Rishi Sunak: he has admitted that, as Chancellor, he diverted cash away from people who desperately needed it and into affluent areas.
Wow. This is a blunder and a half, isn’t it?
Sunak was saying that a funding formula developed by the Blair/Brown Labour governments had prioritised deprived urban areas over affluent rural conurbations.
His argument was that he had restored the proper balance, giving the rich back the funding they deserved.
But of course this is nonsense. The point of the ‘Levelling-up’ policy on which the Conservatives won the 2019 general election is to redistribute national funds to the places that most deserve them – such as deprived urban areas – rather than leaving them with the well-off.
In fact, that’s the point of any form of taxation.
Now this video has emerged, serious questions are being asked about the suitability of this man to have been involved in any form of government at all, let alone holding the highest office in the land.
Labour has written to Levelling Up Secretary Greg Clark asking him to “urgently investigate” the changes made by Mr Sunak to funding formulas.
And spokespeople for leadership rival Liz Truss have been quick to capitalise on the howler, saying ‘Levelling-up’ is not about laying dividing lines between one area of the country and another.
Sadly, in an election that is to be decided entirely by members of the Conservative Party, a candidate who prioritises the rich is probably extremely attractive.
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Buddies: Boris Johnson (right) is more friendly with Volodymyr Zelenskyy than with sick people in the UK who will lose funding for hospitals so he can support the war in Ukraine.
Boris Johnson has announced that he is giving £1 billion in military aid to Ukraine – including £30 million from a Welsh budget to fund – among other things – hospitals.
It seems Welsh finance minister Rebecca Evans was practically blackmailed into handing over the cash as, if she did not, it would have been taken anyway via “UK Treasury processes”.
Ms Evans, with whom This Writer has previously campaigned during Welsh elections, said the way the cash was found was “not right” and “worrying” – and that a precedent should not be set to allow Welsh government money to go on Westminster projects.
Ms Evans told a Senedd committee that she had been asked to either provide the money “upfront” or through a budget reduction later, as a knock-on effect from UK government departments providing cash for military aid.
£65m for Ukraine will come from Scottish government budgets.
The rest of the cash is coming from Westminster government underspends – cash that was included in departmental budgets but not used – meaning the only Tory government in the UK will lose nothing while governments run by Labour and the SNP are drained of vital resources.
The new British aid will go towards paying for “sophisticated air defence systems”, drones, electronic warfare equipment, and “thousands of pieces of vital kit”, the UK government said.
So Boris Johnson has decided that Ukraine gets equipment to help kill, injure and otherwise harm people, and Wales is deprived of vital funding for hospitals. I hope everybody can see what’s wrong here.
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Andy Burnham: he’s Mayor of Greater Manchester and he knows the reasons for every political policy being enacted there.
Here’s a great clip highlighting the Conservative government’s hypocrisy towards local government.
It’s from last Thursday’s (February 17) edition of the BBC’s Question Time. The issue here is Clean Air Zones (CAZs) but could be applied to any number of local policies, as Mr Burnham rightly states in the video.
Have a look, and a listen:
So the Conservative government imposed a requirement for local authorities to improve air quality – but it did not supply the necessary funding, and it has been campaigning against the measures that have been introduced under the conditions it created.
Rank hypocrisy. It stinks.
With local elections coming up in May, we should be asking questions about these policies.
Do you have a local issue that upsets you – in which you think conditions imposed by the authorities are unfair?
Do you know which authorities imposed those conditions? Were they brought in by local councillors or imposed by a central government that made extravagant demands but provided no help?
If so, you’ll know that the one thing you don’t need at local government level is a lot of Conservative councillors who will make matters worse.
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Backhander: private health companies are being given a fortune in public money by the Tory government – and the cash will go to firms that are part-owned by Tories and Tory donors.
Can anybody make sense of this?
Sajid Javid has ordered NHS England to give up to £270m to private hospitals in case of an omicron surge, all of which they will keep even if they treat no patients & despite a lack of staff. Beneficiaries include Spire Health, Ramsay & Circle which is part owned by a tory donor
The only reason This Writer can find for such funding is the one that has been causing the Tories all their problems at the moment: deception.
