Category Archives: Government

Home Office malnourishment policy: taking a leaf from Israel’s book?

It seems the Home Office has been deliberately depriving asylum-seekers of nourishing food:

Food provided to asylum seekers by Home Office contractors is of such poor quality that some people are ending up malnourished in hospital, a report has found.

The paper found that it was difficult or impossible to meet nutritional needs and some people ended up in hospital with nutrition-related conditions. Cases of malnutrition among children and diabetes among adults were identified.

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Food poisoning, weight loss and diabetes were particular problems and there were reports of children “crying with hunger”. Some children lost significant amounts of weight and were not meeting their developmental milestones.

A lot of food ended up being binned and when fruit was provided, it was often already rotting and attracting flies. Hairs, mould and insects were found in food and sometimes raw or undercooked meat and chicken were served.

Food such as yoghurt was sometimes provided after it had passed its sell-by date. Particular concerns were raised about infant feeding and parents’ inability to access facilities to sterilise bottles.

Asylum seekers said they knew that Home Office contractors were making profits out of providing poor food for them. “We are the holy cash cow,” said one.

The report found a “sense of cruelty that food is deliberately being used to demoralise and dehumanise”.

This is a shocking, abominable way to mistreat people fleeing persecution in their own countries and seeking shelter and care here.

It reminds me of the way Israel treated the people of Gaza before the current invasion and genocide.

For those who aren’t aware: because Israel controlled all goods entering Gaza, it was able to restrict the amount of food and drink going into the enclave, thereby ensuring that all 2,000,000+ inhabitants were permanently malnourished, in a policy that was intended to make them unable to resist Israeli atrocities.

And now, by denying access to Gaza for food aid convoys, and murdering anybody who tries to take food from those that do get through, Israel has created a famine in Gaza – and people, including children, have already starved to death.

It is cruelty – using food to demoralise and dehumanise.

That’s just how the Home Office has been described – deliberately trying to do the same to asylum-seekers here in the UK.

Source: Home Office food provision leaving some asylum seekers malnourished – report | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian


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Jeremy Hunt misled us about the National Debt

Jeremy Hunt’s last Budget looks set to go down in history as the biggest pack of lies ever told by a politician in one statement.

It’s hard to know where to start picking at his hour-long stream of nonsense, but here’s one item the BBC has teased out, on the national debt. I refer you to “head of statistics” Robert Cuffe:

In his Budget statement, the Chancellor said that the UK’s debt was “falling in line with our fiscal rules”.

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The government’s rules only require that it falls once in the next five years: between 2028 and 2029.

In other years of the forecast, debt is not set to fall – it will rise three times and hold flat once.

The UK’s debt is forecast to be higher five years from now.

People will have heard him say that the National Debt is falling when in fact it isn’t.

Possibly the worst aspect of this is that it doesn’t really matter. It would be a worry if the UK was unable to pay interest on the debt, or it spiralled out of control, causing an inflation crisis. But the recent increase in inflation had nothing to do with government debt.

The UK’s current problems arise from what the government has been doing with the money it has been spending, that has caused the debt – giving it to very rich friends of the Tory Party, in return for nothing at all, meaning that they have had the wherewithal to buy the nation’s assets – businesses and property – pricing the rest of us out of our own market.

Hunt didn’t have a word to say about all that because it suits him to hide the fact that deliberate government actions have made most of us worse-off.


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Galloway by-election win rattles Sunak; he’ll crack down harder on protest against him

Sunak’s speech: look at that face. He knows the game’s up.

Rishi Sunak has responded to George Galloway’s pro-Palestine by-election win in Rochdale with a speech attacking the new MP himself – and also peaceful protest.

His comments outside Downing Street were pre-publicised, meaning some of us were able to speculate on what he would say…

… and that was very close to the fact of it:

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While he did not announce new laws against protest, Sunak did encourage police to act more strongly during events – attracting heavy criticism:

You can read about the Flour Massacre here.

The speech has provoked strident responses from both pro-Palestine protesters and the Workers’ Party of Britain, whose MP George Galloway now is:

Sunak was really saying he would do everything he could to silence Galloway and stop the protests against the genocide that Israel is carrying out in Gaza.

If you are as disgusted by this revolting display as This Writer, you have two options. The first is to join peaceful protests and bear witness to attempts at suppression by police, acting as Sunak’s political puppets as described in his speech.

