Money, money, money: why doesn’t Boris Johnson spend some of his own, instead of ours, for a change?
Boris Johnson has sacked the legal team selected for him by the government, after its members provided information to the Cabinet Office that led to a new criminal investigation
And now…
Taxpayers are set to be billed more than a million pounds for Boris Johnson ’s new lawyers, after he sacked the government-provided legal team defending him at the Covid-19 inquiry.
In fact, taxpayers aren’t paying for it – other than indirectly. It’s public money, and if the government wants us to pay it, it will need to tax the money back from us. That hasn’t happened yet.
That being said: I don’t see any reason for the public to continue paying for lawyers that public servants didn’t appoint.
I mean,
Boris Johnson's new lawyers to cost taxpayers more than £1m for his Partygate defence.
Johnson made £6m last yr. Just been to US, giving six-figure sum speeches.
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Scam: rail firms (for clarity, the train in the picture is not run by one of the companies in the story) are being protected from the consequences of strike action with public money that is being used to pay shareholders. Meanwhile, workers’ pay demands are ignored and services cancelled.
Tory priorities.
It seems the Conservative government has happily green-lit the payment of £82 million in dividend payments to shareholders in two privatised rail companies, while refusing to accept the pay demands of thousands of people who actually work on the railways:
An extraordinary story where taxpayer funds are directly turned into shareholder dividends.
Public pays to indemnify rail companies against losses rising from strike action & then £82 million in dividends are paid!
Transport Secretary Mark Harper has allowed two private rail companies to be paid £82 million in dividends in 2022.
This is the despite the fact both companies are part of a major industrial dispute where hundreds of millions of pounds has been used to indemnify them against lost revenue from strike action.
FirstRail Holdings Ltd, the holding company for five FirstGroup franchises, and Govia Thameslink Railways, which runs the biggest franchise in Britain, have recently reported dividend payments of £65 million and £16.9 million respectively in their annual accounts for 2022.
Two of First Rail Holdings Ltd’s franchises, Avanti West Coast and Transpennine Express, have been the subject of public and political controversy after cancelling hundreds of services. In spite of this, the government has renewed or extended contracts for Avanti West Coast and may shortly do the same for Transpennine Express.
Govia won a contract to carry on running the Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern franchise from the government in October 2022 despite its sister company LSER being stripped of the Southeastern franchise for concealing public money.
The DfT allowed Go-Ahead Group to conduct its own internal inquiry into the failings at LSER and renewed Govia’s contract for the Thameslink franchise in spite of the fact that the two companies shared many of the same management personnel.
All these franchises have benefited from indemnification worth hundreds of millions of pounds in taxpayers’ money by the DfT to cover the costs of lost passenger revenue during the ongoing dispute.
RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch said: “The DfT is now little more than a representative of big business, geared to turning tax revenue into shareholder dividends.
“If you’re a private train operator, it doesn’t matter whether your problem is unpredictable passenger revenue, costly train leases or industrial action, the Secretary of State is there to help, opening the public purse and emptying it into shareholders’ pockets.
“This system is not operating in the interests of passengers, railway workers or the taxpayer.
“It is clear that only full public ownership of train operation in this country can save our railways from being looted by this gang of unaccountable spivs.”
Here’s an English-language explanation of what can only be described as a Tory-run scam:
It would be cheaper to bring rail back under public ownership all around – and that includes paying rail workers what they demand.
The RMT has no strike days currently planned after the government put a new pay offer on the table – but that doesn’t mean its workers will accept any such offer as fair.
Meanwhile, the government has been ring-fencing the failing rail operators against strike action – using public money. That’s your money.
It would be better to let the privateers fail, take the railways back into public ownership at low cost and pay the workers. The Tories aren’t doing it because they want to keep workers poor and pay the idle rich who do nothing for their wealth.
