Smirking Hunt: did he know he was going to do this all along?
After saying he would not provide any more help for households to pay their energy bills, it seems Jeremy Hunt is preparing to do just that.
The Express is reporting that he will extend the government’s £2,500 energy price guarantee for three months, until wholesale energy prices fall below the current Ofgem price cap in July, as they are expected to do.
Previously, the price guarantee was set to be raised to £3,000 in what would have been a £500 rise in energy bills for the average household.
It still represents an increase of £400, as the government’s grant that has kept bills down until now is ending at the beginning of April.
If the claim is true, it will be a major victory for Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis, who had petitioned the government to use some expected savings to protect households.
As This Site stated in February,
According to Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis, when the announcement that the price guarantee would rise by 20 per cent was made in Hunt’s Autumn Statement, energy prices were significantly higher than they are now.
The current expectation is that in July, energy regulator Ofgem’s price cap (rather than the government’s price guarantee) will drop below both the £3,000 set to come in April and the £2,500 limit in force now, so we will all pay less.
This means the government is likely to save around £10 billion on what it was expecting to spend on the price guarantee at the time of the Autumn Statement.
Mr Lewis has written to the Chancellor, informing him of these expectations and calling on him to keep the price guarantee at its current level until July – a measure that will add only £1.5 billion to the current cost (leaving £8.5 billion in the kitty).
He has said this is better than inflicting poverty – and its devastating effects – on the people of the UK.
The Express is now saying the cost is likely to be £3 billion, which is fine because it still leaves £7 billion in expected savings.
Let’s look forward to confirmation of this move in the Budget statement on March 15.
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Steve Barclay: sadly, none of the equipment behind him was able to jump-start his brain.
Remember before Christmas, when Tory spokespeople were all over the media telling us nurses couldn’t have the pay rise they were demanding because the “independent” pay review body had set the amount?
The Health Secretary has instructed the NHS pay review body to recommend a pay rise of around 2% for the 2023-2024 financial year.
So Steve Barclay has told the “independent” pay review body it can only recommend a tiny pay rise for nurses. That doesn’t seem independent to This Writer!
A recent letter from the secretary of state for health and social care Steve Barclay, to the NHS Pay Review Body (NHSPRB) suggests “it is particularly important that [the NHSPRB] have regard to the government’s inflation target when forming recommendations”.
Pay awards – most particularly when the government is doing the paying – don’t cause inflation.
Mr Barclay also warns “the NHS budget has already been set until 2024 to 2025”.
So any pay negotiation – of any kind, including that supposedly offered by the Pay Review Body – must be fake, then?
Obviously, two per cent is nowhere near enough when inflation is much higher; it’s a real-terms pay cut for nurses who are already £10,000 per year worse-off, in real terms, than they were in 2008.
The result will be more nurses leaving the NHS and a further decline in the service – which Barclay will claim is because public medicine can’t work as well as private, profiteering healthcare.
People will die because of this decision – and Barclay should be held responsible.
Barclay himself seems entirely unsuited to running any kind of organisation, let alone the largest one in the United Kingdom.
After a recent visit to a hospital, he tweeted how he marvelled at a fantastic innovation in healthcare that frees up many beds.
This innovation is called a chair. It has been used in the NHS for very nearly 75 years.
Here’s A Different Bias‘s account of this weirdness:
Steve Barclay is an idiot.
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“Spaffed up the wall”: Boris Johnson’s phrase – inappropriately applied to public money used to investigate child abuse – may now be more correctly applied to his own government’s use of all public funds..
Remember when the national debt was just £950 billion and the Tories slithered into office with a claim that they would eliminate it?
What happened?
George Osborne – remember him? – promised that he would eliminate the national deficit (regular borrowing by the government) by 2015, and would then reduce the debt.
He never did. And now he’s nowhere to be found.
And the national debt is now more than double what it was in 2010.
The Tories will say it’s because of the cost of the Covid-19 crisis – which they have increased exponentially by involving inept private health companies that have failed to carry out a single task adequately.
They may say it’s due to the cost of Brexit – which Boris Johnson pushed on us with a campaign of lies back in 2016 and which has cost us more in four years than we paid in more than 40 as an EU member state.
And they will certainly try to blame the Labour government of 1997-2010 and the international financial crisis that happened during that period, which had nothing to do with Labour policies.
They’ll also say a Labour government would have made matters worse, even though they have squandered more money in the last 10 years than was ever spent by every Labour administration the UK has ever had.
And don’t forget that Labour has reduced the national debt when in office, which is more than the Tories have done in our collective lifetime.
The BBC article is full of Tory apologists saying there was nothing they could do, but it simply isn’t true.
The Conservative Party has, in the words of Boris Johnson “spaffed up the wall” all the public money it could get its hands on, and then borrowed more than a trillion pounds more.
And ministers will say that you have to pay it back.
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A veteran’s view: Click on the image to read Harry Leslie Smith’s Guardian article.
