Monthly Archives: June 2023

Peer accused of trying to interfere with Partygate inquiry resigns. What about the others?

Zac Goldsmith: apparently he owes his peerage to Boris Johnson.

There’s almost as much murk in this as in a glass of drinking water from Thames Water.*

Lord Zac Goldsmith has resigned from his job as an environment minister, just one day after he was named by the House of Commons Privileges Committee as having tried to interfere with its determination on Boris Johnson and Partygate.

But his reason for resigning, if you read the article, is the Tory government’s failure to tackle climate change properly. He says prime minister Rishi Sunak is “simply uninterested” in the issue.

(And he has repeated this assertion – strenuously – after Sunak claimed the resignation came after he had asked Goldsmith to apologise for the apparent interference. He reckons his resignation had been coming for a long time – but that raises one obvious question: why submit it the day after being accused by the Privileges Committee if that had nothing to do with it?)

But who cares about Goldsmith? He’s yesterday’s man now.

What matters is, nine other MPs and peers have also been accused by the Privileges Committee:

The Privileges Committee has published the evidence on which it has based its claim:

Given all of the above, one has only one question left to ask:

What are the other nine named MPs and peers going to do?

*Joke. I don’t honestly think the quality of Thames Water’s product is quite so bad… yet.

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Rwanda judgment: the Law has ruled. Why won’t Rishi Sunak accept the Rule of Law?

Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak: by refusing to accept the Court of Appeal’s judgment on Rwanda deportations, they are denying the Rule of Law. Right?

Once again, for the Tory government: this is awkward.

The Court of Appeal has ruled that sending asylum-seekers to Rwanda will be unlawful, because that country’s assurances that it would not return them to countries where they face persecution or other inhumane treatment are not “sufficient”.

The decision follows a ruling by the High Court that the government’s policy of deporting some asylum-seekers to Rwanda was permissible. An appeal had been launched against the decision by a group of 10 asylum-seekers and the charity Asylum Aid.

Normally, that should be that.

But the Tory government is not accepting this legal ruling and is demanding that it should be taken to the Supreme Court.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman has claimed that the “system is rigged against the British people”.

And Rishi Sunak published a statement online as follows:

Your government should decide who comes here, not “criminal gangs”? Is he suggesting the Court of Appeal is a “criminal gang”? It’s one interpretation of his words!

(In fact, if he disobeys the court’s order, it is Sunak and his government who will be the criminals.)

“Rwanda is a safe country,” he said. This is not true, according to the law.

And his claim that it is this country that should decide who comes here is easily countered. This decision is not about who comes here, but about whether anybody should go to Rwanda. And the answer is nobody.

And now the public purse will have to stump up the exorbitant cost of another court hearing, because this spoilt, petulant man-child and his demonic lieutenant are determined to have their own way. How contemptible.

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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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Is your child among the 700,000 at unsafe schools due to Tory neglect?

A class at school: is this building fit for purpose? Or are these pupils in danger of illness after a sewage leak, or structural collapse, or asbestos contamination?

Parents across the UK woke up to a horrifying news item on the morning of Wednesday, June 28, 2023.

Here it is (with a little additional political spin):

According to the BBC, it means 700,000 school pupils – a little more than six per cent of the total school population – could be in danger because of the dilapidated state into which the Tories have allowed schools to fall:

The National Audit Office (NAO) report says the Department for Education (DfE) has, since 2021, assessed the risk of injury or death from a school building collapse as “very likely and critical”.

The NAO, the UK’s independent public spending watchdog, said risks had not been addressed because of years of underfunding.

It said the deteriorating condition of school buildings was damaging pupil attainment and teacher retention.

Instead of acknowledging the failures, the Tory-run Department for Education has protested that it has been “significantly investing in transforming schools”. Into death traps?

An official said “nothing is more important” than safety at school – and the department had allocated more than £15bn since 2015 to keep schools safe and operational. But this number is meaningless on its own. How much is actually needed to make all schools safe?

