If you’ve seen the video clip in which Richard Murphy explains how money works, you’ll know that people who pay tax are more likely to vote – they feel they have more of an interest in it.
(Of course, tax is about returning money the government has created, in order to avoid catastrophic inflation – and not about giving the government the money it needs in order to provide public services, but let’s not complicate matters by going into that.)
But the Tories have spent the last 11 years raising the earnings threshold at which people pay tax, claiming this as a sign of their generosity.
Oh really? Watch the video and consider the comment by Paul Sweeney.
Just remembered how the nearly half of the working age population in Britain earning less than £13,000 a year was framed by the impartial public service broadcaster 🤦🏻♂️ https://t.co/WPRzVYSmkh
It seems to This Writer that, through no fault of their own, attempts are being made to deny more than 20 million people the right to say which services the government funds. Presumably the next step is to say, if you don’t pay tax, you don’t get to vote.
We’re on a very slippery slope, here.
And a hypocritical one.
You’ll notice that nobody is saying you shouldn’t have a say if you don’t pay all the tax for which you should be liable – for example, because you engage in tax avoidance.
So super-rich tax avoiders will be able to vote/help decide which public services are funded or whether they get funded at all – despite the fact that most of them don’t need the most expensive of those services. Logically, they’ll say those are the ones to get the axe.
Meanwhile, the super-poor – who are now prevented from paying tax, either because they are on benefits or their wages have been pushed into the dirt by Tory employers – may be denied that right.
It should not even be a subject for discussion.
The qualification for voting – and therefore for helping decide how public money is spent – is UK citizenship because we all live here and we are all affected by the decisions the government makes.
Oh, and of course Income Tax is not the only tax that people pay.
So to rule people out of the process because they have been priced out of paying just one of the UK’s many taxes would be unfair in the extreme – and Emma Barnett was talking out of her rear end.
What a shame that’s such a good description of our current Tory government.
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Today (February 16) may be the first working day since my application to appeal was lodged last Wednesday, when I don’t receive an aggravating piece of correspondence from Rachel Riley’s solicitors.
I submitted a witness statement with the appeal application, pointing out that I am far from rich, because Mark Lewis was seeking to enforce an expected decision by the High Court judge to award £27,000 in costs to his client. I am disputing this amount in my appeal as it is far too much, according to the rules by which Lewis is supposed to work.
On February 11, Lewis informed my own legal team that he believes my statement of means (as it’s known) was misleading because I had not mentioned the current position of my crowdfunding efforts; he wanted to get his hands on the cash raised by my CrowdJustice site.
In a further communication the following day, it seems Lewis expanded his interest to include cash raised by donations direct to me.
The CrowdJustice money is nothing to do with me. People donate it direct to CrowdJustice, who pass it on to my legal team, and they take cash from that fund to pay my costs as they come up. I simply don’t know how much is in that account at any time.
Donations direct to my site are passed into the CrowdJustice fund – by me – whenever there is an amount available that makes it worthwhile. The account I keep open to receive those donations contains very little cash as it is simply a conduit for money that goes elsewhere.
So I haven’t misled anybody.
I have instructed my solicitor to ask Lewis to produce any material he has that may show that my statement is inaccurate. If not, he is invited to desist from making wholly inaccurate – and serious – allegations about me.
Meanwhile, dear reader, you are invited to continue contributing to the CrowdJustice fund, in the knowledge that the cash will only be used to support my court case against Riley and will not be used to enrich her in any way. Here are the instructions:
Consider making a donation yourself, if you can afford it, via the CrowdJustice page.
Email your friends, asking them to pledge to the CrowdJustice site.
Post a link to Facebook, asking readers to pledge.
On Twitter, tweet in support, quoting the address of the appeal.
After three weeks of extreme strain, both raising funds for the appeal and dealing with its grounds – while Riley’s legal team threatened to send the bailiffs round to enforce a costs order that still hasn’t been made, I think we can all sympathise with my partner’s belief that Lewis is piling on the pressure purely to cause grief.
Mrs Mike (as she has become known on Vox Political ) is the unseen other victim of Riley’s libel case against me. She has had to endure every stage of this trumped-up and unreasonable court process with me. For a woman with long-term illnesses and disabilities, who has suffered mental illness in the past, it has not been easy.
She has been hugely supportive – and it is a bitter blow to see her becoming upset by something that amounts to nothing more than playground bullying.
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Boris Johnson has the clap: but his show of appreciation for NHS staff never went any further than a photo opportunity outside 10 Downing Street.
The Tory relaunch of ‘Clap for Heroes’ has fallen flat, with streets quiet at 8pm yesterday while residents took to the internet to demand fair pay for National Health Service workers instead.
This Writer never took part in the weekly ritual, that ran for 10 weeks during the first lockdown last year. I knew it was nothing but a sop for struggling doctors, nurses and support workers who were being forced to work long hours on very low pay after 10 years of Tory underfunding.