Only recently, we were told NHS England did not have enough Covid-19 tests – LFT or PCR – to cover demand; indeed, it had to take four million kits from NHS Wales in an effort to cover the shortfall.
So when we see that the number of infections is down to around 70,000, can we really believe it? Or is the investment in private healthcare justified?
It doesn’t matter – because the Tory government is deceiving us in any event.
If the number of infections isn’t really down, then the government is lying about that; if it is, then the government is lying about the need to pay private health.
My personal opinion? The number of deaths appears to have reduced as well as infections (although we’ll have to see what Monday’s data brings), so I’m willing to hazard a guess that the Omicron wave has broken.
That means there’s absolutely no reason to give any money to the profit-grubbers and Sajid Javid is simply lining shareholders’ pockets for no reason other than squandering your cash.
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Rosena Allin-Khan: she has been instrumental in exposing the Tory government’s Covid-19 failures so of course Labour leader Keir Starmer is penalising her.
And you still think Starmer’s not racist?
(Not you; the above is what you could say to anyone trying to justify this.)
Labour row as two Asian women in shadow cabinet lose advisers.
Rosena Allin-Khan and Preet Gill told they must fundraise for personal aides after Keir Starmer’s reshuffle, as the party grapples with insecure finances. #StarmerOut#FordeReporthttps://t.co/P3ysllhveM
But what happened to Labour’s short money? This is the cash given to Opposition parties in Parliament to help them with their costs. There was an attempt to take it away from Labour (Tories are like that – they try to screw the other side any way they can) but it failed, I thought.
So there should be cash for these two MPs to hire all the help they need.
That’s unless Starmer is using the cash for other purposes. I wonder what they are?
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“Keith”: this is just one comment on the way Starmer treats members of his own party who support the values on which Labour was formed, rather than the twisted parody that he leads.
Can you believe it? After blowing a £13 million war chest within just 18 months, Labour Exploitation Party leader Keir Starmer is hammering the little people for cash again.
He’s embarking on a fourth round of staff redundancies and has been writing around to all constituency party units to find out if they have property he can sell off to pay for the huge expenses of the lawsuits he has incurred.
Here’s Cornish Damo to explain in his unique style:
As Labour begins it's FOURTH round of redundancies since the takeover by Starmer & Evans, it's worth taking a look at party finances once again as it appears things are not getting any better and bankrupcy still looms on the horizon with Forde & the #labourdatabreach. #DamoRantspic.twitter.com/N2wpaO7F99
Starmer seems hell-bent on pushing his ideological support for the genocidal Israeli government to its worst extreme, persecuting rank-and-file members who hate the racism and persecution he represents – even though they are responding in the courts, to his party’s cost.
Would he be so keen on litigation if it was his own cash at risk? Doubtful.
But it’s Labour’s funding that he’s flushing away – and this leads me to an inconvenient but inescapable conclusion:
Starmer seems to be determined to purge Labour of all its anti-racists – or to destroy Labour by bankrupting it.
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Secondly, much of what little remains is being given to private companies that aim to profit from your illness rather than improving your health. They are making matters worse:
• £81 billion of your money has been handed to profit making health since 2010
• Today, more than 7 million patients are languishing on NHS waiting lists
Enough, not a half penny more to private health vultures.
From the graph, it seems 5,000 beds or fewer are taken up with Covid-19 patients.
The real Covid problem, of course, has always been that too many NHS beds have been removed altogether from the service – possibly because of the defunding that created a staff shortage of 100,000?
Sadly the NHS crisis will continue under the Conservatives because they want to privatise health altogether; they don’t see the profit in a healthy nation.
And a Labour government under Keir Starmer won’t help because his policies align with those of the Tories on most issues including this.
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Labour’s worst leader: Starmer keeps screwing up so This Site will keep using this image.
The Communications Workers Union (CWU) has withdrawn its support from Keir Starmer.