Oh, here it is, a bit further down the BBC article: “The NAO said the DfE had recommended minimum funding of £5.3bn per year to mitigate the most serious risks of building failure, in its 2020 spending review, with £7bn per year being the “best-practice” level.

But the department was subsequently given an average of £3.1bn per year from the Treasury.

So the Tory government has provided less than half the cash necessary to restore these schools properly. Let’s remind us that, meanwhile, they let privately-run schools like Eton have charity status so they can raise as much money as they like from their rich benefactors and patrons, and don’t have any of the concerns facing state-run schools.

It’s mismanagement, malpractice, pure and simple.

Meanwhile, the horror stories are starting to come to light:

Steve Marsland, head teacher at Russell Scott Primary School, in Manchester, said his head is filled with “worry and panic” over keeping the 460 children at his school safe after raw sewage came up through the floors “on many occasions”.

“We had a plummet in attendance through sickness after the sewage floods, it is an absolute disgrace.

“It has been going on since 2015 and is down to poor building practice,” he told BBC Breakfast.

He said energy bills before his building was rebuilt were between £12,000 to £15,000 a year, but then went up to £45,000 a year, and was now nearly £9,000 a month because of rising energy costs.

So there are possibly no fewer than three government failings there: the sewage intrusion could be because the Tories allowed privatised water companies to dump sewage in the environment rather than forcing them to improve the system; the poor building work may be because the Tories employed the cheapest contractor rather than the best; and the high energy costs are at least partly because of profiteering by the privatised energy firms.

Other schools face dangers caused by the presence of asbestos. Asbestos! In the UK, in the 21st century!

No doubt the grisly details run on and on, and vary from school to school.

But here’s the million-pound question:

Is your child’s school among those that are falling apart, with no hope of proper investment from Rishi Sunak’s penny-pinchers?*

The saddest part is that this is symptomatic of the situation in the UK as a whole, under Tory rule.

And despite the report, nothing is likely to change, even if your children die. Remember the Grenfell Tower tragedy?

It was a tower block that had been covered with highly-flammable cladding by order of landlords at the Tory-run local authority. This cladding caught fire, the tower became an inferno and 72 people died.

To date, hardly anything has been done to remove similar cladding from other buildings and prevent another such tragedy from happening – even after another building with similar cladding caught fire and was destroyed (with no fatalities that time, luckily).

And it’s not just the current Conservative government that has caused such problems.

Remember when Tony Blair’s New Labour took over from the Tories in 1997 and found out that NHS hospitals were falling apart?

Blair’s solution was the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) – a mechanism bringing in investment from private sources, with the disadvantage that the projects created with that money revert to private ownership after a limited time.

PFI has attracted a huge amount of criticism and it seems unlikely that such an undertaking would be carried out again by a future Labour government.

So the question must be asked: if the Tories won’t help, and Labour can’t, how can this nightmare be ended?

*What are they doing with our money? Taxation is at its highest level since World War II or thenabouts, meaning the amount of public money being created every year must be enormous. Where is it going?

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Should water firms charge an extra 40% to tackle the sewage crisis?

You pay for their bad decisions: the privatised, profit-driven water firms have had more than 30 years to fund the restoration of the UK’s crumbling sewage system but instead they have given £72 billion to investors and pumped our effluent into the environment. Now they want to increase our bills by almost half to fix the problem they have created. But where will the money really go?

It looks like the UK’s privatised water firms are trying to sell us down the river again.

They want to add an extra 40 per cent to our bills, saying that’s what it will cost to clean up the sewage crisis they have caused by neglecting the UK’s crumbling system of sewage pipes.

Here’s a report about it, broadcast early in the morning of Wednesday, June 28, 2023:

It’s true that Thames Water boss Sarah Bentley has quit her job, that was worth £1.6 million a year to her, even before she got anywhere near the bonus she received (that she has already given back amid anger over the firm’s poor performance over sewage):

We don’t know how much her bonus totalled but last year she received £496,000.

Unlike many of the water firms, it turns out that this was much more than Thames Water shareholders received – they haven’t had a payout in six years, possibly because the business seems about to go down the pan:

Thames Water is an unusual case, though; since privatisation in the late 1980s, water companies have paid out £72 billion to shareholders.