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Tory wasters: Rishi Sunak and Steve Barclay have wasted billions of pounds that could have paid for much more than the pay rises demanded by doctors, nurses and ambulance crews. If they withheld it because they’re trying to steer us towards privatisation, they have failed.
The Conservatives have been paying billions of pounds to private health-related companies for services that have not been provided – while accusing striking doctors, nurses and ambulance staff of jeopardising patient care.
Experts say the figure is just scratching the surface, with NHS bosses in England having been given the green light to spend up to £10bn on private health companies as part of the government’s plan to reduce the record number of patients waiting for care.
The biggest beneficiary of the outsourcing has been the Australian healthcare multinational Ramsay, which received £134m to offer non-emergency care to NHS patients between 2021 and 2022.
Spire Healthcare, which operates 38 private hospitals formerly owned by Bupa, has been handed a further £108m over the same period. Circle, which is owned by Centene, one of the biggest US healthcare corporations, was paid £50m.
A further 30 private companies, which also include the Nuffield Trust and Specsavers, have been paid £195m in total as part of a contract aimed at boosting the number of patients the NHS treats in England between 2021 and 2022.
The data was obtained by openDemocracy through a Freedom of Information request to all 42 NHS Integrated Care Boards, which are responsible for spending and managing NHS budgets regionally in England. Only 23 responded to openDemocracy’s request, meaning the total cost could be significantly higher.
But the number of patients being treated has not recovered even to pre-Covid-19 levels:
Between January and November 2022, the NHS treated 6.6% fewer patients from elective care waiting lists than it did over the same period in 2019, according to an analysis by the Institute of Fiscal Studies.
The think tank said in February that the NHS was “clearly lagging” behind its target to increase the number of people it is treating to around 30% above pre-pandemic levels by 2024/25.
Exhibit B:
WHERE DID THE MONEY GO TO "DHSC wasted £15bn on unused Covid supplies" says @NAOorguk No money for nurses & junior doctors? But plenty for PPE VIP LANES & Tory donors who own private healthcare companies. Corruption is at the Tory core.https://t.co/liyyLMjfSS
The department spent £8.9bn during 2020-21 and another £6bn last year on such supplies, including masks and gowns for NHS staff that have proved unuseable and are now being burned.
The sums were revealed in the Department of Health and Social Care’s (DHSC) annual accounts and report for 2021-22, published on Thursday, and highlighted in a highly critical assessment issued by the National Audit Office (NAO).
The DHSC’s report also disclosed that it expects to spend £319m storing and disposing of PPE which is no longer needed and is of such poor quality that it is no use to frontline staff anyway.
In March last year it was still spending £24m a month storing the infection-preventing equipment, the NAO said.
On the subject of storage, there’s this:
You have to wonder why we bought so much PPE – much from Tory donors at 500% of pre-pandemic prices – that we didn't even bother having shipped to the UK.
i analysis of figures provided by NHS bodies showed that strikes by junior doctors, nurses, ambulance and other health workers have already led to 665,000 cancelled appointments or operations.
NHS Providers in March said 140,000 appointments were postponed due to nurses and ambulance workers walking out between December and mid-March.
NHS England said the first junior doctors strike last month caused the cancellation of 175,000 operations and appointments.
Up to 350,000 appointments could have been cancelled during the unprecedented four-day junior doctors walkout last week, the NHS Confederation estimated.
Separately, NHS England analysis said the first nurse walkouts on 15 and 20 December caused the cancellation of almost 30,000 operations and appointments.
This is not justification for government investment in the private sector, though. Quite the opposite.
Let’s go back to that Open Democracy article for a moment:
Junior doctors are asking for a 35% pay rise to reverse 15 years of below-inflation wage increases.
The BMA calculates that the net cost of the pay rise for the government would be £1.03bn – a tenth of the potential spending on private healthcare companies. Even the £500m spent last year could have funded an 8% uplift in junior doctor wages for the year in question.
