would give his employer an unfair advantage over its competitors.
ACOBA provided advice on how to avoid “potential risks” but it is easy to circumvent them. The only way to ensure that former ministers don’t blab is to forbid them from taking jobs until any information they had is out of date and useless.
In October, Javid launched a dodgy attack on left-wingers who had criticised his replacement as Chancellor, Rishi Sunak.
As a candidate in the previous year’s Tory leadership election, Javid had called for an independent investigation into allegations of Islamophobia in the party, to which all the other candidates including Boris Johnson agreed. That investigation never happened.
Now he returned with a false claim that left-wingers were racist for attacking Sunak’s (failed) policies – even though the criticism did not mention Sunak’s ethnicity at any point.
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Sajid Javid: the new Health Secretary has been compared with Gollum from JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth fictions.
Hancock had to go, in the end.
Not only had he brought the position of Health Secretary into disrepute by breaking his own “guidelines” (and we all thought they were rules), but he had allowed the Tory government to be ridiculed.
And nobody thought he should stay. This Site’s (admittedly unscientific) poll gave a 100 per cent result in favour of him resigning.
And now he is gone.
(I’m not saying he went just because of my poll’s result, but it does seem to have reflected the mood of the nation at large, meaning it was impossible for him to stay.)
Ironically, that leaves the woman he allegedly hired solely so he could have an affair with her, stuck in a Health Department job that she may not even be qualified to hold. We know nothing of her record as an adviser.
But he’ll probably be back very soon.
Yes – now for the bad news.
You see, Boris Johnson has appointed Sajid Javid as Hancock’s replacement.
Javid was removed from his previous Cabinet job as Chancellor of the Exchequer in February last year, after a row with Johnson and then-prime ministerial adviser Dominic Cummings over his own advisers.
The fact that he is back now – filling the gap left after the first Cabinet change since he left – suggests that Johnson has very few allies in his own party.
This could explain his refusal to sack his ministers; with only the Britannia Unchained mob (Patel, Raab, Truss, Kwarteng) and a few Brexiters to choose from, he can’t afford to lose anybody.
This would also explain the increasing wave of corruption in Johnson’s ranks.
They know he is weak and they are exploiting it.
Further signs of Johnson’s weakness are evident – and likely to become more so after Javid’s appointment.
We have already seen attacks from Dominics Cummings and Grieve, and the defection of John Bercow to Keir Starmer’s Labour (not a huge leap, sadly).
I’m willing to predict more backstabbings from what we might call more “traditional” Conservatives, as they realise an 80-seat Parliamentary majority doesn’t mean more than 360 supporters for Johnson’s fascism.
They have plenty of attack options – the fact that Johnson allowed Hancock to make so many mistakes, break so many rules (all right, “guidelines”), and generally corrupt his office shows that the prime minister’s judgement is highly questionable.
The fact that Johnson refused to sack Hancock in the face of the public outcry also raises serious questions. Other PMs have sacked ministers who brought their administration into disrepute, even though it meant hiring MPs less sympathetic to their own politics, but Johnson didn’t. That could be a valuable pressure point in the future.
In fact, there’s really only one ray of hope for Johnson amid this political and public relations disaster:
Hancock’s personal life brought him down, not his utter failure at his job.
This is a man whose three years as Health Secretary were characterised by rampant corruption – the appointment of an adviser purely so he could have an affair with her is just one example – and incompetence.
He gave contracts to provide the NHS with personal protective equipment (PPE) to Tory donors and friends who failed to do so. In the time he wasted this way, tens of thousands of people died.
He wasted £37 billion on a privatised “track and trace” system that still doesn’t work after a year. That organisation was run by Dido Harding, who now wants a job running NHS England – and if she gets it, she’ll ruin it as well.
He lied to us repeatedly about the seriousness of the Covid-19 threat, about the effectiveness of the government’s opposition to it, and about the incompetence of his own decisions (covering up his uselessness).
He failed to provide appropriate guidance to protect care home residents from Covid-19 – most especially from fellow residents returning from hospital but also from staff who worked in multiple homes.
I’m listing these examples off the top of my head, by the way – they are so obvious I don’t even have to research them.
But those failures aren’t what brought him down.
Johnson can take heart from this. It shows that the mindless mass of tribal Tory voters is still right behind him – convinced that his government is doing what’s right for the UK, even as it drags us into the cess pit of fascism and exploitation.
It’s a very small gleam of sunlight through the clouds surrounding him, though.
He has surrounded himself with corrupt incompetents just like Hancock, whose rampant self-interest will bring them before the court of public opinion again – very soon.
What will Johnson do when the mob is baying for the next one’s head?
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I’ve checked and it is accurate. Photo and video searches using Hancock’s name have been disabled.
Twitter users may wish to inquiry of @TwitterSupport just why it is supporting an unfaithful husband who breaks his own safety rules, thereby increasing the risk of contracting a potentially fatal disease that has been blighting the world for a year and a half.
The last day or so have been a hard time for Matt Hancock and he has said he would appreciate being left alone to come to terms with the revelations about his love life.
FAT CHANCE!
It’s bonanza time for those of us who enjoy mocking what’s he’s been doing with his banana.
I haven’t even seen much of what’s going around but I know you’ll get a kick out of this…
… and this (it’s long, which is probably more than we can say for Matt, and it’s enjoyable, which again…)…
Oh dear – it seems Facebook is demanding you watch it on that platform. Please do. In the meantime, here’s – the real – Matt strutting his stuff on stage with Therese Coffey. What a sex machine!
How about this comment on Hancock being busy saving lives?
A friend of mine has tried to raise the tone by comparing the photo of Hancock having that extra-regulatory snog with Gina Coladangelo with classical art:
Apparently the choice of colours make it much more like The Scream than what was probably intended:
You go for Klimt but you get Munch. I’m sure many women understand that sensation.
Never mind, Matt – you can always try to justify it by saying you’re an “Alpha Male”. Just don’t expect anybody to take you seriously… ever again.
One parting shot: here’s Jonathan Pie to bring it all home to Hancock in a big way. Be warned that he doesn’t hold back at all and the language is extreme:
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
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