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MPs give themselves £48k pay rise to defend against a threat that doesn’t exist

Backhander: politicians in Westminster have found another way to bleed public funds into their own hands – a fund to defend against a claimed threat of violence against them… that does not exist.

UK Home Secretary James Cleverly has announced Parliament’s response to claims that MPs are being threatened by “Islamists” or “Muslims” or “pro-Palestine protesters” or whoever the bogeyman is today.

It’s £31 million, to be divided between MPs so they can pay for extra security, which comes to almost £48,000 per MP – although it seems likely to be used to help other politicians too:

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People have drawn the obvious conclusion:

With no clear evidence against any individual or organisation, we are seeing MPs diverting public money away from public services and the good of the nation and towards themselves – for no reason.

And take careful note of the comment about Diane Abbott – who has received more abuse and threats than every other MP in Parliament combined, but was never offered any publicly-funded protection before now. Is it because she doesn’t kowtow to the rich and powerful?

The conclusion – about the Tory and Labour MPs who made this possible – is painfully clear:

They are lining their own pockets while they can.


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How do you scrap a tax hike on your digital services business? Give Labour £16,000?

Google: facing an increase in the UK’s digitial services tax from 2% to 10%, this firm and others gave Labour shadow ministers gifts worth £16,000 and it was subsequently cancelled. The increased would have brought £3 billion into the UK Treasury.

Is Keir Starmer’s Labour as bent as a figure-eight? Judge for yourself with this tale of shadow ministers scrapping plans for a 10 per cent digital services tax after receiving £16,000 in gifts from Google and other companies in the sector.

The tax hike would have brought £3bn to the Treasury, providing an opportunity to cut taxes on struggling small businesses – but it seems £16,000 for people including shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds was enough to put a stop to this valuable change:

Information from Open Democracy says Reynolds was talking about the tax increase right up until he took a £3,377 package for two to attend Glastonbury as a guest of YouTube, which is owned by Google. The day after, reports emerged that he had ditched the plan.

It was not the only time senior figures in Starmer’s team accepted luxury gifts from Google in the months before the party’s U-turn. Shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell’s political adviser, Labour’s executive director of policy, and the party’s head of domestic policy all accepted tickets and transport to, and ‘hospitality’ at, the Brit Awards in February from the digital giant. Powell’s register of interests estimates that the adviser’s ticket was worth £1,170.

Starmer’s political director also accepted transport to and ‘hospitality’ ahead of the event from Google, though his ticket, along with that of Starmer’s private secretary, was covered by Universal Music.

Starmer had accepted a £380 dinner from Google for him and one staff member during the World Economic Forum in January.

In total, openDemocracy estimates that Labour shadow cabinet members and their staff accepted luxury gifts from Google worth nearly £10,000 over the months before they announced their policy U-turn.

And that’s just Google. The estimate of £16,000 in total may, in fact, be low.

Take a look at the full Open Democracy article (link below). The attached comment from ‘Tory Fibs’ is also useful because it crystallises the problem with Labour – or any political organisation – taking money or gifts-in-kind from businesses facing tax increases or legislative regulation:

My perception is certainly that Labour cannot be trusted to implement the right policies for the UK because its representatives are corruptible with cheap bribes.

And no – it doesn’t matter whether Jonathan Reynolds was otherwise influenced to cancel the policy.

It seems as though he shut down a £3 billion plan to help small businesses because a digital giant gave him tickets for Glasto.

And it seems as though the total cost to the digital services industry of shutting down this £3 billion plan was a mere £16,000. That’s pocket money to these people.

Until Labour – and all the other political parties – stop accepting these gifts from people and organisations their decisions may affect, they can never be trusted.


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We have spent nearly a quarter of a million pounds defending Boris Johnson. Worth it?

Boris Johnson: he loves money – especially if it belongs to somebody else.

Boris Johnson’s defence against allegations that he misled Parliament over all the parties in Downing Street while the rest of us were in Covid-19 lockdown has cost the public purse £245,000 – so far.

This Writer is not quite sure who signed off on the plan to use our money to pay his lawyers – the Treasury is denying that anybody there had anything to do with it.

And that’s strange, because

The Treasury’s spending rulebook says its consent should always be sought for costs “which set precedents, are novel, contentious or could cause repercussions elsewhere in the public sector”.

The BBC asked the Cabinet Office if this would apply to Mr Johnson’s legal bills, in a freedom of information (FOI) request. We were told the Treasury was not required to approve all spending decisions.

That’s a contradiction, of course. And those responsible seem to know it.

The Cabinet Office and a source close to Mr Johnson argued there is a long-standing precedent that former ministers are supported with legal representation.

