Peter Bone: the alleged sexual misconduct took place between a male staff member and the Brexiter MP on a trip to Madrid. With hindsight, he may wish that the UK had withdrawn from the EU a little sooner than it did.
Oh my word. Yet another Tory has been suspended on charges including sexual misconduct – indecent exposure. And it’s Peter Bone!
I hope we can all resist any obvious nickname suggestions…
According to the BBC,
It follows a complaint made to the body by a former member of staff, over alleged behaviour which took place over 10 years ago.
Parliament’s Independent Expert Panel (IEP) found Mr Bone broke Parliament’s sexual misconduct rules by indecently exposing himself to the staffer during an overseas trip.
It also upheld five allegations of bullying, including “instructing, or physically forcing, the complainant to put his hands in his lap when Mr Bone was unhappy with him or his work”.
It also found he “verbally belittled, ridiculed, abused and humiliated” him, and “repeatedly physically struck and threw things” at him, including hitting him with his hand or an object such as a pencil or a rolled-up document.
It also upheld an allegation Mr Bone “repeatedly pressurised” the staffer to give him a massage in the office. It found this was bullying, but not sexual misconduct.
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Here’s a more personal perspective on it:
An overview of the findings from an expert panel re. the allegations against Conservative MP, Peter Bone.
Holy shit.
I’m obliged to say that he denies the allegations. I’m not obliged to refrain from calling him an utter prick.
He says the investigation was “flawed, procedurally unfair and didn’t comply with its own rules and regulations”, the claims against him “false and untrue”, and he’s discussing further action with his lawyers.
Meanwhile, MPs will have to vote on whether to suspend him from Parliament for six weeks, as recommended.
If that happens, it would trigger a recall petition that could potentially lead to a by-election in Mr Bone’s Wellingborough seat.
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Christian Matheson has quit as Labour MP for Chester after two charges of sexual misconduct against him were upheld.
Here’s Sky News:
According to the BBC,
Two allegations of sexual misconduct against Mr Matheson by a former member of his staff have been upheld.
The MP for Chester allegedly invited her on a private trip abroad, which was found to be “sexually motivated”.
He admitted he had committed a minor breach of the code and tendered his resignation with “great sadness”.
During a work event outside Parliament, he also [made] unwanted and unwelcome sexual advances.
Matheson said he accepted he had been found guilty of a minor breach of the code, but added that he had been found guilty of several allegations which were untrue.
His resignation has triggered a by-election for the City of Chester seat.
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Downing Street party: Boris Johnson asks quiz questions at one of the events that he says did not happen at his home and workplace during Covid-19-related lockdowns.
Police have discovered widespread criminality in Downing Street, with 20 people – so far – fined for attending parties there during Covid-19 lockdown when it was illegal to do so.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is on the record as saying no such parties took place and all regulations were followed, despite allegedly attending six of the 12 events under investigation himself.
At the very least, Johnson lied to Parliament and under the Ministerial Code he should resign.
In response to questioning, Johnson complained that Opposition leader Keir Starmer had previously said he should not resign, then fell back on a list of other issues he claimed to be tackling.
He did not address the question at all.
Doesn’t that indicate that he is as guilty as sin and should resign or be pushed out?
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Matt Hancock: you wouldn’t trust him to pick up a prescription from the chemist, but Boris Johnson made him health secretary. No wonder hundreds of thousands of people have died of Covid-19.
Here’s a great example of Tory corruption: the independent advisor on ministerial standards has announced that Health Secretary Matt Hancock has breached the ministerial code. It’s a sacking offence, so why does he still have his job?
Answer: because standards have slipped to such a low standard under prime minister Boris Johnson that cabinet ministers can get away with anything.
This case concerns a firm called Topwood, run by Hancock’s sister and brother-in-law. It managed to get onto NHS Shared Business Services framework in 2019, just months after Hancock became Health Secretary.
Hancock was then given – it seems he didn’t pay for them – a 20 per cent share in the shredding, storage and security firm, right before it won two NHS Wales contracts worth £150,000 each to carry out waste disposal including the shredding of confidential documents.
His failure to disclose that he has shares in the firm was described as a “technical breach” of the ministerial code by Lord Geidt – who has also given Boris Johnson a clean bill of health over the funding of refurbishment work on the 11 Downing Street flat.
Hancock was characterised as having been unaware that he needed to declare this conflict of interest. But ignorance of the law is no excuse – as you or I would soon find out if we were to fall foul of similar rules.
You see the problem?
Labour’s Angela Rayner does. She has pointed out that the decision not to penalise Hancock sets a precedent that cabinet ministers do not have to follow the rules.