The other is to vote for parties other than either the Conservatives or Labour. Remember:

Sunak and Starmer – and the parties they lead – are as bad as each other. Rochdale has shown the way and it is for those of us in other constituencies to follow.


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Four ways Labour could fix the crisis in local council finances – but will it?

Council funding: council tax bills are only a minor element in the funding of local authorities – most of the cash comes from central government’s Aggregate External Finance (AEF) grant. It is the composition of this grant that determines whether councils can cope – or will go bankrupt.

LabourList used to be a handy source of information about the UK’s largest political party – but that was a long time ago, before the infighting over Jeremy Corbyn, and Keir Starmer’s purge of the Left.

Still, it does produce the occasional item of interest, like a recent piece about ways a Labour government might solve the Tory-caused crisis in local council funding.

Six English councils have announced effective bankruptcy since 2020, and there is said to be a £4 billion funding gap across the board.

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“£4 billion? That’s nothing,” I hear you say. “Tories give sums like that to their buddies in return for hot air.” True. But LabourList has suggested four possible ways of improving council funding.

The big question is: which will Keir Starmer rubber-stamp? Or will he ignore the problem, like the Tory he is?

Here are the possibilities:

Proposal 1: Rework the local government needs assessment [the Fair Funding Review].

The government launched a ‘fair funding review’ in 2016, but this has not progressed since a consultation in 2018. Not having this in place in England makes it a significant outlier in the international community, gradually untethering the distribution of local government finance from local need and resource.

The Fair Funding Review should be reopened and delivered, paving the way for yearly needs assessments and longer-term funding settlements.

Proposal 2: Establish a systematic form of territorial equalisation between local authorities.

England is an outlier in not having a systematic form of territorial equalisation, that ensures solidarity and parity in needs-based revenue between location.

Germany, Italy, and Japan all utilise forms of vertical (central to local) and horizontal (between location) redistributions of major income streams (including elements of personal, company, consumption, and asset taxes) that ensure that all locations have access to sufficient resources and the ability to deliver minimum service standards.

Importantly, the funding provided through the equalisation systems in Germany, Japan and Italy is not ringfenced. This results in individual local authorities having significant discretion over the income they receive.

Proposal 3: Establish a standing commission, akin to the ‘English Devolution Council’ proposed by the Institute for Government.

Discussions between councils and the government about local financial pressures, distribution of funds, or the impact of national policies are haphazard and often adversarial. To strengthen this relationship, we propose a one-stop, statutory body to provide discussion forum for local authority representatives and the government.

Proposal 4: Develop a long-term programme exploring assigning national tax revenues to local authorities.

A fixed percentage of the revenue from one or more national taxes could be assigned to local government as a whole. Taxes that could be considered in this regard include income tax, VAT, employers’ NI, corporation tax, vehicle excise duty, and stamp duty.

The revenue could then be distributed according to the needs assessment developed in Proposal 1. This would counter the problem faced by many proposals for fiscal devolution: that richer areas raise more money, increasing inequality.

All of these ideas are based on the situation in Germany, Italy and Japan, which suggests that, perhaps, only minimal research has been done.

Still, a little is better than none at all.

But no amount of research can do any good if a government is not interested in implementing it.

And Keir Starmer is haemorrhaging votes because of his blind loyalty to Israel in that country’s brutal slaughter of innocent citizens of Gaza.

Which of the four ideas above will he implement? Well, he may not have the chance to consider any of them.

Source: Four ways Labour could fix the crisis in local council finances – LabourList


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Has plan to double English medical students stalled so ‘physician associates’ can be installed instead?

Physician associate: training for these not-doctors is cropping up all over the place (this is at Chester University), while a government promise to fund more places for trainee doctors has proved to be economical with the truth.

A plan to increase the number of trainee doctors in England to 15,000 by 2031 has stalled, with only 350 places funded for 2025-6 – just a quarter of the expected annual total.

Ministers have dramatically stalled plans to double the number of doctors being trained in England by 2031 in a move that has caused dismay across the NHS, as well in medical schools and universities.

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In June last year, ministers backed a long-term plan to expand the NHS workforce and pledged, amid great fanfare, to “double medical school places by 2031 from 7,500 today to 15,000, with more medical school places in areas with the greatest shortages to level up training and help address geographic inequity”. Labour is also committed to raising the number of doctors to 15,000 by 2031.

