Boris Johnson isn’t the only Tory who’s tried to ruin London with ‘white elephant’ schemes. Here’s (Tory-run) Westminster Council

Marble Arch Mound: if Westminster Council had wanted to stink up the classic architecture of Marble Arch with a big pile of earth, they could have got it dirt cheap from any Powys farmer. Why spend £2 million on it?

Ridicule has met the opening of Tory-run Westminster Council’s ‘Marble Arch Mound’ – a £2m embarrassment that follows the rule: never let a Conservative near a building project.

The architectural plans were very exciting, apparently – but the reality has turned out to be a big pile of Earth.

And now people who bought tickets to climb this travesty are claiming refunds.

Oh. It’ll look better once the landscape has had time to “bed in and grow”. But this is only a temporary installation, isn’t it?

The idea had been to tempt shoppers back to central London after the lifting of the Covid-19 lockdown there. In Oxford Street, 17 per cent of the shops have closed permanently because of Tory government mismanagement of the crisis.

Perhaps the others will have to close after this fiasco – which is more likely to turn people away, it seems.

Source: ‘Teething problems’: visitors offered refunds for Marble Arch Mound | Architecture | The Guardian

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Amanda Pritchard selected as next boss of NHS England

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The new NHS England chief executive: Amanda Pritchard.

Is it good that Amanda Pritchard has been selected to run NHS England, replacing Simon Stevens?

I don’t know, but my first reaction was that she has to be better than Dido Harding (who was discounted earlier in the selection process)!

She’ll be the first female boss since the NHS was created in 1948, which is a boost for sex equality.

But she’s also a graduate of Oxford University, which suggests a possible bias towards Toryism. And she had to pass interviews with representatives of 10 Downing Street, the Treasury and Cabinet Office (Tory), NHS England chair Lord David Prior (Tory) and other NHS England board members (loyalties unknown).

Is it possible that she joined the service 25 years ago, just to undermine it?

Or will she be forced to, whether she wants to or not?

Source: Amanda Pritchard on course to be next NHS England chief executive | News | Health Service Journal

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After embracing ‘fire and rehire’, Labour is now embracing ‘zero hours’ contracts too

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Starmer and Rayner: we were told they were ‘taking the knee’ in a publicity stunt for Black Lives Matter but this image could equally be taken as them kneeling before employers’ group the Confederation of British Industry and vowing that they will never allow the Party of the Workers to actually stand up for workers’ rights, prevent exploitation, and/or seek acceptable pay and working conditions. They are a danger to you.

Keir Starmer (and his deputy, Angela Rayner) really are dragging the Labour Party into the mire, aren’t they?

Already they have hypocritically launched a policy to abolish odious ‘fire and rehire’ employment practices, ignoring the fact that they are carrying out such an exercise, within Labour, at the moment.

And now Rayner has announced that the party is reversing its policy on ‘zero hours’ contracts so that employers will be allowed to continue exploiting workers by forcing them to work only when it suits bosses, without access to employment conditions including sick pay and holidays.

So passes the Party of the Workers: not in struggle but in subversion by fake socialists who belong in the Conservative Party.

Way back in 2016, former leader Jeremy Corbyn announced that under him, Labour would abolish ‘zero hours’ contracts. He said a Labour government would legislate to ensure that all employees be given guaranteed hours which must be specified and written into a contract – bringing an end to zero-hour contracts.

If an employer wanted workers to work beyond those hours, they would have to specify the length of additional work along with a reason for asking.

An employer would also have to give reasonable compensation, akin to an “on-call” payment to an employee, for agreeing to make themselves available for additional work, whether they were ultimately asked to do so or not.

Now Angela Rayner has swept all that away.

Asked on the BBC’s Today programme if Labour still opposed ‘zero hours’ contracts, Rayner refused to give a straight answer, and ended up saying that the party now opposes “exploitation” of them:

Mishal Husain: Are u against zero hours contracts?
Angela Rayner: We want everyone to have security..
MH: Are u against 0 hours
AR: This is about healthy balance..
MH: Are u against them?
AR: We're against the exploitation of them
AR is unable to spell out Labour policy #r4today

— Mark Gregory (@Gregom10) July 28, 2021

Is Labour against Zero Hour Contacts? Angela Rayner is asked. Folks, she said a lot of stuff but none of it was no.

— Gyll King (@GyllKing) July 28, 2021

That can only mean Labour does not oppose ‘zero hours’ contracts any more. It is a wholesale endorsement of worker exploitation by employers.