I knew that clapping doesn’t help. In fact, it may undermine the NHS by giving working the sense that we think putting our hands together on our doorsteps once a week is somehow a reasonable substitute for a well-resourced and capable health service with a decent standard of living for its staff.
Boris Johnson knows the NHS is struggling, but his government refused to provide a reasonable pay rise to NHS workers last year. Instead he splurged billions of pounds on fake companies run by spoilt friends of his ministers or Tory donors, who then failed to provide the equipment they had been contracted to make or find.
His demand for you to stand on your doorstep in the cold and clap your hands like a performing seal is an appeal for complicity. By clapping, you agree with him that the NHS doesn’t need decent pay.
No wonder so many people didn’t bother.
It is far better to tweet, email, and write to our MPs, demanding that they provide a decent living wage – not just to the NHS but to all frontline, key and essential workers.
That’s why I support comments like these.
I’ll acknowledge tonight’s clap for heroes by adding #CashNotClaps to a tweet or two at 8pm.
Give them a pay rise 👏🏻 Give them a pay rise 👏🏻 Give them a pay rise 👏🏻 Give them a pay rise 👏🏻 Give them a pay rise 👏🏻 Give them a pay rise 👏🏻 Give them a pay rise 👏🏻 Give them a pay rise 👏🏻 Give them a pay rise 👏🏻 Give them a pay rise 👏🏻 Give them a pay rise 👏🏻 #CashNotClaps
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I was a mug for voting Remain. If I'd banged the drum for Brexit I might have been in the House of Lords by now, or had a multi-million pound contract for doing something at which I had no previous experience or demonstrable ability.
He seems to have been referring to Boris Johnson’s decision to nominate arch-Brexiter Daniel Hannan for a peerage (as if Johnson hasn’t already sent far too many of his cronies to the House of Lords):
During his term as Conservative Party co-treasurer – effectively the party’s chief fundraiser – Cruddas was filmed by The Sunday Times, apparently offering access to the prime minister in return for a sizable donation: “£200,000 to £250,000 is Premier League – things will open up for you – you can ask him practically any question you want.”
Cruddas sued the newspaper for libel and won – but appeal court judges later ruled that the central allegation of the story – that Cruddas had offered “cash for access” to potential donors – was supported by the evidence.
By nominating him for a peerage, Johnson is effectively rewarding Cruddas for this behaviour – which This Writer considers to be corrupt; he was offering donors a chance to influence government policy – if the price was right.
Do Conservative voters think it’s right that the Upper House of the UK’s legislature is being filled with people connected to such corruption?
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Tory chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced a new support package for English areas under Tier 2 Covid-19 restrictions in a move that seems time to snub Greater Manchester.
The north-west English area had been under Tier 2 restrictions until earlier this week, when Sunak’s government forced it into Tier 3 with a financial support package that has been vilified as punitive and unfair.
Now the BBC is reporting:
Rishi Sunak announced big changes to the Job Support Scheme (JSS) – set to replace furlough in November.
Businesses in tier two areas, particularly in the hospitality sector, had complained that they would be better off if they were under tier three restrictions.
Sunak delivered his announcement in the House of Commons:
It is clear that "open but struggling businesses require further support," says Chancellor Rishi Sunak
"We are doubling the next round of the self-employed income support [scheme] from 20% to 40% of people’s incomes. Increasing the maximum grant to £3,750”
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham was unimpressed – and even that usually-staunch supporter of the Tories, the BBC’s Laura Kuennsberg, had to agree that he made a fair point:
Perhaps not an unfair question…. govt was refusing to budge on giving GM an extra 5 million on Tues, when today's plan (surely) must have been in the mix
“Hello? We’ve been under these restrictions for three months”
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham says he was left “open-mouthed" by reports Chancellor Rishi Sunak is to unveil more support for tier 2 businesses, "billed… for London and Birmingham"https://t.co/AVi6S4rqRkpic.twitter.com/KtB9NkSCQJ
Anthony Browne, the Tory MP appearing on the day’s edition of the BBC’s Politics Live, tried to justify the timing of the announcement:
#RishiSunak announces new deal to help people cope with #Covid19UK – days after no agreement with #AndyBurnham over #GreaterManchester because of the lack of such measures. "It takes time" to evolve these policies, says Tory on #PoliticsLive – so it could've been given to Burnham
If it takes time to evolve a policy change like that which Sunak announced in Parliament, then that means it would certainly have been under discussion when the talks with Burnham were taking place.
So it also follows that the Conservatives holding those discussions – like Robert Jenrick, who spewed such a lot of nonsense about it earlier in the week – deliberately failed to mention it to Burnham.
Why?
The only reason that I can see would be to corruptly engineer a financial disadvantage for the Labour-voting people of Greater Manchester.
Once again, it seems, the Conservatives are using the Covid-19 crisis for their own selfish political gain.
How utterly despicable.
I am glad to see that the £2,100 per month grant is retrospective and may be backdated to August 2.