She said:
“I have asked Lord Geidt whether he agrees that this precedent of a Cabinet minister being found by an independent investigation to have broken the ministerial code and then not resigning sends a very clear message that the rules don’t apply to Cabinet ministers, with this case therefore damaging public trust in our politics, fundamentally weakening the ministerial code system and giving carte blanche to other ministers to break the ministerial code safe in the knowledge that they will not face sanctions.”
In fact, this has already happened.
Priti Patel was found to have broken the ministerial code in a serious way – she had been bullying civil servants in the various government departments she has darkened with her presence, including the Home Office.
But prime minister Boris Johnson, who has ultimate power to decide whether a breach has taken place, let her off.
The decision prompted former independent advisor on ministerial standards, Sir Alex Allan, to resign.
The Cabinet Office has tried to laugh off the controversy by saying that new guidelines suggest that ministerial code breaches should be attract a range of different sanctions according to their seriousness, and this was the first case to be examined after the change.
How convenient.
All this shows is that the Johnson government has deliberately let the corruption in.
The removal of a minister after any breach of the code at all was intended to be a strong deterrent – to ensure that ministers stuck strictly to their duties, because even the slightest deviation would attract the harshest penalty.
But now deviants like Hancock are being told they can do what they like.
It is a scandal and you should not put up with it.
But you do, because there is no mechanism within the law by which you can put a stop to it.
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On one side, we see Nicola Sturgeon. The First Minister of Scotland has been found to have misled Parliament by giving an inaccurate account of meetings with Alex Salmond in 2018.
If an inquiry finds that she knowingly uttered falsehoods, then that is a resignation offence for an elected minister of any government, according to the Ministerial Code, and she should go – without question.
On the other side, we see Boris Johnson. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has been accused of having misled Parliament by failing to provide details of funding for renovations to his official Downing Street flat.
The allegation is that private donations to the Conservative Party totalling £60,000 have been used as part of £200,000 worth of refurbishments to the flat.
If so, it should have been reported to the Electoral Commission, because the Ministerial Code demands that “a statement covering relevant Ministers’ interests will be published twice yearly”. The last such statement appeared last July, eight months ago.
It seems clear that Johnson has knowingly breached the Code in failing to declare the sources of funding for the flat.
So he should resign – right?
But within Parliament there has been no pressure for him to do so, while Tory calls for Sturgeon to take a hike have been punitive in their decibel level.
Labour’s Keir Starmer, despite being a lawyer, has claimed Sturgeon should go whether she knowingly misled Parliament or not – which is another indication that he should not be in politics, let alone running a political party.
10 Downing Street says all appropriate codes were followed, but this rings hollow. What does Allegra Stratton, Johnson’s press secretary, mean by “appropriate”? Something different from the dictionary definition, one would guess.
That’s how Downing Street has explained the other ways Johnson has recently misled Parliament, as I mentioned in a previous article:
After he said there would be no funding cut for the body tasked with improving transport in the north (he’s taking away 40 per cent of its funding), Downing Street tried to suggest he had been talking about transport generally for the north of England.
And after he claimed all Covid-19 contracts had been published and were “on the record” – only to be contradicted by the High Court – a minister said all CANs – Contract Award Notices – had been published. They are not the same thing.
Today’s howler was his claim, in Prime Minister’s Questions, that Keir Starmer had voted against a promise of a 2.1 per cent pay rise for nurses – that his own government is breaking.
The plan was in the NHS Funding Bill last year – which passed without a formal vote because all the main parties supported it. Starmer didn’t need to vote, but if he had, he would have supported the Bill.
Johnson (or rather, Stratton – he’d done his usual runner) eventually came out with a claim that he had been saying Starmer voted against the Queen’s Speech – but the plan wasn’t mentioned in it.
The document Starmer had been waving around at PMQs – and to which he had been referring – was the NHS long-term plan, which was a policy document and not a piece of legislation on which he could have voted.
So it seems clear that Johnson had knowingly misled Parliament but the issue also seems to have gone away because nobody is calling for his resignation over it.
If you’re wondering who did fund the renovation, here‘s openDemocracy:
The Mail also claims that party officials have since been looking for ways to keep the donation anonymous by returning it, and then repeating it through a new ‘Downing Street Trust’ that would conceal the original source.
Lord Brownlow, who served as vice-chairman of the Tory party in 2017-20 and was made a peer in 2019 by Theresa May, is expected to head up this new non-charitable trust.
So the person who allegedly provided this dodgy donation is set to head the organisation dedicated to hushing it up. More corrupt cronyism?
Let’s face it: nobody involved in this is going to come out smelling of roses.
It’s just that Boris Johnson, more than anybody else, is going to be smelling of faeces.
And it will take more than a Union Flag to wipe them away.