A special conference of the union voted to provide only its affiliation fee to the national Labour Party from now on:
CWU Special Conference has just voted to suspend donations to the national Labour Party above our affiliation fee. As a trade union we will only work with those in the Party who are interested in delivering for our members. It’s time to get back out into our communities.
The union’s general secretary, Dave Ward, said the union would focus on individual Labour members who support its own aims: “In focusing our political resources on those in Labour who are really up for delivering for our members we are looking beyond the factional war being waged by an out-of-touch Westminster politics.
“This is a positive step for our union and a real offer to those in Labour who want to change things on the ground.”
It’s another defeat for Keir Starmer, who must now take the financial hit implied by the loss of the union’s funding. Coming on top of the #LabourDataBreach this puts his further-right-wing-than-the-Tories party in financial danger.
Too bad:
The CWU has today joined Unite in reducing funding for Labour, already suffering financial stress after the departure of 100,000+ members. That's part of the price of moving right.
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Not really backhanders: but some of the firms concerned have received government contracts after making donations so I feel justified in using the image.
These firms have been added to the main article here – but I’m listing them in a separate article to help ensure that as many people as possible don’t miss them.
Some of these entries refer to donations that are several years old but are included here because we have no reason to believe the people responsible for the donations have changed their political allegiances.
And yes – July 27 was a slow news day.
As stated previously: It is the individual responsibility of everybody in the UK to obtain the best government possible – and to change that government by any legal means if a wrong decision is made; you can’t expect the rest of us to do it for you.
That means changing your behaviour to cut out the Tory businesses, and finding new suppliers of goods and services you need.
It also means pestering your friends and colleagues to do the same. Expect resistance because people are naturally lazy. Use the exam results fiasco to persuade parents, and the Covid-19 disaster on others. As the Tories perpetrate more cock-ups – and they will – add those to the list you can use.
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Starmer’s hypocrisy: this image was made when Starmer was accusing individual Jews of anti-Semitism. Now he’s attacking organisations that will have Jews in their memberships – and Neil Coyne has called for one Jewish group to be proscribed as well, in an echo of Nazi demands during the Weimar period in Germany.
Boris Johnson’s Tories may be unfit to govern but Keir Starmer’s version of Labour is in no condition to take over as it continues its self-harming course to the political scrapheap.
Starmer’s latest big idea for electoral success is to make Labour even more like the Conservative Party by ending its pretence of being a “broad church”; he wants to ban membership from anyone who claims to be a socialist.
As stated in a previous article, he’s doing this by claiming that socialists – who want self-determination for people of all ethnicities, particularly those that currently suffer persecution – are anti-Semites (because this means they want self-determination for Palestinians who are persecuted by the Israeli government that Starmer smarms up to).
First on the list to get the chop are around 1,000 party members who also belong to Resist, Labour Against the Witchhunt, Labour in Exile and Socialist Action.
Their crimes appear to be claiming that many anti-Semitism allegations, for which Labour members have been suspended or expelled, were blown out of proportion and politically-motivated; welcoming such expelled or suspended members into their own ranks; and demanding the re-admission of Jeremy Corbyn into the Parliamentary Labour Party.
All of these stances may be demonstrably connected to support for Palestinians against Israeli persecution.
Here’s the part that marks Starmer out as an imbecile, though: in cutting members out of the party, he’s cutting off the membership fees that he needs, in order to maintain the machinery he is using to attack them.
As it is – at the same NEC meeting where he will demand the removal of the above-named groups, he will have to propose plans to make around a quarter of Labour Party staff jobless:
“@UKLabour’s ruling NEC is set to discuss plans for large-scale redundancies among staff, with up to 90 jobs at risk, as @Keir_Starmer seeks to repair the party’s shattered finances.”
Hilariously, the Guardian report tells us that the plan has been devised in a report entitled Organise to Win!
The report states:
Labour’s finances have been hit hard by fighting three general elections in the past six years, as well as a string of costly legal cases, and hopes of a membership bounce after Starmer took over failed to materialise.
