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Why is the government telling an INDEPENDENT organisation what pay nurses should get?

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?

What do you make of this, then:

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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One-third of UK exporters to the EU have stopped exporting within the first year alone

This being a bank holiday weekend, This Writer is either otherwise occupied or almost totally incapacitated, so I’m putting up material that has interested me – and I hope it interests you. Make of it what you will…

… but I will say that I agree with Phil – if anyone had suggested that exports would plummet by a third before Brexit happened, it would have been condemned as “Project Fear” by Brexiteers.

This disaster became unavoidable after those damned fools seized control of the public discourse.

Here’s the clip:

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Board members of UK’s biggest finance firms have had nearly 80% pay rise since 2009

Nice work if you can get it!

And, indeed, if you think it actually qualifies as work.

Board members on the UK’s largest financial companies have enjoyed an average pay rise of 79 per cent since 2009.

This means that during the decade of austerity, while you were probably facing a pay freeze – meaning a real-terms drop in income, median pay for the three highest earning non-executive directors (NEDs) in each of the FTSE 100’s 17 financial firms surged from £90,700 in 2009 to £162,000 in 2019.

They received this for attending – just attending, not necessarily contributing to – an average of 26 meetings a year.

The largest increases have been at Lloyds Banking Group, where top NEDs are earning 257% more than in 2009; the London Stock Exchange Group, where there has been a 219% rise; and investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown, where fees have jumped 170%.

Remember, these firms don’t actually contribute anything to our lives – they don’t make anything, and such services as they do supply are highly exclusive.

They make money by betting on whether other businesses will do well or badly. That’s what investment is, after all – a wager that providing money to those firms now will bring a profitable return later.

It’s a game for the very rich.

And it depends on keeping the people who do the actual work very poor.

Payroll is always the largest cost to any firm so, if they are to provide an expected return to investors from firms like Lloyds Banking Group, the London Stock Exchange Group, Hargreaves Lansdown, Phoenix, Barclays, Prudential, Aviva, Admira, RSA, NatWest and so on, businesses have to keep pay low.

So these 79 per cent pay increases for finance firms arise from their board members attaching themselves to you like leeches and sucking out all the benefits that you should be enjoying.

Remember that as you endure the hardships you’ll be asked to face in 2021.

Source: UK’s biggest financial firms have given boards near-80% pay rise since 2009 | Business | The Guardian

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Sunak wants employers to pay a quarter of furloughed staff wages from August

Rishi Sunak: is he opening the door for employers to exploit their staff?

Funny how this story comes out when everybody’s talking about Dominic Cummings instead, isn’t it?

This Writer has said before that employers won’t pay – most probably because they can’t afford it.

But here’s a thought. Will employees go back to their old jobs, after being callously laid off over coronavirus?

And if they will, will employers try to get them to do it for lower pay?

I think it’s a definite possibility.

Employers will be expected to pay at least a fifth of the wages of furloughed staff from August, it is claimed.

The Treasury is said to be considering asking businesses to cover between 20% and 30% of staff wages.

Companies may also be told to cough up for national insurance contributions, which are approximately 5% of people’s wages, according to The Times.

Source: Employers may have to pay 25% of furloughed staff wages from August | Metro News

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Coronavirus: zero-hours workers sacked en masse despite Tory government promises

Rishi Sunak: his promises to employees are turning out to be worthless.

Another Tory coronavirus promise bites the dust.

Rishi Sunak promised that zero-hours workers would be covered by his promise to pay 80 per cent of employee wages, as long as they were on PAYE.

But his promise depended on employers signing up to the deal, and many haven’t.

Instead, the Department for Work and Pensions has been swamped with new claims for Universal Credit.

The reason?

Rishi Sunak said on Friday that workers on zero-hours contracts would be covered, as long as they were paid through PAYE. But many of these workers have simply been let go en masse in any case. Self-employed workers, who are not on PAYE, are not covered at all and will have to claim benefits if their work dries up and no new government measures are enacted.

There’s no two ways around it. The Tories promised people would be protected; the Tories lied.

Source: Sacked by text message: Zero-hours contract workers laid off because of coronavirus’ impact | The Independent

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Complaints about disability benefit assessments up 6,000% in three years

[Image: Black Triangle Campaign].

These are damning figures.

But what I find more upsetting is the way The Independent (in this case) suggests they have prompted “fresh” concerns about the Conservative government’s genocidal system.

The simple fact is that these aren’t concerns any more; they’re facts.

The Tory system isn’t simply harming disabled people; it is killing them.

For some reason, the mainstream media seems unwilling to admit that fact.

Who does that benefit?

The number of complaints to the government about its disability benefit assessment process has surged by more than 6,000 per cent in three years, prompting fresh concerns that the system is “flawed” and harming disabled people.

Government figures show 9,320 complaints were received about medical assessments for Personal Independent Payment (PIP) in the year to February 2019 – compared with 1,391 in 2016-17 and just 142 in 2015-16.

This marks a surge of 570 per cent in two years and 6,463 per cent in three years – which campaigners said shows that the process is “completely inadequate” for disabled people. The overall number of PIP claims has risen by 67 per cent since 2016.

Source: Complaints about disability benefit assessments up 6,000% in three years, figures show | The Independent

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UK economy 2.5 per cent SMALLER than if Remain had won EU referendum – experts

I don’t expect this to persuade anybody who voted ‘Leave’.

We all remember leave-voting Michael Gove’s comments about experts, after all.

But this is not speculation or prediction – it is an evidence-based finding.

The UK economy has suffered as a result of the Brexit vote and is 2.5 per cent smaller than if a majority had voted to remain in the EU.

A loss of £360 million per week!

That’s only £6 per person – but it’s £312 per year, and in a country where most people can’t even boast £100 worth of savings, it might be more relevant than it seems.

I await the excuses of the Brexiteers.

On a similar note, the figures seem to show an improvement in the economy of more than 15 per cent since the Conservatives took office in 2010, yet real-terms average pay has fallen by thousands of pounds per year.

The money has to go somewhere so we must conclude that those who control the money flow – business leaders and bankers – are keeping it for themselves.

Where’s the outrage at that?

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Fracking set to be banned from 40% of England’s shale areas

The Guardian is reporting that regulations proposed by the Labour Party and approved by the Coalition Government mean fracking will be banned from two-fifths of the land in England.

[Image: The Guardian.]

[Image: The Guardian.]

Labour faced harsh criticism last week, particularly from the Green Party of England and Wales, after it failed to support that party’s call for a moratorium on fracking that would have banned it altogether. Green supporters suggested that Labour had done a deal with the Coalition to abstain on the moratorium in return for support over the 13-point regulation scheme.

In fact, according to the newspaper, “Ministers were forced to accept Labour’s new environmental rules last week to avoid a rebellion by Conservative and LibDem backbench MPs, many of whom are facing opposition to fracking from constituents.”

So there was no dirty backroom deal and 40 per cent of England is free of fracking whereas, if Labour had supported the Green moratorium, none of England would be protected.

The article continues: “Neither the government nor Labour have stated how much of the land available for future shale gas drilling – 60 per cent of England – would be affected by the new bans. But a Guardian data analysis has revealed it is 39.7 per cent, with large swaths of the south and south east off-limits, as well as the Yorkshire Dales and Peak district.

“An independent analysis by Greenpeace also found that 45 per cent of the 931 blocks being licensed for fracking in England were at least 50 per cent covered by protected areas, which it said was likely to make them unattractive to fracking companies.

“Just three per cent of of the blocks have no protected areas at all, Greenpeace found.”

Well played, Labour! That was a good afternoon’s work.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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