It means that, in a few short words, Angela Rayner betrayed Labour’s reason for existing.

Considering the party’s contradictory attitude to ‘fire and rehire’, commenters and commentators have only one conclusion to draw: that Labour has changed policy because it intends to use ‘zero hours’ contracts itself:

Angela Rayner is on the radio refusing to say Labour are against zero hour contracts and defending short term insecure contracts because… Labour need people to work for them in General Elections.

— elio (@eliovsb) July 28, 2021

If Labour wants people to work for the party in the run-up to a general election under such conditions, then Labour won’t help working people if it is elected.

Nobody at all should want to work for Labour in such a situation.

We should all spurn Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and all their right-wing cuckoo cronies, as we would spurn a pack of rabid dogs.

In the long term, the rabid dogs would be less harmful to us.

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There’s a really simple reason recorded Covid cases have fallen but deaths are up

More firms for the list of Tory donors to boycott

2 Replies

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.

Here are the new additions:

Alton Towers (owned by Prestbury property firm)

Berkeley Homes (housebuilder)

Bloomberg (media group)

Caledonia Investments

Calor Gas Ltd

Canary Wharf Group (property)

Carlton Television (via boss Michael Green)

Carphone Warehouse

CityLink (via boss Jon Moulton)

Claridge’s Hotel

Clinton Cards (donations to individual MPs of which this is an example)

Cobra Beer

DFS Furniture (historical – Tory donor Lord Graham Kirkham lost control in 2013)

Dow Investments plc

EADS UK

Garden Centre Group

GCH Capital (manufacturing and distribution)

Heathrow Airport

McLaren (automotive)

Meggitt (aerospace engineering)

Moonpig.com

Mothercare

Numis (investment banker)

Parabis Group (legal and professional services)

Powerleague (five-a-side football group)

Shop Direct

Telecom Plus

Towergate Partnership (insurance/financial)

Tullow Oil

Veetee Rice (food)

Wates (construction)

Wittington Investments (food)

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Dead cat alert: yesterday’s man talking about Uighurs on a failing news channel is a DISTRACTION

4 Replies

‘Demand better’: That’s what the sign says on the wall behind Vince Cable and that’s what you need to do – demand better than him.

Apparently certain people are making a fuss because former Liberal Democrat minister Vince Cable said the Uighurs haven’t suffered genocide under China.

He did this while having a pint with swivel-eyed goon Nigel Farage on GB News, after publishing an article in The Independent.

Who cares what Cable thinks?

He’s yesterday’s man. So is Farage.

The whole stunt looks like it was cooked up to boost ratings for a failing far-right fake-news channel.

I hope no Vox Political reader is weak-minded enough to let Cable, Farage or GB News lead them by the nose in such a cynical way.

Source: Shouting at China over alleged Uighur genocide won’t help – instead the West must find a way to work with them | The Independent

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Starmer out-politicked over Johnson’s lies by new Labour recruit Bercow

3 Replies

John Bercow: more imagination and intelligence than Keir Starmer.

Keir Starmer has been trumped in the row over Boris Johnson repeatedly lying to Parliament – by the new recruit he so warmly welcomed only recently.

John Bercow, the former Commons Speaker, said Labour backbencher Dawn Butler was right to claim the prime minister had lied – and called for “absurd” parliamentary rules to be changed so MPs can accuse one another of lying in the chamber.

In a joint article, written with Ms Butler for The Times, he wrote:

“The glaring weakness of the system is that someone lying to tens of millions of citizens knows he or she is protected by an ancient rule.

“They face no sanction. By contrast, an MP with the guts to tell the truth is judged to be in disgrace. It is absurd.”

Contrast this with party leader Starmer’s response, which was to say he agreed with what Ms Butler had said – but then to insist that Acting Deputy Speaker Judith Cummins was right to order the Labour MP to leave:

“In fairness to the temporary Speaker, Judith Cummins, who was there – she did the right thing, she followed the rules, because parliament doesn’t allow you to call other parliamentarians liars in the chamber. So I don’t criticise the deputy speaker for what she did.”

And not a word of support for changing the system.

This is just more evidence that Starmer is not fit to lead the Labour Party.

He simply doesn’t have the imagination to realise that rules are not immutable and may be changed – despite the fact that he works in a place where the rules that govern the whole of the UK are changed on a daily basis.

Ms Butler’s claims were factually accurate, by the way – the organisation Full Fact has checked them and supported them.