The party paid out a six-figure sum a year ago to settle a case brought by seven former employees and a veteran BBC journalist, admitting it defamed them in the aftermath of a Panorama investigation into its handling of antisemitism.
It doesn’t mention the possibility that Labour had no need to settle, as its legal advisors had told Starmer that the party was likely to win if the case came to court. His decision to capitulate is inexplicable.
And how many other disasters have gone unreported? Labour lost thousands of pounds defending itself in court against This Writer’s case, that the party had broken its own disciplinary rules in order to expel me.
The finding was that the party had not broken its rules, which are extremely vague in respect of what may actually be done – but Labour did appear to have broken the regulations it had in place at the time, in order to justify throwing me out. The court ordered that Labour should not be repaid the thousands of pounds it had spent on the case.
How many other such cases have taken place? What other disputes have eroded the party’s funds?
Remember: Labour became the richest UK political party under Jeremy Corbyn because he inspired hundreds of thousands of people to join up – people Keir Starmer has been desperately trying to throw off since he became leader.
Starmer’s plan, it seems, was to go back to relying on donations from big businesses – the same model as that used by Tony Blair during the ‘New Labour’ period of the mid-1990s to 2015.
But his failure to inspire popular support – because he hasn’t said what he stands for – means businesses aren’t supporting him.
There is only one conclusion to draw:
Here’s an obvious, incontrovertible sentence you won’t read in the press tomorrow as Labour makes more layoffs:
The party is in a financial death spiral because of Keir Starmer. I have no idea whose advising him – it’s as if he’s trying to end the Labour Party.
If he isn’t trying to end his own party, then it is ironic that he might be saved from his own stupidity by NEC members who oppose the proscription plan. The UK’s biggest union, and Labour’s biggest donor – Unite – is against it:
Oh, brilliant plan. Labour is haemorrhaging member subscriptions, and is so broke it is having to lay off staff, so @Keir_Starmer's idea of repairing its finances is to enrage the party's largest donor by purging and victimising socialists. https://t.co/p6FzA7TW2Npic.twitter.com/qEsThNwAc2
— leftworks #WeAreCorbyn #IStandWithJeremyCorbyn (@leftworks1) July 19, 2021
The quoted section in the above tweet is from the Guardian article, again, and states:
Labour’s biggest donor, the Unite trade union, attacked the plans on Monday, saying: “While working-class communities are continuing to bear the brunt of the sickness and employment worries made much worse by Conservative mishandling of the pandemic, Labour is abandoning the field of battle against this government to turn its fire on its members instead.”
The union added that such “acts of political machismo” create a “sense of despair among voters who see a party at perpetual war with itself”.
And NEC members from the left-wing Grassroots Voice organisation also oppose the proscriptions:
— Nadia Jama – #GrassrootsVoice (@MizJama) July 19, 2021
The group states:
We believe that asking us to consider this matter … is a continuation of the destructive, factional behaviours from the leadership of the party which have marked the last year.
This isn’t just about the organisations we are being asked to consider… it is about … setting a precedent, proscribing these organisations as a forerunner to proscription of more and more groupings on the left of the party, to ultimately expel large sections of the Labour left and erase the Bennite and other socialist traditions within the party.
Then again,
Starmer has a supportive majority on the NEC, so the plans are expected to be agreed.
If so, then Starmer has stuffed the NEC with drones who are just as stupid as he is and the Labour Party no longer deserves to survive.
So those like Mrs Gee, below, who believe the Left is on a hiding to nothing if it carries on with Labour, may be entirely justified in that view – and, while it may take decades to get a new party up to the popularity Labour achieved under great left-wing leaders like Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson, it may be better to work towards that than to support a lost cause:
If I'm honest I don't want the whip restoring to Jeremy Corbyn
I'd rather other Labour MPs resigned the whip in protest & started a new party as part of a progressive alliance to seriously take on the Tories across the UK because clearly centrist Labour has no plans to do that
Whatever happens, it seems the Labour Party, as run by Keir Starmer, is over.
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