But former senior civil servants disputed this, telling the BBC that it would not normally apply to parliamentary inquiries, like the one into Mr Johnson.

Johnson doesn’t need the financial help – he’s made £5.5 million from extra-curricular activities since he was forced to stand down as prime minister last year.

He gave evidence to the Commons Privileges Committee’s Partygate inquiry on March 22, and now we’re all waiting for its verdict, while Johnson’s legal bill skyrockets.

I asked the reason for the delay last week, after it was suggested that the result was being held back for political reasons to do with the local elections. Can you imagine how badly the Tories would have fared if the committee had found against him, before election day?

The response was that, after the verbal evidence had been taken, the committee had requested and received written evidence – and was mulling this over.

Well, those MPs had better make their decision soon, or the Treasury might not be able to cover the cost.


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If you’ve got a mortgage, look how much the Tories have added to it

Of course, if you live in the UK, you’ll be lucky to have a mortgage at all… these days.

But if you have… well, you won’t be feeling very lucky at the moment:

Will you?


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Sunak knew he was lying when he said the UK has 20,000 more police officers. Why isn’t he gone?

Rishi Sunak: he treats Parliament as if he’s appearing in a badly-scripted community theatre. The claims are untrue but he seems to think that if he delivers them as if they were, he’ll be believed anyway.

I remember when knowingly lying to Parliament was an offence for which any MP could expect to be expelled. Sadly, under the Tories, such discipline has fallen by the wayside and even a prime minister can now get away with saying any old rubbish and getting away with it.

We were reminded of this yesterday (April 26, 2023) at PMQs:

He even went ahead and publicised this on the social media:

Here are the facts, courtesy of Peter Stefanovic:

So there you have it. Sunak is lying. Braverman was wrong.

If you enjoy watching Tories squirm, watch her having her wrongness pointed out to her by Susanna Reid on Good Morning Britain:

The UK only has 4,000 more police officers, and in any case, to reach parity with previous levels of policing per head of population, the government would have needed to recruit 50,000 more police.

But they can’t, because wages have fallen 20 per cent behind inflation and morale is at an all-time low.

Still, if you repeat a lie often enough, people will start to believe it, as Josef Goebbels taught the Tories.

Do you believe it?


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You’re £11,000 worse-off than in 2008 due to wage stagnation – but the billionaires aren’t!

Cash money: if you haven’t seen even this much in a while, it’s because – thanks to Tory policies – billionaires have vacuumed it all up.

Here’s a painful piece of information I found on the social media:

I did a bit of digging (not very much!) and it turns out that Mr Burgon isn’t wrong:

Workers are £11,000 worse off per year due to 15 years of wage stagnation, according to the Resolution Foundation.

In new figures shared with BBC Panorama, the think tank calculated that, had wages continued to grow at the pace seen before the 2008 financial crash, the average worker would make £11,000 more per year than they do now, taking rising prices into account.

Torsten Bell, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, told the BBC the wage stagnation of the past 15 years is “almost completely unprecedented”.

Unprecedented it may be, but you can bet it was entirely planned by the Tories who slithered into government in 2010.

“This is definitely not what normal looks like. This is what failure looks like.”

Not as far as those Tories were concerned. For them, it was success. They funnelled the cash away from the majority of UK citizens, away from the Treasury, and into the hands and offshore bank accounts of the tiniest minority of the super-rich.

As for the billionaires… here‘s Statista:

The UK’s top ten richest people are wealthier than the group has ever been, according to The Sunday Times, who recently released their annual Rich List. Their data finds that the cumulative wealth of the top ten billionaires in the UK has grown from £47.77 billion in 2009 to £182 billion in 2022 – an increase of 281 percent.

As this chart shows, following the 2008 crash, the UK’s billionaires have seen a steady, and fairly steep, incline in their wealth. The upward trend continued despite the pandemic, which saw the UK’s economy shrink by 20.4 percent in the second quarter of 2020, as most industries suffered, and 30.5 million people in Europe were expected to be pushed into poverty. This is a stark contrast to the UK’s 250 ultra wealthy, who saw their collective wealth surge to a record high of £653 billion in 2022.

And Jeremy Hunt’s Budget predicted slower growth than we expected after the disastrous Liz Truss was ousted from Downing Street last year.

And the Tories are starting to bounce back in the opinion polls.

Who are the people going back to them? Are they masochists?

Source: Workers £11,000 worse off a year due to stagnant wages – Resolution Foundation


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Yet another blow to families as childcare costs skyrocket

Who could afford to be a parent under this Conservative government?