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You know when we told y’all the rich declared class warfare and you told us to stop being loony lefties. Well now your kids are collateral damage. Wake up, and fight.
— Kerry-Anne Mendoza 🏳️🌈🏴 (@TheMendozaWoman) August 14, 2020
Let’s not delude ourselves. @BorisJohnson does not care for equality & fairness.
Liberals are mistakenly framing #ToryChaos as “callous indifference” or “incompetence”.
It’s class war.
Analysis that fails to explain dynamics of class power & the systematised destruction of the working class is not just bad but dangerous.
— Kerry-Anne Mendoza 🏳️🌈🏴 (@TheMendozaWoman) August 14, 2020
Quite. This is not incompetence. There is no lack of competence In giving contracts to their rich mates or giving them honours or artificially helping the children of the affluent to boost their exam results. This is nor a problem algorithm. This is class warfare.
— Nick Matthews #keepcooperating (@NickCooperative) August 14, 2020
I’m not claiming credit for calling a thing by its name – this is “multiple discovery”, “simultaneous invention”, “synchronicity” or, if you like, an expression of the “zeitgeist”. More and more people are simply coming to realise, understand and accept that it is the policy of the UK’s Conservative government to push them down unfairly.
That is what the decision – and it was a decision, deliberately made – to punish ‘A’ level pupils who weren’t from private schools was all about. Yes, Gavin Williamson and the other Tories are saying it was down to a mechanical system, an algorithm – but that algorithm was written by a human being who intended it to give an advantage to the children of very rich people.
In this way, the Tory class war has stolen your children’s futures and given them to the undeserving rich.
It’s what the decision – and it was a decision, deliberately made – not to fight Covid-19 in any meaningful way was all about. Tens of thousands of people in care homes have died – your relatives, maybe – because Matt Hancock and the other Tories said people with Covid-19 who lived in those homes should be sent back to them – never mind the fact that they did not have isolation facilities and the virus would run through those places like wildfire and be transferred to others by part-time staff who worked in different homes run by the same – private – firm.
The Tories – and their private business collaborators – failed to source personal protective equipment, ventilators, tests and the facilities to carry out tests. The lockdown they imposed was half-hearted and failed to stop the progress of the disease. Now that they have lifted it, albeit with a few measures still in place, more people are contracting the virus again. So they have stopped reporting the daily number of infections.
And the Tories have rewarded their private business collaborators for their failures with hugely expensive contracts to continue failing us – all at the public expense. Serco’s test and trace contract has been renewed, even though we know it won’t stop any second wave (really just a resurgence of the first wave that was suppressed but never went away).
You won’t get justice against the Tories by the normal means available to civil society because the Tories have either corrupted them already or are in the process of doing so. Boris Johnson illegally terminated Parliament’s last session in the autumn of 2019 and what was the result? He called a general election, lied to us until he was purple in the face and was rewarded with an 80-seat Parliamentary majority.
Now he is using that power to ensure that the courts will not be able to stop any more of his corruption by planning a curb on judicial review of government activity. He is imposing a dictatorship – just as he told you he would, if you could have been bothered to read page 48 of his election manifesto.
The police won’t help. Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock, Gavin Williamson and the others are all above the law – no matter what they do. Try reporting a cabinet minister for a crime and see how far you get. They’ll tell you they’re treating it seriously, bounce the accusation around a few different departments and then say there’s no evidence. I’ve been there.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died already because it is Tory policy to kill claimants of sickness or disability claimants, who they consider to be “useless eaters”. That’s why the newspapers have been full of reports showing people with long-term illnesses and disabilities starving to death.
They wanted your homes so they imposed the Bedroom Tax and took them away from you.
The list goes on and on.
And still, too many people think they are the best choice to run the UK – even though the economy is in its deepest recession ever, and Brexit means it may never recover. You will suffer – they won’t. They have been stockpiling your cash and will simply use it to sit out any unpleasantness in the future.
But I feel sure a tipping-point will come – a flashpoint. I wonder how much we will all have to lose before that happens. I’m guessing it’ll be pretty much everything.
By then, many people may think there is nothing they can do. I am reminded yet again of Martin Niemoller’s poem about how the Nazis came for different groups who received no help from anybody else until, by the time they come for the author, there was nobody even left for him to ask.
But I am reminded of another group who were put in a similar position. When I visited Bosnia in the 1990s, I was told how – when the tanks from other countries moved in – the people, who were weaponless, left their homes and went up into the hills. They came back at night, when they took weapons – and lives – from the soldiers who had taken everything from them. And slowly, they took back their land from their oppressors.
I can see that happening here in the future.
I would rather it didn’t.
But it will, if people of good conscience don’t wake up, get up and put up a fight.