I was disturbed, this morning, to read that parts of the media were trying to silence people who had created images and sites linking D-Day and its 70th anniversary with the National Health Service – its creation and current problems.
The comment was made by an organisation calling itself The Labour Forum and ran: “D-Day and the NHS have nothing to do with each other. Whatsoever. Any photos trying to link today’s political issues with D-Day are offensive and will be deleted immediately.”
This seems extremely strange to me because, from what I have read, the creation of the NHS and a ‘welfare state’ (the term did not actually enter the Oxford English Dictionary until 1955) were exactly what the soldiers at Normandy were fighting so steadfastly to ensure.
When Britain went to war in September 1939, it was woefully ill-prepared for the task. Our professional army was not a match for Germany’s well-nourished, well-trained and well-equipped war machine (Germany’s welfare state had been ushered in by Otto von Bismarck during the 19th century). Not only that, but the crop of recruits brought in by conscription was a step in the wrong direction, being untrained, in poor health and malnourished after 20 years of Conservative rule.
Yet these were the men who were going to win the war, supported by equally poorly-served women, youngsters, and pensioners on the Home Front.
We know the first few years of the war went badly for Britain. We were forced out of Europe and attempts to create a front in Africa found themselves on uneven ground.
Then came the Beveridge report, Social Insurance and Allied Services. It was written by the Liberal Sir William Beveridge, who had been tasked with carrying out the widest social survey yet undertaken – covering schemes of social insurance and – as stated – allied services.
He went far beyond this remit, instead calling for an end to poverty, disease and unemployment by fighting what he called the five giants on the road to reconstruction – Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness – and claiming to supply the means to do so.
His plan dealt mainly with Want and Disease, proposing a system of social insurance against the interruption and destruction of earning power and a National Health Service for the prevention and cure of disease and disability, and for rehabilitation.
Winston Churchill (who was of course Prime Minister at the time) privately made clear his concern at the “dangerous optimism” created by the report’s proposals. In public, although he could not attend a debate on a Labour motion that – significantly – called for the early implementation of the plan as a test of Parliament’s sincerity, he sent a message saying it was “an essential part of any post-war scheme of national betterment”. But he refused to “tie the hands of future Parliaments” by starting any legislation to bring the plan into effect.
I quote now from The Welfare State, by Pauline Gregg (George S Harrap & Co, 1967): “To refuse its immediate acceptance, to refuse to make public any plan for its immediate post-War implementation, even if not for its implementation then and there, was to the people betrayal… You cannot refuse to welcome a saviour without being suspected of not wishing to be saved – or, at best, of being so blind that you do not know salvation when you see it!”
The social and economic questions that most troubled the electorate in 1944 were housing and jobs – as they should be today. But the wartime coalition broke over arguments about housing, and Churchill’s Conservatives refused to commit to full employment, as demanded by Beveridge. Instead it proposed that “a high and stable level of employment” should be one of its primary responsibilities, with no legislation planned on the grounds that employment could not be created by government alone.
This is why Labour won the 1945 election with such a landslide. The people expected the Tories to betray them when peace was restored, and they could not back Beveridge’s Liberals because they were afraid of half-measures.
And the people – both those who fought as soldiers and those who supported them at home – were determined that their war would mean something; that it would create a better future. They wanted Beveridge’s plan for social security and they absolutely demanded a national health service.
That is why they were prepared to fight so hard, and even die for their cause. Not the continuation of a British government that couldn’t care less about them until it needed cannon fodder – but the creation of a new system, in which every citizen had value and could rely on the support of their fellows.
It was a system that enjoyed success – albeit to varying degrees – right up to the early 1970s when Edward Health tried to replace it with neoliberalism. He failed but he paved the way for Margaret Thatcher, Nicholas Ridley and Keith Joseph to turn Britain into the mess it is today.
And here we sit, on the 70th anniversary of D-Day, facing exactly the same issues as our parents and grandparents did back then.
Do we want a National health service? Or are we content to allow a gang of money-worshipping bandits to turn it into a profit machine for their own enrichment while our health returns to pre-1939 conditions? Rickets and tuberculosis have already returned. What next?
Do we want a housing boom for the rich, while the workers and the poor lose the benefits that allowed them to keep a roof over their heads (pay having dropped below the level at which people can cover all their bills without help from the state)?
Do we want a job market that deliberately ensures a large amount of unemployment, in order to keep wages down and ensure that the lower echelons don’t forget that their place is to serve aristocrats like Jacob Rees-Mogg?
Or shall we remember the sacrifices made by our forefathers on D-Day and throughout the war, and demand better?
The choice is yours – and no ‘Labour Forum’ has the right to stop you discussing it.
(The latest Vox Political book collection – Health Warning: Government! – is now available. It is a cracking read and fantastic value for money. Only available via the Internet, it may be purchased here in print and eBook form, along with the previous VP release, Strong Words and Hard Times.)
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