Should this money have been invested in restoring the crumbling system? Has such investment been watered down to give a fast return to investors?

Panellists on the BBC’s Politics Live thrashed their way through these murky waters in two debates, when it seemed the Tory panellists, Bob Seely and Johnny Mercer, knew why this disaster has happened, but the left-wingers had the solution to it. See for yourself:

The funding system certainly seems to be sending our money down the drain.

But isn’t that because water is not appropriate for privatisation and is, as Mr McKenna suggested, a racket?

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Student loans: Bad news for English people starting university in the autumn

Graduates: how many of these people will ever fully pay back their student loans? How many new students, entering university in autumn 2023, will be even worse-off?

Anyone English who starts a university course in the autumn will pay more for their student loan, and over a longer period of time.

Here’s Martin Lewis, explaining it on ITV’s Good Morning Britain:

So for anybody who lives in England and has not gone to university yet (but will in the autumn or at any time afterwards), from the April after you leave university, you will not pay back the £243 per year that current ex-students do or will; you will pay back £450 per year.

The period of time over which you will make those payments will not be a maximum of 30 years, as it is now, but 40 years. This means you won’t pay a minimum of £7,290 but a minimum of £13,500.

Some might think that’s still a good deal on loans of more than £25,000.

And of course there is interest to be paid. Some ex-students known to This Writer have recently discovered that, after paying back their student loans for more than 20 years, they owe more now than when they started.

In terms of the public purse, where the state is currently paying 44p for every pound spent on education, from September – for new university students – it will pay just 19p for every pound spent on education.

Instead of paying 56p per pound, the individual will pay 81p per pound. Martin Lewis reckons this is a 50 per cent increase. I make it around 45 per cent.

Apparently more people are likely to clear the cost of the loan plus interest. I’d be fascinated to learn just how they’re likely to do that.

To me, it seems like a way of offloading debt from the state and onto individuals. Bear in mind that the level of student debt owed to the Student Loans Company currently stands at £205 billion.

That figure has doubled in the last six years, after the then-Tory/Liberal Democrat Coalition government increased tuition fees from £3,600 per year to £9,000. The decision was made in 2012 but the change happened in 2016.

We can all see what this is, I hope. The Tory government is saddling poorer students with a debt they will have to repay for their entire working lives, making them more vulnerable to exploitation by employers – wage slaves.

All this in the middle of a huge – and worsening, remember – cost of living crisis.

Meanwhile, privileged students whose parents have more cash to splash on them will be able to pay off their loans faster and go on to earn more.

The whole situation puts the lie to Tory claims that they are the party of opportunity, of equality, and facilitators of upward social mobility. Doesn’t it?

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Tory lies: Steve Barclay wants you to think nurses are getting a pay rise

Bare-faced: how Steve Barclay has the nerve to spit out falsehoods about valuing nurses and giving them a pay rise must be beyond the understanding of anybody with a brain.

There can’t be many spectacles as ugly as that of a Tory minister crowing about giving a pay cut to nurses who kept us all alive during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Here’s Steve Barclay:

In fact, while Barclay enjoys real-terms pay parity with what MPs had back in 2010 plus his very large ministerial pay packet, many nurses have suffered a real-terms pay cut of 20 per cent during the same period, meaning they already effectively work one day a week for free.

On top of that, he’s now giving them a pay increase that is only just over half the current rate of inflation – meaning it is a pay cut.

This Site explained what Barclay and the Tories were doing, back in April. Read it here.

It seems that members of the Royal College of Nursing simply lost their ability to continue striking for better pay. Remember, they have been working one day a week for free, and that has to have an impact on their ability to resist further attacks on their pay; they don’t have the savings to support strike action. Many of them were already forced to visit food banks before the strikes even began.

Barclay’s claim to “hugely value” nurses’ work can be interpreted as nothing more than a bare-faced lie.

If he valued them, he would be offering them at least the same pay deal he gets – parity with the past. If he really valued them, he would offer more (because – remember – MPs receive significantly better pay than nurses).