Add nurses and ambulance staff to the calculation and bringing their pay up to parity with 2008 or 2010 levels would still cost a fraction of what Rishi Sunak and his government have wasted – let’s be clear on that: wasted – on private health firms that simply do not help.
Exhibit D:
NHS strikes: RCN union chief warns that nurses could still be striking ‘right up until Christmas’ https://t.co/5kEJfmjmrX
The Tories don’t want to go into talks with preconditions, and won’t talk if strike action is likely. In other words, the only talks they want are if they tell the nurses (and other NHS staff) what they have to take. No union representative will accept those – let’s face it – preconditions. In any case, it is hypocritical of the Tory government to demand preconditions while condemning nurses for having any of their own.
Exhibit E:
Report via @TheKingsFund Latest BSA survey is desperate. In 2010 satisfaction with NHS peaked at 70% In 2022 it fell to 29% – lowest figure on record Social Care satisfaction comes in at 14%. Real people. Real heartbreak The result of Tory financial greedhttps://t.co/8A4QuQdJQM
From a peak of 70 per cent in 2010, overall satisfaction with the NHS has fallen to just 29 per cent – the lowest figure recorded since this question was first asked in 1983. Satisfaction with individual NHS services is at record lows across the board, while satisfaction with social care is the lowest of all with only 14 per cent of the public saying they are satisfied with it.
Yet none of this translates into any appetite for user charging or a different funding model, the first options that some commentators flailing around for a magical solution tend to clutch at. The public’s aspirations seem straightforward: they simply want an NHS that does what it says on the tin and that works. They were highly satisfied with a system that provided this as recently as 12 years ago, and they do not accept that this is too much to ask.
This may come as a huge disappointment to leading Tories, who are generally believed to have spent the last 13 years de-funding the NHS in order to stop it working properly, in the belief that public opinion would swing behind changing to a US-style, insurance-based, privately-run health system.
The article suggests that £30 billion would be needed to support the kind of pay deals NHS workers need. From the Open Democracy article, this seems a lot more than necessary – but let’s consider the options it presents anyway:
Earlier this year I noted the suggestion that £30 billion was required to fund appropriate NHS pay deals and wrote a proposal to address the need to finance this, including the possibility that it simply be added to the deficit, which is wholly plausible. As I suggestsed then… this funding could be addressed as follows:
1) £10 billion could come from the additional taxes paid by those lured back to the NHS by better working conditions and higher pay, and by those lured back having given up on work altogether. The impact of the extra NHS spending on growth elsewhere in the economy is also taken into account in this estimate.
2) At least £5 billion might be raised from taxes paid by those able to return to the workforce either because their own conditions will be sufficiently well managed to allow this or because those that they care for will enjoy better health, letting them return to work.
So, at least half of the funding required will be directly generated from the benefits created by that additional spending. Options for the remaining £15 billion include:
3) A government could simply decide to run a bigger deficit to fund the £15 billion requirement. The impact on the national debt is insignificant.
4) The Bank of England currently has a programme of selling the government debt it owns bought under the quantitative easing programmes that paid for the banking crises of 2008/9, the Brexit crisis of 2016 and the Covid crisis of 2020/21. If £15bn of this programme was cancelled each year and bonds to fund the NHS were sold instead the funding to deliver the healthcare we need could be found. In this case, there would be no net impact on the national debt owned by third parties.
5) National Savings and Investments could issue NHS Bonds in ISA accounts to provide the funding. £70 billion is saved in ISAs each year. Properly marketed, it would be easy to find £15 billion a year this way.
6) Halving the tax reliefs on savings available to the wealthiest 10% of people in the UK each year. At present it is likely that this group enjoy at least £30 billion of pension and ISA tax reliefs each year.
7) Since the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons has found that for every £1 spent on tax investigations £18 of additional tax is raised, investing £1 billion in additional funding with HM Revenue & Customs might be enough to recover the funds required for the NHS each year.
