Category Archives: Business

Elbit: UK awards Israeli arms firm new contract – despite Gaza genocide

Protest: Elbit is regularly targeted by protest group Palestine Action, that aims to shut down and disrupt multinational arms dealers, especially UK-based operations that provide weapons used in the Israel/Palestine conflict [Image: Palestine Action].

This is the reason the UK is being accused of complicity in the Gaza genocide; this country is giving your money to an arms manufacturer whose weapons are being used to carry it out:

The UK government has been accused of being “totally complicit” in the deaths of tens of thousands of people in Gaza after handing a fresh round of public cash to the British arm of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit.

A Ministry of Defence contract dated 17 January represents the first time Britain has struck a deal with Elbit’s UK subsidiary since Israel laid siege to Gaza following the 7 October attacks by Hamas.

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Elbit reportedly supplies up to 85% of Israel’s drones and land-based military equipment, describing its Hermes 450 drones – which have been used by Israel for strikes on Hamas targets in Gaza in recent months – as “the backbone of the Israeli Defence Forces”.

Its latest contract, which is worth £25,000, was awarded four days after thousands marched through central London to call for a ceasefire in Gaza as part of a global day of action last month.

Source: Elbit: UK awards Israeli arms firm first contract since 7 October | openDemocracy


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How much money IS Rishi Sunak giving his wife’s company?

Partners in (the) climb: Akshata Murty and her husband, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak.

Infosys, the firm run by Rishi Sunak’s father-in-law, in which his wife Akshata Murty is a major shareholder, is raking in massive profits from the UK government. Coincidence?

According to LBC,

Akshata Murty’s company received £7 million in public sector invoices last year up from £4.7 million in 2022.

The £7.029 million total in public sector invoices includes over £250,000 from the Government Property Agency (GPA), as well as a similar amount from the Care Quality Commission (£270,000) – whilst the London Borough of Brent totalled over £2 million in invoices with Infosys.

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Within these invoices, Infosys were given contracts for “Information Communication Technology” (£1.5 million), “Consultant fees” (£1.1 million) as well as “IT Consultancy” (£868,000) across various levels of government.

Public sector invoices show the actual amount spent with a company over a certain period of time.

LBC can also reveal that in addition to these regular contract wins, the company has also won spots on a number of frameworks in recent years.

Whilst this offers no guarantee of work, it can “give the company an edge in winning contracts in the future” according to Tussell.

Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth has said the public should be told exactly why Infosys, with its close links to Sunak, seems to be cashing in.

It will be interesting to see what excuse Sunak devises, if he’s pressed on this issue, which again raises the question of corruption in the government to which he claims he has brought “honesty”.

Source: Rishi Sunak’s wife’s firm Infosys received 50% boost in public sector invoices in 2023 – LBC


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Silent Coup: here’s the longer video clip about corporations overthrowing democracy

After This Site publicised Matt Kennard’s Silent Coup, about how the world’s biggest corporations corrupt democracy – but in which I admitted failing to find the full 10-minute video clip, I received the following response from a commenter:

“The full video is here, you ninny.”

And they provided a web address for it.

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Well, now the full video is here:

As for me being a “ninny”, which apparently means “a foolish and weak person”… well, I’m not so weak that I can’t admit my failings, or so foolish that I can’t put aside a (not particularly) wounding insult for the sake of getting a good message across!


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Silent Coup: if corporations overthrow democracy is that why they’re cosying up to Labour?

Keir Starmer: corporate stooge?

I couldn’t find the 10-minute clip mentioned in the ‘X’ post below, and may have to buy the book. There are features of more than an hour on YouTube but I didn’t want to put you off.

Take a look at this:

The clip above has hit ‘X’ at a time when corporations are inveigling themselves into the Labour Party via advisers and lobbyists and an extraordinary rate.

The reason: to influence the decisions made by Keir Starmer and his cronies – to corrupt them, if they aren’t corrupt enough already.

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For This Writer, that would be a good enough reason not to throw your vote away on a Labour Party that flat-out refuses to represent your interests or the good of the UK as a whole.

Allow me to repeat:

You simply cannot vote tribally – for the party you think represents you (none of them do; they’re all about enriching their MPs and nothing else) – at the next general election.

Instead – and I cannot stress this strongly enough – if you want your vote to mean anything, you have to actually find out what the candidates in your constituency are planning to do, if they are lucky enough to be elected.

That is what party manifestos are for. Independent candidates also have policy documents and they will all be online for you to find and read.

You need to find and read these policy documents, and then you need to make a dispassionate choice, based on what you have read.

Which of the candidates offers the most policies that fit what you need? And, by that, I mean: who will improve your own life the most?

Do not consider how other people will vote, either in your constituency or the other 649 around the UK. That is not your concern.