And just to blow my own trumpet, This Writer got there before either Starmer or Bercow: I wrote to the Speaker’s Office last week, telling current Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle the rule must be changed and that he should spend the summer devising a reasonable replacement.

I have yet to receive a reply, which should explain much about the state of the Speaker’s Office under Hoyle.

Meanwhile Bercow – by making the point that has been obvious to six-year-old chldren – has set himself up, already, as a potential leadership challenger from the right of the Labour Party.

He would be far more likely to succeed than a left-winger,under more ridiculous rules that demand a challenger must have a certain percentage of fellow MPs in support before a ballot can take place.

I don’t think he will challenge – at least, not yet – but this was a positive first step, and right-wingers in the Parliamentary Labour Party will have taken notice.

They won’t have been able to avoid noticing that the leader they backed only 15 months ago, and continued to support with nonsense claims ever since… is useless.

Source: Change ‘absurd’ rules so MPs can accuse each other of lying, says John Bercow | The Independent

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Isn’t Labour’s new employment policy hypocritical, as Starmer practises ‘fire and rehire’?

3 Replies

Keir Starmer: a Tory in a red tie?

How can Keir Starmer seriously propose banning ‘fire and rehire’ policies by employers when he has brought that odious practice to the Labour Party?

This Site reported on July 21 that Starmer has almost bankrupted Labour, making it necessary for the party to axe 90 full-time jobs.

At the same time, Starmer was hiring 30-50 staff on short-term contracts. I stated:

That’s ‘fire and rehire’ because you know some of the axed staff will have been doing the same work that the new employees will be asked to do – and some of these jobs will be occupied by the same people.

The mainstream media has picked up on this, with The Independent reporting on it only a day or so ago.

How tone-deaf, then, for Starmer to send his deputy leader, Angela Rayner, out to promote a policy that condemns ‘fire and rehire’!

Consider this, from the BBC’s article on the new policy:

Labour also says it wants to outlaw “fire and rehire” practices whereby employers dismiss workers and then offer to hire them back under new, often poorer, terms and conditions.

That is exactly what Starmer is doing.

The new policy has other holes that have led critics to claim that it is merely tinkering around the edges of employment law and not revolutionising it at all.

For example, the “real living wage” of £10 per hour has been attacked as not being enough to lift anybody out of dependence on state benefits or – in extreme cases – food banks.

This is simply not good enough.

Under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour devised policies that would have changed the UK from a country that exploits its population for the benefit of a tiny minority – which is what it is now, and don’t you forget it – into a progressive, trailblazing nation that valued all of its citizens.

Our success as a nation would have been valued, not by the number of billionaires we had, but by the absence of poverty.

But Starmer isn’t interested in this.

His plan isn’t revolutionary. It is hypocritical and so is he.

And the truth of that is clear to everybody.

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Labour launches investigation into support of transphobia by Rosie Duffield

Propaganda alert: UK economic growth is nothing to crow about and here’s the reason

3 Replies

Back in business? But how far will the UK economy restore itself after Covid, with the shadow of Brexit hanging over it?

What a way to spin something we all knew would happen.

According to economic forecaster EY Item Club (who?), the economy is growing at its fastest rate in 80 years. Gosh!

But… isn’t that because it stalled altogether last year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and is just now bouncing back?

Is it not the truth that, rather than growing, we should say the economy is being restored to the level we might expect after the crisis?

I think it is.

As The Guardian‘s report puts it,

The EY Item Club said it now expected GDP to grow by 7.6% … The UK economy shrank by 9.8% in 2020.

So that’s 2.2 per cent of shrinkage that the economy won’t make up this year, meaning the nation as a whole will be worse-off than before the pandemic hit.

There are other elements likely to affect the UK’s economic performance, including inflation and unemployment.

The recovery is extremely fragile, and another Covid wave could bring it crashing to a halt or even into reverse.

And there’s also the elephant in the room. I notice that nobody involved in this article has mentioned Brexit.

Source: UK economy growing at fastest rate in 80 years, says forecaster | Economic growth (GDP) | The Guardian

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Vox Political

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More firms for the list of Tory donors to boycott

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Dead cat alert: yesterday’s man talking about Uighurs on a failing news channel is a DISTRACTION

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Starmer out-politicked over Johnson’s lies by new Labour recruit Bercow

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Isn’t Labour’s new employment policy hypocritical, as Starmer practises ‘fire and rehire’?

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