8) The rate of capital gains tax in the UK is currently set at half the rate of income tax in most cases. If it was set at the same rate as the income tax rate then the revenue from this tax might double, raising £15 billion a year.
Judging by all this evidence, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that the Tory government has wasted huge amounts of money that could have been used to support real investment in the National Health Service, and is claiming there is no money available now.
But in fact there are many options available to it; ministers are simply refusing to consider them.
So the NHS crisis that has led to the strikes by doctors, nurses and ambulance teams was caused by the Tory government, and the Tories are deliberately withholding the cash necessary to restore the system.
It is Tory waste that has caused the problem; the strikers are simply doing the only thing they can do to raise awareness of it.
Care: the head of NHS England once said he wanted change but now it seems clear it will be for the worse.
The Tory government promised to revitalise social care in the UK – but seems set to renege on that vow.
Is this the next big Tory scandal?
Ministers are poised to cut £250m from investment in the social care workforce in England, it has been reported, in a move that providers say could set back care “for years to come”.
With more than 165,000 care worker jobs vacant, and low pay driving staff to quit for better wages in retail and hospitality, care providers and councils have been clamouring for investment in recruitment and retention. Inadequate staffing levels are frequently noted as a cause of neglect and poor care by the Care Quality Commission.
However, according to the Health Service Journal (subscription), the government is poised to water down a promise it made in the December 2021 social care white paper to dedicate £500m to “investment in knowledge, skills, health and wellbeing, and recruitment policies [that] will improve social care as a long-term career choice”. This amount could be cut to £250m.
Knife crime is rampant in the UK, much of it involving young people. How is £5 million of sports funding supposed to turn it around?
Here’s the story. Discussion below:
I was talking about this only last night, with a 19-year-old friend of mine.
He told me that stunts like this from Dominic Raab are pointless.
Young people are surrounded by a culture of knife crime, he said – in the music they hear, the social media they visit, and in the people they meet in their daily lives (including, often, family members).
In the year ending March 2022, there were around 45,000 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument in England and Wales (excluding Greater Manchester Police Force), according to the Office for National Statistics. This was nine per cent higher than in 2020/21 and a massive 34 per cent higher than in 2010/11.
How is a pittance of cash spread across the UK to fund sport supposed to help turn that tide?
Not only is it not enough, it will not be interesting to many of the youngsters who may have been involved in creating the statistics quoted above.
I wonder who provided the advice on which this was based, and on what information it was based.
And I wonder who knows how much it will cost to effect real change.
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Money: the cost-of-living crisis means more cash is needed to cover the care of severely disabled people – but councils don’t have enough.
Here’s a little-known consequence of the cost-of-living crisis: disabled people are being evicted from charity-run care homes because local councils are refusing to pay increased costs.
These are people with severe disabilities whose care can cost anything between £85,000 and £150,000 per year.
The charity Leonard Cheshire said it had served 11 eviction notices on contracts with councils that had been under re-negotiation without agreement since February. Two were rescinded after councils agreed to pay uprated fees.
The fee increases reflect the rising costs of wages, energy and food due to the cost-of-living crisis that has been largely caused by the UK’s Conservative government, due to Brexit and energy privatisation that has led to failures to upgrade to cheap, locally-generated energy.
Leonard Cheshire has spent millions of pounds from its own reserves over the last few years, subsidising care services that councils have failed to fund adequately – but now says it can no longer afford to continue doing so.
Mencap has not evicted anybody because it generally doesn’t own the properties they occupy – but is subsidising one in five of the state-funded care packages it provides to 4,000 people – so that’s 800 of them. The cost to the charity is millions of pounds.
Evicted residents are unlikely to become homeless because their council or NHS funder has a duty to provide alternative care.
But the concern is that moving will disrupt the care that people get, and cheaper alternative arrangements will be of poorer quality or based far away from their family support network.
Ironically, the evictions are prompted by concerns that the level of council funding no longer guarantees basic safety and quality standards.
