Tag Archives: £1 billion

The DUP’s £1 billion ‘bung’ is doing Northern Ireland no good at all

Kiss of death: This is a mock-up, of course, but the relationship between the Conservatives and the Northern Irish DUP is harming the smaller party.

What a stroke of genius for Theresa May – she bribed the DUP to support her minority government at a time when the £1 billion on offer cannot be used to help the people of Northern Ireland.

Claudia Wood’s piece in The Guardian makes it abundantly clear that cash should be going into Northern Ireland’s health and education services – but isn’t.

She states:

A three-week wait for a routine GP appointment isn’t unusual. Hospital referrals are much worse – the 18-week targets English hospitals may miss by a week or two are the stuff of dreams over here, where waits for up to four years (yes, years) for first outpatient appointments are not uncommon. About a third of all patients wait longer than a year and even urgent health consultations have a two-year waiting list in the worst areas.

With fewer than 2 million people living in Northern Ireland, schools are closing because they can’t attract enough pupils. The schools that do have enough pupils to stay open are withering on the vine, with half estimated to be running a deficit this year and some asking parents to donate stationery and toilet rolls.

The money isn’t being sent where it is needed and the reason is simple:

Northern Ireland is also short of a government.

The DUP’s £1bn is being allocated by officials according to designated pots set out in the agreement to prop up the Conservative government in Westminster, but in the absence of ministerial sign-off, big budget items are being tied up.

Popular protests have taken place under the slogan “We deserve better” – and have gone unheard. The DUP has failed to reach a new power-sharing agreement with Sinn Fein, so Northern Ireland limps on with no government.

What will this do for the DUP at the next general election?

Who will support a party that secured a huge amount of money for Northern Ireland, then refused point-blank to take the steps needed to use it in a constructive way?

Unless Arlene Foster changes her mind and concludes a new agreement to get Stormont up and running properly again very soon, she could face annihilation in the next poll, much as the Liberal Democrats did in 2015, after their five years of collaboration with the Conservatives.

It seems the Tories cannot avoid harming their allies.

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Repost: £1 billion ‘bribe’ for DUP needs Parliamentary approval – but Tories & DUP shouldn’t be allowed to vote

Reposted due to suspicious Facebook/Wordpress malfunction:

Theresa May with DUP leader Arlene Foster after reaching the £1bn deal with the Democratic Unionist party to prop up her minority government. Both have an interest in Parliament approving the payment, so neither should be allowed to vote on it [Image: Dominic Lipinski/PA].

This comes hot on the heels of the announcement that the deal – for the Tories to pay the DUP £1 billion in return for support on key votes – will go before a judicial review.

So, even if judges decide that the bung isn’t a bribe, the Tories will have to get the support of Parliament for it.

To This Writer, it occurs that every single Conservative MP, along with all those from the DUP, should declare an interest in the matter, meaning they should not vote on it. That would leave the decision up to those who aren’t likely to profit from it.

If that doesn’t happen, then the vote should not be valid.

What do YOU think will happen?

Parliament will need to approve the release of £1bn in funding for Northern Ireland promised to the Democratic Unionist party by Theresa May to secure its support after the general election, the government has conceded.

Challenged by the campaigner Gina Miller about the legal basis for releasing the funds, which have not yet been made available, the Treasury solicitor, who heads the Government Legal Department, said it “will have appropriate parliamentary authorisation”, adding: “No timetable has been set for the making of such payments.”

Replying to a legal letter from Miller and the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB), Jonathan Jones said the government intends to use “long-established procedures, under which central government requests the grant of money by the House of Commons” in order to pay out the funds it promised the DUP in the controversial agreement in June.

Source: Tory-DUP £1bn payment needs parliament’s approval after Gina Miller challenge | Politics | The Guardian

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£1 billion ‘bribe’ for DUP will need Parliamentary approval – but neither Tories nor DUP should be allowed to vote

This comes hot on the heels of the announcement that the deal – for the Tories to pay the DUP £1 billion in return for support on key votes – will go before a judicial review.

So, even if judges decide that the bung isn’t a bribe, the Tories will have to get the support of Parliament for it.

If that doesn’t happen, then the vote should not be valid.

What do YOU think will happen?

Parliament will need to approve the release of £1bn in funding for Northern Ireland promised to the Democratic Unionist party by Theresa May to secure its support after the general election, the government has conceded.

Challenged by the campaigner Gina Miller about the legal basis for releasing the funds, which have not yet been made available, the Treasury solicitor, who heads the Government Legal Department, said it “will have appropriate parliamentary authorisation”, adding: “No timetable has been set for the making of such payments.”

Replying to a legal letter from Miller and the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB), Jonathan Jones said the government intends to use “long-established procedures, under which central government requests the grant of money by the House of Commons” in order to pay out the funds it promised the DUP in the controversial agreement in June.

Source: Tory-DUP £1bn payment needs parliament’s approval after Gina Miller challenge | Politics | The Guardian

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Court to decide whether Tories’ £1 billion deal with DUP was bribery

Theresa May (left) with Arlene Foster, the leader of the DUP, in London in June [Image: Carl Court/Getty Images].

It may seem like a no-brainer, but the courts have come out in favour of the Tories in unlikely situations before.

This Writer hopes Labour Party lawyers are paying close attention because any future Labour government may be asked to legislate against the possibility of a corrupt deal of this kind taking place again.

(It may also have to find a way to pre-empt attempts by minority governments to corruptly gain majorities on public bill committees, for that matter.)

The court’s decision will carry huge weight, as it could strip the minority Tory government of even the tenuous majority it has at the moment – making it impossible for it to push through its right-wing legislative programme and making a new general election more likely.