It is not for you to worry about which party will get enough votes to actually enact its policies. This will lead you down the usual garden path to voting in a government that won’t do anything at all for the good of the country, like the one we’ve had since 2010.

BE SELFISH. Bizarrely, it might be the only way to get the kind of government that all of us need.


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Labour ‘for sale’ as it cosies up to big business

Angela Rayner: she once denounced lobbyists acting as advisers to Tory government ministers; now her own electoral ‘battle bus’ is sponsored by a lobbyist and Labour is riddled with lobbyists advising shadow ministers on behalf of their clients.

Those of you who still think voting for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is a good idea need to ask yourselves: who will this party be working for – you, or the big businesses that are buying influence over Labour in advance of the general election?

Solomon Hughes has exposed the increasing influence of some of the worst big businesses on Labour, in Tribune magazine, writing:

Keir Starmer says he wants to clean up politics. Instead, he has facilitated a lobbyist takeover of the Labour Party, where predatory gambling firms, big oil and gig economy giants are buying influence at our expense.

In 2020 the Labour Party issued a press release in which its deputy leader, Angela Rayner, ripped into the Conservative government over ‘reports that lobbyists have been secretly serving as advisers to government ministers and departments’ and other revelations of ‘cronyism’ around ‘businesses and individuals with close links to the Conservative Party’. Rayner said it showed there was ‘one rule for lobbyists and their paying clients and another rule for the rest of us’.

This press release has been deleted from Labour’s website, along with all other pre-2022 notices. But Rayner’s own ‘battle bus’ is now ‘sponsored’ and part-funded by a Labour-connected lobbyist.

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According to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, Pentland Communications, a lobbying firm set up in 2018 by Barrie Cunning, paid Labour HQ £6,000 to fund Rayner’s ‘campaigning’, including ‘the provision of a branded vehicle’, a camper van with the slogan ‘Rayner on the Road’. Since August, Labour’s deputy leader has been using it for campaigning.

Pentland represents big housebuilders like Barratt. Rayner’s responsibilities include Labour housing policy. Pentland says it can help firms achieve ‘commercial objectives’ using its ‘good political relationships’. Paying for Rayner’s battle bus can’t hurt those ‘relationships’.

Pentland says other political events are also business opportunities. It tells clients that each party conference also ‘provides a good opportunity’ to meet politicians ‘in both formal and informal settings and have those important conversations’.

Rayner’s apparent reversal shows how Labour has fully embraced the corporate lobbying it denounced as ‘cronyism’ when it applied to the Conservatives. Concerns about corruption have disappeared as Labour pursues the intense lobbying that has come along with its lead in the polls.

The article goes on to suggest that “‘centrist’ politicians denouncing corporate corruption when in the opposition wallow in it when in government”. And it says:

Cameron highlighted how the ‘revolving door’ of ex-ministers and ex-advisers ‘for hire’ is key to lobbying. Labour has gone further, accepting lobbyists as its current officials. Abdi Duale was elected to Labour’s National Executive last September on the ‘moderate’ slate. The same month Duale became a director at FTI, a lobbying firm. FTI also employs former Labour MP Gemma Doyle, a director of key Labour ‘moderate’ group Progressive Britain. FTI offer clients ‘direct advocacy’ with ‘elected and appointed policymakers’. FTI’s recent clients include Palantir, the American spy-tech firm that is chasing contracts in the NHS.

The list goes on and on:

At the last Labour conference, Alice Perry won a seat on the Conference Arrangements Committee (CAC). Typically for Labour, this dull-sounding body has significant power: it decides what debates Labour conferences hear. Perry, who was backed by both ‘moderate’ and ‘soft left’ factions, is also a public affairs director for the lobbying firm Cicero. The company tells clients she will be ‘advising on Labour Party engagement strategies’. Among Cicero’s clients are financial firms like Barclays and Blackrock, ‘buy-now-pay-later’ outfit Klarna, and privatisers like Serco.

In 2021 Rachel Reeves attacked the government over public services ‘being outsourced to a large private company like Serco, which has a poor track record and known links to the Conservative Party’. Now Serco hires Labour-linked lobbying firms. Serco executives shared platforms with shadow ministers at Labour’s 2023 conference. Perhaps we all misunderstood, and Reeves really objected to Serco’s ‘known links to the Conservative Party’ because she thought they should have known links to the Labour Party instead.

There are others, but we’ll skip those because the article goes on to state:

Corporations want to take big money contracts from the government while reducing any regulation or tax on their businesses. They want to shape the policy agenda and have turned to the consultants — as well as their own in-house lobbyists — to do so. Lobbying firms that spent years relying on their links with the Tories are adapting to a likely Labour government.

But – and this is important:

Something big is happening inside Labour as well. The party is welcoming lobbyists as the proof of, and route to, its ‘business engagement’. Under Starmer, Labour takes corporate support as a vote of confidence. If ‘business’ supports ‘labour’, then the party must be doing the right thing — and can hope for friendlier treatment by the corporate-run press.