Inevitably, the government has claimed it provides plenty of money to support adult social care services – with the £7.5 billion available over two years constituting the biggest funding increase in UK history.
Conspicuously missing is any comment on whether this is enough money to cover the increased costs of care.
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Money: Liz Truss had half a million pounds in funding for her Tory leadership campaign – almost twice the permitted amount. It came from hedge fund bosses, bankers and business leaders – the “status quo” that she warned against in her two-faced Conservative Party conference speech.
Remember this, from Liz Truss’s keynote speech at the Conservative Party conference, only yesterday?
Today we discover that, not only is it an option for her, but it was her first option when seeking funding for her campaign to be leader of the Conservative Party – and prime minister by default:
Liz Truss was given more than £500,000 for her leadership campaign, with about half of it coming from donors linked to hedge fund bosses, venture capitalists and other City financiers. https://t.co/W6FgZACee3
These are people who will now consider it their right to make demands of the UK’s prime minister, ensuring that she does what they tell her – because she owes them her job.
When Liz Truss suggests she's "challenging the status quo", it's worth remembering the super-rich donors who funded her leadership campaign, including: a billionaire (£25k donation), a city banker (£50k) and an ex-BP executive partner (£100k).
The prime minister, who has made a virtue of being pro-business and cutting taxes, saw a further round of donations declared on the register of MPs’ interests on Wednesday.
The second tranche of donations takes the amount she has received to more than £500,000 – way above the campaign spending limit of £300,000.
So she broke the campaign’s rules.
Doesn’t that make her candidacy invalid? Shouldn’t she be resigning right about now, rather than jetsetting around the world on a prime ministerial jolly?
The grinning Kwarteng: he’ll be smiling on the other side of his face when the roar of protest against his attack on our health and education reaches him.
Your health and your children’s education are to suffer in order to make the rich richer, Kwasi Kwarteng has confirmed.
He didn’t say it in quite that way, of course – but he has announced that public services will lose up to £18 billion per year – and that is a result of his decision to cut taxes for the rich.
He – and prime minister Liz Truss – has claimed the non-existent “trickle-down” effect means these fat cats will spend the extra money into the economy, making other people richer too.
But this is not true. Instead, the money will most likely go to tax havens while you suffer due to the loss.
Here’s what has been announced:
CHANCELLOR Kwasi Kwarteng has confirmed that public services face further cuts of up to £18 billion per year.
This comes following his dramatic U-turn on the 45p tax rate.
Budgets will not be topped up in order to take account of soaring inflation, the Chancellor said.
The move has been described by economic experts as one which is likely to have an “extraordinary” impact on the NHS and schools.
Last week, head of the IFS Paul Johnson said: “It is pretty extraordinary. There’s a real problem for schools and hospitals. It’s going to be a real squeeze.”
Paul Johnson isn’t the only one saying there are real problems. Already the social media are filling with outrage:
BREAKING: Kwasi Kwarteng will offer no financial assistance to schools and hospitals that are struggling to afford their energy bills this winter. I guess the 5 year olds will have to freeze and the life support machines will have to power themselves x
— Laura Kuenssberg Translator (@BBCFLauraKT) October 3, 2022
We’ve gone from leaving the EU so we can give our NHS £350m per week instead…
To making cuts to our NHS so we can give to our richest instead.
In terms of the NHS, it’s murder by proxy – if you think about it.
Truss and Kwarteng used the fear that you wouldn’t be able to heat your home as an excuse to bring in changes that mean you may not even be able to afford to live in it.
Then, mindful of the effect of these changes on your health, they are now imposing changes that mean the National Health Service will have to turn you away to die – after you spent years paying for it with your taxes.
Remember: health and education are your right; you have paid for them and the Tories have a contractual obligation to provide them – up to the highest standard.
Kwarteng should be reminded of this. It might make him grin on the other side of his face.
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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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