Mr McLean’s words, that the agreement was “no more and no less than the purchase by the government of votes in parliament using public money”, seem persuasive to This Writer.

Let us hope the judges hear them the same way.

Theresa May’s parliamentary deal with the Democratic Unionist party will face a judicial challenge in the divisional court in London within the next few weeks.

The crowdfunded legal challenge brought by Ciaran McClean, a Green party activist in Northern Ireland, is likely to be heard by several senior judges.

The high court notified both sides’ legal teams on Friday that because of the urgency of the claim it should be heard in October at the beginning of the new legal term. It is likely to begin on 26 October.

McClean, the son of one of the founders of Northern Ireland’s civil rights movement, Paddy Joe McClean, is spearheading the challenge to the arrangement through which the DUP gained a £1bn aid package for the region.

The basis of the claim is that any political agreement between the government and the DUP is in breach of the Good Friday agreement under which the government undertook to exercise its power in Northern Ireland “with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions”.

The legal challenge also argues that the political deal breaches the Bribery Act 2010 and is in any event unlawful as a corrupt arrangement.

Source: Court to hear challenge to Theresa May’s £1bn deal with DUP | Politics | The Guardian

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The SNP’s great poverty betrayal

Scotland’s economic disaster [Image: SNPfail – it’s a Liberal Democrat-run site but the figures are accurate].

The poorest Scottish people are losing public services due to a Council Tax freeze by the SNP-run Scottish government, while £1 billion provided by the Westminster government to alleviate poverty has been used to patch over cuts in local authority budgets.

Scotland’s 32 local authorities have still racked up a record £12-15 billion worth of debt as a result of the council tax freeze – but the SNP still claims it is a socialist party, and still claims it is economically responsible.

The SNP has kept council tax frozen every year since it took power in Holyrood in 2007. The party claims this helps all households – but of course it helps some more than others. The richer you are, the more you have to pay if council tax is increased, while the increase on poorer people is less. Therefore, if council tax is frozen, the rich see more benefit from it. Add in the fact that average wages have been stagnant for almost the entire period of the Scottish council tax freeze and is becomes clear that poorer people have seen little or no benefit at all.

Meanwhile, council services that benefit everybody are being harmed, with 50,000 jobs lost since the freeze was imposed and another 60,000 set to go.

Scotland’s local councils have borrowed billions of pounds to help survive the swingeing budget cuts from the Scottish government – and now owe more than twice as much per head than English and Welsh local authorities, equal to debts of £6,166 per household, compared with £3,100 per home in England and £2,825 per household in Wales.

And rather than spend £1 billion of money from Westminster on alleviating poverty – as intended – the SNP gave it to councils who used it to lessen their borrowing requirements. There was no scrutiny or management of how the money was spent.

The SNP is increasing poverty among the Scottish people, while continuing with giveaways to high-earners – there can be no doubt about that.

Yet that party is still claiming support from more than half the Scottish electorate. How?

Surely Scottish people are more intelligent than that.

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Now British Gas has cut its standard tariff – by much less than it should

Gosh. British Gas is to cut household gas prices by five per cent – but this is a whopping 22 per cent less than the fall in wholesale gas prices.

The company says its 6.8 million customers will benefit by £37 over a year (that’s if the price cut remains for that long). It’s more than E.On customers (as reported here yesterday)…

… but the benefit of the wholesale price cut means British Gas will still make a whopping profit of more than £1 BILLION.

(Total profit is likely to be around £1,107,040,000).

British Gas representatives were all over the media this morning, apologising for making customers wait until February 27 before they feel the benefit; this is because the company reckons it bought the gas being used at the moment at higher, 2013-14, prices.

They should have been apologising for failing to pass on all of the wholesale cut to customers. It would have saved them very nearly £200 per year.

That kind of money is desperately needed by families feeling the pinch of the Conservative-planned cost of living crisis.

The drop will only benefit customers on British Gas’s standard and those Fix & Fall tariffs and the effect on different customers will vary.

The Labour Party, which has been campaigning for fairer energy bills for more than a year, has been (understandably) disparaging about this meagre display of largesse.

Shadow energy secretary Caroline Flint tweeted: “Wholesale gas prices down by [more than] 20%, yet gas bills only cut by 5%. Regulator must have power to make sure full savings go to all consumers.”

In a statement to the press, she added: “This shows that Ed Miliband was right to challenge the energy companies to cut their prices and pass on the falls in wholesale costs to consumers. But given gas prices have fallen by at least 20 per cent a price cut of just 5 per cent means consumers still aren’t getting the full benefit of falling wholesale prices.

“The next Labour government is committed to making big changes in our energy market: freezing energy prices until 2017 so that bills can fall but not rise, and giving the regulator the power to force energy companies to cut their prices – when wholesale costs fall – to all of their customers.”

Some have taken issue with the description of a freeze that allows prices to fall, rather than keeping them static, but this is nit-picking. We can all see that Labour is simply pushing for households to get the best deal.

What do the Conservatives want? What do the Liberal Democrats want? Only last week they showed…

They’re quite happy for the rich company bosses to keep your money.

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Tag Archives: £1 billion

The DUP’s £1 billion ‘bung’ is doing Northern Ireland no good at all

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Repost: £1 billion ‘bribe’ for DUP needs Parliamentary approval – but Tories & DUP shouldn’t be allowed to vote

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£1 billion ‘bribe’ for DUP will need Parliamentary approval – but neither Tories nor DUP should be allowed to vote

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Court to decide whether Tories’ £1 billion deal with DUP was bribery

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The SNP’s great poverty betrayal

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Now British Gas has cut its standard tariff – by much less than it should

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