And it could lead to scandal (again):

Labour is, in effect, using lobbyists to run much of its ‘business engagement’.

The last Labour government ran into a ‘cash for access’ scandal in 1998, when The Observer exposed lobbyists with New Labour links helping their clients get close to the new government. This was the first big blemish on Blair’s government. We are very likely to see a re-run of this scandal.

Worst of all is the possibility that the firms and lobbyists cosying up to Labour will use the connections (if the party wins the next election) to suck up government contracts, siphon off the cash and produce poor work.

This happened before, under Tony Blair’s New Labour:

We might end up with firms that suck money out of the public sector for poor work, giving another generation of future/former ministers jobs. The current wave of junior Labour officials taking corporate lobbying jobs acts as a kind of human promise, showing future ministers that they too can look forward to corporate jobs with a Labour government. This isn’t a theoretical risk: it is exactly what happened when the last Labour government embraced PFI and outsourcing. The lobbying and the jobs-for-the-boys-and-girls sweetened a bitter pill — although the former ministers got the sweeteners; we just got the bitterness.

Is that really what you want?

This Writer can’t see any difference between Starmer’s plan for a Labour government and what we already have under the Tories – apart from the possibility that the names of some of the ex-ministers taking jobs with big business will be different.

It seems clear that under a Starmer Labour government, public money will still be thrown away at private businesses who’ll provide no useful service to the public but will give jobs to the ministers who helped them.

So – please – do yourself and all the rest of us a favour.

Get yourself a list of all the candidates in your constituency and their manifestos, and educate yourself about what they are offering.

Then choose to vote for the candidate who offers the best deal for you.

I wrote the following in another article but it fits perfectly here, too:

Do not consider how other people will vote, either in your constituency or the other 649 around the UK. That is not your concern.

It is not for you to worry about which party will get enough votes to actually enact its policies. This will lead you down the usual garden path to voting in a government that won’t do anything at all for the good of the country, like the one we’ve had since 2010.

BE SELFISH. Bizarrely, it might be the only way to get the kind of government that all of us need.


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Tory health minister promised to sell shares in health firm – but didn’t. Is this the reason?

Lord Markham: his word is about as much use as that of Rishi Sunak’s in-laws’ firm, Infosys, it seems.

This Writer has a certain amount of sympathy with Tory health minister Lord Markham.

He may have promised to sell his shares in private health screening firm Cignpost, that made a fortune from Covid testing, a year ago and failed to do so, but he’s not the first.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s wife’s dad’s firm Infosys promised to stop operating in Russia after that country invaded Ukraine – but was still there, picking up contracts, eight months later (to my knowledge).

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If that firm – and the prime ministerial in-laws who run it – can ignore its promises, why can’t Markham?

After all, they’re all in it together – right?

A Tory health minister still owns a major stake in a private health screening firm making money from the crisis in the NHS a year after promising to sell it, the Mirror can reveal.

Lord Markham annouced last January that he was “undertaking to sell my stake” in Cignpost, a private Covid testing firm which made a fortune from the pandemic. But Company House records for Cignpost Investments Limited still show Markham owning between 25% and 50% of the business.

Cignpost has filed accounts showing that revenue soared by 467% to £278m in 2022, thanks to booming business helping firms comply with covid rules. The company has £52m cash in the bank and shareholder funds are up 150% from last year. Cignpost also offers mobile health screening, including heart health assessments and skin screening, which can be done in “your board room, staff car park or a third-party venue”.

Source: Tory health minister still hasn’t sold stake in Covid testing firm a year after promise – Mirror Online


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Satirist tells Davos World Economic Forum attendees what we all think of them [STRONG LANGUAGE]

Where did he get that shiner? Well, there’s an inference to be drawn… but the most logical explanation is that it’s makeup.

The World Economic Forum in Davos had a bad reputation before Damon Imani got anywhere near it. This just amplifies on that.

For example, when Dutch historian Rutger Bregman went to Davis in 2020, he remarked on the incongruity of thousands of rich businesspeople flying in on highly-polluting private jets to hear David Attenborough discuss how big business is wrecking the environment, and demanded to know why they weren’t talking about tax:

Now we have Damon Imani, who trolled the whole attendance of the WEF – and especially Klaus Schwab, who has chaired it since he founded it in 1971 – with this little gem:

It’s really well done; for clarity, he wasn’t actually at the WEF – the clip of him in a studio is interspersed with footage from the event itself.

Job done?

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Well, no. Because he came back:

I’m waiting breathlessly to see if there will be another instalment.

Aren’t you?