But a leaked letter written jointly by health minister Andrew Stephenson and the minister for skills, apprenticeships and higher education, Robert Halfon, to the independent regulator the Office for Students, says they will fund only 350 additional places for trainee doctors in 2025-26. This is less than a quarter of the annual number widely anticipated and there is no guarantee that even that level of resource will be repeated.

This Writer never believes any “long-term plan” announced by a government; these always seem to be bids for short-term boosts in popularity. Last year’s announcement about medical students seems a perfect example.

I also wonder whether the Tories are trying to save money by force-replacing doctors with controversial ‘physician associates’ – under-qualified substitutes for doctors whose decisions have proved dangerous, and occasionally fatal.

Source: Government delays plans to double number of medical students in England | NHS | The Guardian


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Tories (allegedly) delay compensating sub-postmasters – for electoral gain?

Sub-postmasters: if Mr Staunton’s claim is correct, then the Tory government has been lying about wanting to do right by them.

The now-former chairman of Post Office Ltd has claimed the government asked him to “stall” payouts to sub-postmasters so they could “limp” into the next general election with “the lowest possible financial liability”.

The Sunday Times seemed to have the story first:

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Here’s a snippet from that story:

This Writer couldn’t find the Sunday Times piece online but this is from the GB News version of the same story:

The former chairman went on to allege that he was instructed by a senior civil servant to stall on compensation payments to the Horizon victims so that the government could “limp into the election” later this year with the lowest possible financial liability.

He told the Times: “Early on, I was told by a fairly senior person to stall on spending on compensation and on the replacement of Horizon, and to limp, in quotation marks — I did a file note on it — limp into the election.

“It was not an anti-postmaster thing, it was just straight financials.

“I didn’t ask, because I said, ‘I’m having no part of it – I’m not here to limp into the election, it’s not the right thing to do by postmasters.’ The word ‘limp’ gives you a snapshot of where they were.”

Badenoch’s department have denied the claims and referred to the conversation as “simply incorrect”.

That’s all very well.

But here’s a little lateral thinking on the subject:

That seems to be the size of it.

But I’m curious as to the meaning of this idea that the Tory government would be going into the next election with the “lowest possible financial liability”.

It isn’t as though the Tories would be paying from party funds, making them less able to campaign.

So what’s the fuss about?


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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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Rishi Sunak’s NHS fail in a single social media post

Rishi Sunak in a hospital: he can get in because he can afford to jump the 7+ million-strong queue he and his Tory colleagues have created.

This just about sums up Tory health policy for the last 14 years:

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It is as Prem Sikka explained in a speech to the House of Lords (and an article for Left Foot Forward):

The government has reduced access to healthcare.

That was, is and remains the entire point of everything the Tories have done with the National Health Service since 2010 – and is the reason millions have died while awaiting NHS care under their rule.


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Would the UK have a labour shortage if the Tories hadn’t killed so many of us?

Too few workers: but with low wages, reduced access to healthcare and rising stress-related mental illness, why would anybody want a job in the UK?

It would be funny if it were not so tragic.

The Conservative government is not happy because there is a labour shortage in the UK.

The last figures This Writer has seen suggest that businesses need an extra million workers.

It would be easy to blame Brexit for the shortfall, and there is certainly an argument that sending migrant workers back to their own countries has been a bad idea.

But there’s also the fact – fact, mark you – that the Conservative governments of 2010 onwards have been killing off working-age people at an astonishing rate. This is not a reference to Covid, but to actual, premeditated Tory policy.

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The ever-excellent Prem Sikka made this point in a House of Lords debate on the subject:

He had previously posted this on ‘X’:

The article to which he links provides all the information you need:

People in secure and well paid jobs are more likely to have a longer life expectancy and take less time off work due to sickness. This can swell the size of the work force, but the government has pushed real wage cuts with claims that wage increases for workers are inflationary though that logic is suspended for executives and bankers. The average real wage has remained mostly unchanged since 2007.

The annual UK median wage is around £29,669.  The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that a single person needs to earn £29,500 a year to reach a minimum acceptable standard of living. A couple with two children need to earn £50,000 between them. This means that nearly half the working population does not reach the minimum standard of living though low incomes can be supplemented by means-tested social security systems. 17.8m adults have income of less than £12,570. Indeed, due to low pay more people in work are claiming social security benefits than those out of work.