Did he applaud them like a filthy hypocrite on Thursday nights during pandemic lockdown in 2020?

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Tory lies: car industry issues were due to Brexit, not the war in Ukraine

Kemi Badenoch: another Tory parrot, uttering whatever tripe she’s told to regurgitate at us?

Take a look at this video clip of Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch saying concerns faced by car makers were due to the war in Ukraine, not Brexit – coupled with a more recent news report saying the exact opposite:

The best we can say about this is that at least the lies are being debunked faster.

In fact, this one was debunked in the press as soon as it was uttered. The Guardian explained [boldings mine]:

She said:

“The issue that the automotive industries are talking about is around rules of origin. This is something that the EU are also worried about because the costs of the components have risen.

“This isn’t to do with Brexit, this is to do with supply chain issues following the pandemic and the war in Russia and Ukraine.

“I actually have had meetings with my EU trade counterpart, we are discussing these things and looking at how we can review them, especially as the TCA [trade and cooperation agreement – the UK’s Brexit deal with the EU] will be coming into review soon.”

The “rules of origin” requirements raised by car manufacturers are part of the TCA, and are therefore definitely related to Brexit. But Badenoch is right in the sense that all European car manufacturers are having problems because there is not enough battery supply in Europe, making them reliant on imports from Asia.

And wrong in the sense that there is no information here that links a car battery shortage with Ukraine. Any shortages in minerals that are used in these batteries may be overcome by obtaining them elsewhere.

The question now is: did Badenoch know she was not telling the truth, or was she just another Tory parrot, squawking out the words she had been told to say?

If so, who is telling Tory ministers to utter such tripe?

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Matt Hancock trashes Tory Covid-19 policy at the Covid Inquiry

Matt Hancock: he was a Covid-19 super-spreader, if you remember.

Yesterday (Tuesday, June 27) was Matt Hancock’s big day at the Covid Inquiry – and he didn’t waste any words trashing Tory policy.

This Writer’s problem will be if there’s a discrepancy between what he’s saying now and what he did back then – spring 2020 onwards. I’m pretty sure there is, but let’s establish what he said first.

Oh dear! He fell at the first hurdle.

This Site has covered the matter of asymptomatic transmission – and especially how it related to care homes – extensively. You can get a flavour of it in this article about a leak of WhatsApp messages earlier this year – and it also contains many links to other articles on the subject.

Hancock also had a few things to say about care homes…

Here’s a biggie: BREXIT ENDED LIVES:

Oh hang on – Hancock reckons some of the Brexit preparedness stuff would have helped with Covid-19, too…

 

For the rest, I’m going to rely on a lot of information from Robert Peston, who was live-tweeting while Hancock was giving his testimony. It runs as follows:

Let’s have a response from people who lost family members because of the government’s Covid-19 failures:

For the moment, I’m presenting this evidence as it is. Feel free to draw your own conclusions about it. I’ll want some time to look into the implications.

It seems certain the inquiry will turn up more – and possibly even more damning – evidence as it continues.

The Tories are ditching their plan to rewrite Human Rights law

Alex Chalk: the justice secretary has halted the Tory attack on our human rights… for now.

Don’t get too festive too soon; plans to re-write human rights laws have been on-again and off-again for nearly 10 years now.

But on the face of it, this is very good news:

The Government has decided not to proceed with the Bill of Rights, the Justice Secretary has said.

Alex Chalk confirmed in the House of Commons that Dominic Raab’s plans to rewrite human rights law will be officially shelved after “having carefully considered the Government’s legislative programme in the round”.

The Justice Secretary said ministers remain committed to “a human rights framework which is up-to-date and fit for purpose and works for the British people”.

So it seems the plan is to return to this issue at some point in the future.

Bear in mind that changes to human rights are at the heart of the controversy over the Illegal Migration Bill, which is considered to live up to its name with regard to international law: illegal.

A Tory Bill of Rights is certain to restrict our rights to the bare minimum.

The best way to make sure they can’t do that is to make sure they don’t remain in office.

Source: Bill of Rights will be ditched, says Justice Secretary

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