Inflation is above 10 per cent while wages are stagnating because the Tories want them to.

Energy bills are set to hit an average of £3,000 per year because the Tories won’t keep their price guarantee for another three months and won’t help with the extra costs.

Local authorities across England (I haven’t heard about the other UK countries) are set to increase Council Tax by the maximum amount allowed, and are still set to reduce services – because the Tories won’t provide enough in the central government grant.

And now child care costs are set to rise by an eye-watering £1,000 per year.

Try to ignore the Labour Party flag-waving from Imran Hussain; it’s the news story link below that matters:

The story states:

A survey of 1,156 providers by the Early Years Alliance found nine out of 10 expect to increase fees, typically in April, and by an average of 8% – higher than in previous years.

UK childcare costs are already among the most expensive in the world, with full-time fees for a child under two at nursery reaching an average £269 a week last year – or just under £14,000 annually.

An 8% rise would take that to more than £15,000.

Who can afford that?

The concern is that by this stage many parents – particularly mothers – have felt forced to drop out of work or cut their hours.

Three and four-year-olds in England attending a nursery or childminder are eligible for either 15 or 30 free hours a week depending on whether their parents work, so their costs are a lot lower.

Most nurseries and childminders surveyed – 87% – said the money they get from the government does not cover their costs to provide the “free” hours – leaving them out of pocket.

More than half of providers (51%) said they had operated at a loss last year. A handful said they were looking at fee increases of as much as 25%.

An option to extend free hours to all two-year-olds is understood to have been ruled out.

The problem for the Tories is that there aren’t enough people in the workforce as it is; if people have to quit their jobs to look after their children, the economic result could be disastrous.

Only today (February 16), this site commented on an alleged plan to persuade GPs not to sign sick notes for people with long-term illnesses in order to force them to stay at work.

But this will not help as people who are sick either won’t be able to carry out the amount of work required, or won’t be able to work at all.

Before Brexit, the UK could always bring in a migrant workforce from Europe – but the silly Tories ended that with their Brexit. They only have themselves to blame.

And This Writer’s instinct says they’re only going to make matters worse.


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Labour challenges Johnson government to ‘Build it in Britain’ creating 400,000 new jobs

 

How pleasant to be able to report on something positive the Labour Party is doing.

The ‘green economic recovery’ was a Corbyn initiative, of course.

Ahead of this month’s Comprehensive Spending Review, Labour is calling for an economic recovery that will deliver high-skilled jobs in every part of the UK as part of the drive towards a clean economy. It is also calling for the low-carbon infrastructure of the future to be built in Britain.

Labour’s calls follow an extensive consultation with businesses, trade unions and other stakeholders around what a credible green recovery should look like, which received almost 2,000 responses. The consultation indicated that the Government must:

  • Recover Jobs
    By bringing forward planned capital investment and dedicating it to low-carbon sectors – at least £30billion in the next 18 months – as part of a rapid stimulus package to support up to an estimated 400,000 additional jobs.
  • Retrain Workers
    By putting in place an emergency training programme to equip people affected by the unemployment crisis with the skills they need for the future greener economy.
  • Rebuild business
    By creating a National Investment Bank similar to those operating in other countries, focused on green investment, and by ensuring that public investment always aids the drive to net-zero rather than hindering it.

The consultation report details a number of areas where progress has so far been limited in the UK, but where action now would support the creation of new jobs and tackle the climate and environmental crisis. They include:

  • Investing in upgrading ports and shipyards for offshore wind supply chains.
  • Expanding investment in Carbon Capture and Storage and hydrogen to help establish new opportunities for highly-skilled workers.
  • Accelerating planned investment in electric vehicle charging infrastructure and ensuring the planning system better supports electric vehicle charging.
  • Bringing forward orders for electric buses to help struggling manufacturers fill their order books.
  • Introducing a National Nature Service, an employment programme to focus on nature conservation projects.
  • Expanding energy efficiency and retrofit programmes, including in social housing.
  • Ensuring that updated Sector Deals for sectors like automotive, steel and aerospace protect jobs and promote the shift to net zero.
  • Bringing forward flooding protection investment, prioritising areas of need across the North West, Yorkshire and the East Midlands.

These should be delivered within a wider strategy that also meets the UK’s overall infrastructure needs at the upcoming Spending Review.

Ed Miliband MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, said:

“We face a jobs emergency and a climate emergency. It’s time for a bold and ambitious plan to deliver hundreds of thousands of jobs which can also tackle the climate crisis.

“This is the right thing to do for so many people who are facing unemployment, the right thing to do for our economy to get a lead in the industries of the future and the right thing to do to build a better quality of life for people in our country.