The result is that some 14.4 million people live in poverty. Millions of people are deprived of good food, housing, education, clothing, skills and healthcare. Deprived people cannot work long hours or fulfil their potential. More workers report sick and have mental and physical health problems. More than 800,000 patients were admitted to hospital with malnutrition and nutritional deficiencies last year. Some 16m people have disabilities which may affect their participation in labour markets. The government is considering withdrawing benefits from the old, sick and disabled and force them to work, but it is hard to see how that will deal with systemic problems.

Rather than improving healthcare, the government has reduced access to healthcare. People struggle to get access to NHS dentists and family doctors. Some 6.39 million individuals in England alone are waiting for 7.6m hospital appointments. That is one-in-nine persons. Around 2.8 million people, roughly equivalent to the populations of Bournemouth, Cardiff, Coventry, Edinburgh Stoke-on-Trent and Middlesbrough, combined, are suffering from chronic health conditions and are unable to work. More than 500,000 under-35s in the prime of their life are out of work due to long-term illness.

A 2023 study reported in the 5 years to 2022 nearly 1.5 million people in England died whilst waiting for a NHS hospital appointment – that is nearly 300,000 a year.  A 2022 study reported that between 2012 and 2019, government imposed austerity caused 335,000 excess deaths in England and Scotland i.e. nearly 48,000 a year. One-third of these deaths were among people under 65. Another study estimated that between 2011 and 2020, 1.2m people in England died prematurely from a combination of poverty, austerity and Covid. The Government’s obsession with austerity, wage cuts and defunct economic theories has turned the state into a killing machine, and is a major cause of labour shortages.

The article is well worth reading as it covers other reasons for the labour shortage – all of which are down to government policy, inactivity or incompetence.

This Site has been warning that government policy kills since it was founded in 2011 – but at successive elections, the Tories have been voted back in.

So the logical conclusion is that the people of the UK are happy to be deprived of the healthcare to which we all contribute via our taxes, happy to be starved of food, housing and education, and happy to be driven into mental illness by the stress that all this causes.

Are we?

Or have we all been misled, time and again, by politicians with undeclared interests in keeping us down, along with their client media?

With a general election coming up soon, isn’t it time we gave up listening to the public relations people and started to check for ourselves what we are really being offered?

The people of Rochdale could use their by-election as an example for the rest of us.


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Rishi Sunak: worst prime minister on TV since Alec Douglas-Home?

Rishi Sunak on TV: at least he’s facing in the right direction in this image.

This Writer once saw a TV documentary about the 1964 general election campaign in which Labour’s Harold Wilson, easily the most intelligent person ever to have high office in the UK, walked all over then-Conservative prime minister Alec Douglas Home.

The reason? Home simply wasn’t good in front of a camera and Wilson was. The Tory looked awkward, sounded stiff and presented himself as someone who simply didn’t want to be bothered with people.

It’s possible that my interpretation of his campaign is coloured by the biases of the filmmakers, of course, but given the result of the election I doubt it.

Rishi Sunak looks like he’s going to be worse.

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To start with, he doesn’t seem even to understand that he needs to look into a TV camera – or at least face in the right direction – when he’s speaking to the public through it.

He fell at even that simple hurdle when he addressed the GB News People’s Forum on Monday, making his opening remarks with his back to the camera.

And from there it went downhill. There’s a Guardian review in the article below…

… but let’s go straight for the red meat (of Sunak’s jugular?) and watch Peter Stefanovic’s summary of everything that was wrong about Sunak’s TV time:

I’ve only got one full clip from the show – of when Sunak suggested his parents sent him to a private school because they had great aspirations for their children.

Labour’s Cat McKinnell called him out about it on ‘X’, although her words were clearly electioneering for her own party. Still, if you watch the clip, you can see what she means:

Here’s a more practical-minded response:

The verdicts afterward were damning. This one is kind in comparison with most:

The people invited to form the audience and ask the questions had all been chosen by the polling firm Survation which, it seems, had been asked to fill the room with Conservatives.

At least, they were Conservatives going in.

On the way out it was a different story, as we see here:

Only half of them came out saying they would still vote Tory.

Perhaps this is the most damning: a satirical poke at Sunak by suggesting his performance could become a segment on Would I Lie To You, with his part taken by legendary panellist Bob Mortimer:

We all thought Theresa May was shockingly bad, back in 2017.

Now we know we can look forward to a summer of seeing our prime minister running away, not only from his responsibilities but from TV cameras, the public and – most probably – the reality that he’s going to lose the election and probably his own place in Parliament.


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