Keir Starmer won’t do it. He agrees with the Tories. That’s why he’s busy turning the Labour Party into Tory Lite Mk II (New Labour was Mk I) and accusing anybody who disagrees with him of anti-Semitism.
If you don’t want this to fall into violence, then you need to think what else you can do.
The ‘A’ level fiasco creates opportunities. Already some further education institutions have said they will take students who were downgraded, on the basis of their predicted results. Some haven’t. Clearly we should take note of the side that each University, each college, takes. Those who do the right thing should be rewarded in whatever ways we can. Those who do not should be shunned – meaning not only that we should not even try to send our children there, but that we should reject their graduates when they seek employment with our businesses. We know they won’t be any damn good anyway.
And employers who turn down applicants on the basis of the Tory algorithm’s discredited results should also be named, so we can stop buying their products.
That’s the best – non-violent – response I can conceive on the spur of the moment, and these things need to start happening now.
We’d better get to it, if we don’t want to roll over and die. And yes, that means you.
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Liam Fox: he handed over huge wodges of government secrets to the Russians and the Tories told you Jeremy Corbyn was somehow to blame.
The Tory government – and its fans in the UK mass media – really did a number on the public with this one.
It seems that Russian hackers broke into then-International Trade Secretary Liam Fox’s personal email account to get the information – which should not have been held there in any event.
Not only that, but they did this by asking Fox for his account details – and like the wet-behind-the-ears damnfool he is, he handed them over of his own free will.
That is what we’re now being told.
Fox was apparently targeted by a “spear phishing” email – a tactic that is so obvious, primary schoolchildren know to avoid them.
The information he handed over made it possible for the hackers to take material from his email account on multiple occasions between July 12 and October 2, 2019.
It is not known whether the information on key briefings was stolen after he resigned from the cabinet on July 24. If it was, then what was he doing, still possessing those details?
Details of the UK-US deal were then published by an anonymous hacker online, where Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour team discovered them and publicised the fact that the Conservatives – if re-elected in December – planned to sell off those parts of the NHS that could be used to make a profit to fatcat US corporations.
And the media said this meant Corbyn was in cahoots with the Russians.
And most of the UK electorate believed it and voted the Tories in with a huge majority – ensuring that there would be no way to stop the big NHS sell-off.
The lie was resurrected last month, when it was used as a “dead cat” to distract from the revelation in the so-called “Russia Report” that the Tories created a welcoming environment for Russians to launder money in the UK, and looked the other way rather than even consider Russian interference in our elections and referendums.
So Corbyn was doorstepped by a grinning gang of BBC TV reporters and a load of flapdoodle was published in the papers.
In fact, it seems he was among the last to know.
According to Skwawkbox, the Torygraph managed to get hold of the information two days before the Russians!
Of course the Cabinet Office has said
the Government has very robust systems in place to protect the IT systems of officials and staff.
But if you believe that, after all the other Tory lies revealed above, then you really have got the government you deserve.
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Greenock Job Centre Plus: It may not look like a venue for wild, drunken parties but it seems that is just what has been happening there while 1,300 Universal Credit claims piled up and the rest of us endured social distancing rules that DWP bosses flouted.
They just can’t help themselves, can they?
Bosses at the Job Centre in Greenock followed the example of their Tory bosses like Dominic Cummings and decided to hold boozy parties instead of handling the 12 per cent surge in Universal Credit claims.
But their abandonment of lockdown led instead to a dressing-down, and then they were frogmarched out of the office after a whistleblower informed Department for Work and Pensions bosses in London.
It seems the alleged parties took place in offices adjoining the main public reception areas of the facility at Greenock Jobcentre Plus while staff had been working from home during the lockdown period when an additional 1300 people in the area were forced to apply for Universal Credit from that office.
What a disgrace. But it is what we have come to expect from the Department for Work and Pensions.
The Daily Record quotes a ‘source’ as follows:
“The allegation is that managers in Greenock had at least two social gatherings where people were having a drink and abandoning any efforts to apply social distancing. They were effectively accused of using their work office as a place to gather socially and let their hair down, at a time when people from different households were banned from doing so.
“This will cause a lot of anger because the DWP has been sanctioning people left, right and centre in Greenock, which is an unemployment blackspot.
“There are undoubtedly going to be busy times ahead for the staff at the centre and the last thing they need is this massive dent in the public perception of them.
“You can’t have managers at such a highly charged, public-facing facility thinking it’s one rule for them and one for people who are on benefits
The DWP says an investigation is under way, which is bad news for the office bosses concerned.
They are not high-ranking enough for the Tories to want to save, and the government desperately needs to show that it can get a grip on the rule-breaking that has been rife among its people while the rest of us have been enduring lockdown and social distancing.
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