“As other countries lead the way with a green recovery, Britain is hesitating. It’s time to end the dither and inaction, and start delivering now.  It is what the British people deserve and what the crises we face demand.”

Anneliese Dodds MP, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, said:

“Labour is ambitious for Britain. We can harness the opportunities for green growth if the Government takes the right decisions now.

“In recent years, and particularly during this crisis, our country has fallen behind in the drive to a cleaner, greener economy.  We’ve seen far more rhetoric than action – and that has cost our country jobs.

“Future generations will judge us by the choices we make today to tackle the unemployment crisis and face up to the realities of the climate emergency.

“That’s why we need coordinated action to support 400,000 jobs of the future today, not tomorrow. Now’s the time to build it in Britain.”

Source: Labour challenges government to ‘Build it in Britain’ and support 400,000 new jobs with green economic recovery – The Labour Party

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/


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#LevellingUp or #ToryCorruption ? Serco-employed test and trace managers take £1.5m per year

Not the NHS: Boris Johnson privatised the Covid-19 test and trace system, believing it would be a great advert for privatisation. Instead, it has become a millstone around his neck – so he refers to it constantly as “NHS test and trace” in the hope that people will blame the nationalised health service that has nothing to do with it.

The Serco Test and Trace scandal gets worse and worse; it has just been revealed that some employees receive £7,360 per day to pretend to find people with Covid-19 and trace their contacts.

That’s the equivalent of £1.5 million a year. These are people from companies with strong connections to the Conservative government, that won their contracts via an emergency system which avoids the normal tendering process.

And it has already been established that most contact tracing personnel spend their time playing computer games because they are not being given work to do.

City AM says,

Sky, citing leaked documents, reported that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has paid BCG around £10m. That was for a team of 40 consultants to work for four months on test and trace.

BCG’s “day rates” for public sector work – which determine the cost of its service – range from £2,400 to £7,360 for its most senior employees.

The report said BCG is giving the government a 10 to 15 per cent discount. Although this would still equate to day rates equivalent to around £1.5m a year.

BCG declined to comment.

Sky also said that 165 more consultants had been hired to work on test and trace. They include 84 from Deloitte, 31 from EY and 50 from KPMG.

So much for Boris Johnson’s claim that he was “levelling up” the UK. Tory friends are being paid millions in public money while those who desperately need it are being starved.

While ministerial salaries are being frozen, all MPs are getting a pay rise of £3,300 per year – equivalent to around two-thirds of the current annual rate of Universal Credit for an adult aged over 25.

The lowest MP salary will be £85,291 per year. Compare that with nurses on £24,000. Who does the more important job?

What about care workers, who receive an excruciatingly-low £18,553 per year. Who does the more important job?

The Durham-based family of Boris Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings have been excused from paying £30,000 in backdated council tax on houses they built without planning permission 18 years ago – while child poverty in the Durham North constituency has rocketed by nine per cent – to total one-third of all children living there – in the last four years… after housing costs were taken into account,

The social media are seething with discontent:

I think the following three tweets put the current situation in a nutshell, using the current northern lockdown as an example of Tory corruption at its worst. First, let’s set the scene:

Now we can go into details with this excellent speech by Labour MP Dan Carden:

Lastly, let’s remember that there was an alternative – but people were steered away from it by liars in the mainstream media who shilled for the corrupt Tories instead. Now what, do you think, encouraged them to do that?

Source: Government paying test and trace consultants equivalent of £1.5m salary : CityAM

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/


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Number of disabled motorists falls by 80,000 in two years

Your opinions are requested.

1.26 million now receive a disability exemption from vehicle tax, compared to 1.35 million in 2015

The number of disabled motorists has fallen by nearly 80,000 in two years. Figures show a 6 per cent drop in disabled people receiving an exemption from vehicle tax since 2015, with 1.267 million people now registered.

While there is no evidence that any one cause is behind the drop, the figures prompted fresh criticism of Government reforms to disability benefits. The data, from the Motability charity, echo other statistics that show a fall in people being eligible to claim personal independence payments (PIP). 59,000 disabled motorists have lost their eligibility for an adapted vehicle since the switch from disability living allowance (DLA) to PIP in 2013.

Figures released after a written parliamentary question from Labour MP Peter Dowd show 1,266,523 disabled people received an exemption from vehicle tax as of February this year, compared to 1,345,446 in February 2015. People can claim the exemption if they receive the higher rate of the mobility component of either PIP or DLA, or specific benefits for injured armed forces veterans.

Read more: Number of disabled motorists falls 80,000 in two years


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