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Here’s why you think you’re getting richer when in fact you’re getting poorer

Relative values: older people think the young are richer than them because they’re paid in pounds rather than pennies – but inflation means those pounds don’t pay for as much as the pennies did and, in real terms, younger people are paid less than their senior counterparts were at the same age.

Here’s why you think you’re getting richer when in fact you’re getting poorer – as laid out in simple terms by Gary Stevenson.

He has released a video clip explaining why older generations are mistaken in claiming younger people “never had it so good”, to quote Harold Macmillan.

While it is true that young people may start their working lives earning more money – in pounds and pence – than older people did, the simple fact of inflation means the pounds they are paid simply doesn’t go as far as the pennies their elders received.

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But the fact that – on paper – they are receiving more means employers can pay them less in real terms and claim they’re being over-generous – and get away with it because people look at the simple numbers rather than the real-terms value.

Here’s Gary:

The theory Gary puts forward is proved by the fact that, after World War II, a single earner was able to buy the mortgage on a house and pay the living costs of everybody living in it – no matter how big the family, and now everybody of working age has to be slaving away all the hours they can work, and still can’t make ends meet.

But the UK as a nation is not getting poorer – either in money terms or real terms.

This means the cash that would have gone to working people in the post-war era is now going somewhere else. Gary says it’s going to the rich and that makes perfect sense because rich people own the companies that employ working people and can therefore dictate how their firms’ profits are divided.

It is these rich people who are impoverishing the vast majority of us in the UK – and getting away with it by lying that we are actually getting richer, generation by generation, when in fact the action of inflation and the wage stagnation they inflict on us mean that we are actually getting poorer.

The answer is for government to tax the rich so that these pay policies make them no better-off, or to impose laws that demand a maximum ratio between the highest-paid and lowest-paid in any business.

Neither of the main political parties seem interested in this. We may speculate about the reasons for this – is big business holding politicians to ransom: “Keep our salaries high and wages low or there’ll be no cushy job waiting for you after you get voted out”? – but it won’t make any real difference. It is what it is.

We see that in Labour’s new ‘campaigning bible’, that is full of soundbites and empty of initiative.

From what This Writer has seen, it contains nothing that could possibly induce a member of the voting public to conclude that a Labour government will improve their standard of living.

The reason for that is simple: it doesn’t address the issues facing us – like the illusion of improvement that Gary has identified.


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Alleged PPE profiteer Michelle moans after husband is accused over business tactics

Ill-gotten gains? Michelle Mone posed on the deck of her husband’s £6 million yacht, ‘Lady M’ – which may have been bought with government money, paid for PPE equipment during the Covid crisis – that didn’t work.

Michelle Mone, the Ultimo bra businesswoman who became a Tory peer and then allegedly made millions pushing useless PPE on the government through the illegal ‘VIP lane’, is not happy.

Apparently her husband Doug Barrowman may soon be nicked by HM Revenue and Customs for tax avoidance:

Lady Mone seems to think her husband’s woes are due to the efforts of tax expert Dan Neidle, who was most recently seen explaining why Post Office Limited may become insolvent after allegedly fiddling its own taxes relevant to the sub-postmasters scandal.

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Apparently he’s about to publish “serious allegations” about Barrowman and his business:

Mr Neidle has been happy to draw attention to Lady Moan’s rant, so one supposes she can’t say he hasn’t given her the right of reply. Here it is:

Has he advised corporations on tax avoidance? He says no:

Still, let’s keep an open mind and see what she says, yes?


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Is this why the media have been so quiet about #Fujitsu’s involvement in the #PostOfficeScandal?

Fujitsu, the company that built and sold the faulty Horizon software to Post Office Limited and thereby set up hundreds of sub-postmasters to have their lives ruined, seems to have got off surprisingly lightly since ITV’s drama about the scandal.

Few commentators, apart from those of us in the social media, seem keen for the company to foot the bill for its failure to deliver adequate software that met the requirements defined by Post Office Limited.

Maybe it did meet those requirements and we’re being hoodwinked. That’s a possibility This Writer would like to see explored – it can’t be that difficult for either company to produce the requisite documentation, can it?

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For the moment, let’s consider other possible reasons Fujitsu may be kept out of the spotlight.

Principle among these must be the firm’s working relationship with Infosys, the corporation owned by Rishi Sunak’s father-in-law, in which his wife has shares.

Is it really a coincidence that the following has happened?

In the December 2019 ruling, the High Court of Justice Queen’s Bench Division Rolls Building ruled in the case of Bates and Ors vs Post Office Limited that the original Horizon system used by the Post Office had not been sufficiently robust and had suffered from a number of bugs and errors.

Some of us might have considered that to be a red flag, suggesting that Fujitsu should not be given any more high-cost government contracts.

But if you think about the top two sentences in the next post, you can probably think of a reason for what’s described in the third:

Finally, and very important to all of the above:

Draw your own conclusions from the information you see above.


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