I hope hospitality businesses in Greater Manchester use it to take as much as they can from Sunak and his twisted government.
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Robert Jenrick: he reckons it is ‘perfectly normal’ for ministers to corruptly funnel money from their own department’s funds into their own constituencies.
“Perfectly normal” is it, Robert Jenrick?
If you are utterly corrupt, it might be perfectly normal to allocate millions of pounds from a regeneration fund to your fellow MP’s constituency in return for him giving £25 million to yours. Not if you’re honest!
Jenrick tried to brazen out the Labour Party’s accusation against him when he appeared on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show:
Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick has dismissed Labour’s call for an investigation into the award of a £25m regeneration grant to his constituency.
He told BBC One’s Andrew Marr show the decision to give the money to Newark, Nottinghamshire, had been taken by fellow minister Jake Berry.
Mr Jenrick said he had himself decided to grant funds to a town in Mr Berry’s constituency under the same scheme.
He called this “perfectly normal” and accused Labour of “distraction”.
The £25m was awarded to Newark under the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s £3.6bn Towns Fund, set up last year to help places that had “not always benefitted from economic growth in the same way as more prosperous areas”.
Here’s a clip of him doing just that:
#marr – Which minister decided that your constituency would get money?
Robert Jenrick – Jake Berry#Marr – & Jake Berry also get money for his constituency… & who decided that?
Jenrick is the Secretary of State for Housing and Berry is a minister within the same government department.
The public has already passed its own verdict on whether the decisions were corrupt – and both Jenrick and Berry have been found lacking:
Oh wow, Robert Jenrick just admitted that he allocated funds to Jake Berry's constituency, and Berry allocated funds to Jenrick's. Another example of #oneruleforthem corruption to add to the ever growing Conservative pile.#Marr
What Jenrick said about he and his Junior Minister Jake Berry deciding to give money to each other's constituencies only passes the sniff test if Covid has taken away your sense of smell. #Marr
I can’t believe that anyone from a working class background in the North would vote for this millionaires boys club effectively handing them the keys to the safe, they are lining each other’s pockets and sticking two fingers up at the rest #ToryCorruption
There will be no inquiry into this and neither Jenrick nor Berry will face the sack, or even any disciplinary action. Boris Johnson’s government doesn’t believe it is accountable to the public.
They’ll probably divert attention by claiming the controversy is about something different. Jenrick has already tried:
He added: “This is perfectly normal. Ministers don’t get involved in making decisions for their own constituency.
“But neither should their constituencies be victims of the fact that their MP is a minister.”
That is not the issue. Just to spell it out so it is perfecly clear: The issue is that ministers from the Ministry of Housing have colluded to funnel cash from that ministry’s Towns Fund into their own constituencies.
Jenrick’s passion for corruption is already well-established – remember the controversy over his decision to help Richard Desmond avoid paying £50 million to a community where he wanted to build a new development that did not conform to planning rules.
Now we may add Berry to our ever-growing list of corrupt Tories.
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Don’t cry, Mr Johnson: we all know it’s hard for you to feed yourself, your paramour and four of your six kids on a £150,000+ income, with your accommodation supported by the state. But we’re not sure you or anyone you know should be in charge of the nation’s economy if you can’t. It was Tories like you who said the economy was like a household budget, after all.
If you behave more like a performing monkey than a prime minister, you get what you deserve when you complain.
It seems the UK’s performing monkey – Boris Johnson – is complaining, as his fans in The Times explain:
On the personal front sources say Johnson is complaining about money. He is still supporting four out of his six children, has been through an expensive divorce and had his income drop by more than half as a result of fulfilling his lifetime ambition https://t.co/JGe3D91tOX
The headline defies reason! Overburdened, underpaid and ‘misery on his face’!
Overburdened? This is the prime minister who has spent more time on holiday then any of his recent forerunners – possibly than all of them put together, if you average it out for a single year.
Underpaid? Let’s see how that plays out for our £150,000-a-year public servant in some of the comments from those he is supposed to serve:
People sometimes say social media is harsh and unforgiving, but to see it uniting in sympathy for our beloved PM, who has to buy his own food on only £150k a year, is heartwarming. pic.twitter.com/FCi4KVLW49
Here‘s Phil Harrison: “This piece is jaw-droppingly offensive. a) He earns five times the national median wage at a time when millions are losing jobs. b) He’s already minted. c) He only looks after 4 of his 6 kids?! YOU WHAT?? Does he want a medal? He should be in court.”
Indeed. Johnson probably claims Child Benefit for the other two…
Indeed. If Johnson had not wanted to support his children, one wonders how he came to have so many. Lost In The Shire has a thought about that: “I sometimes imagine his supporters think he slipped and accidentally impregnated a host of women and so that’s why he doesn’t need to pay to support or acknowledge all of his own children.”
#PoorBoris my arse!!!Who gives a shit…One bit of advice Boris.."Keep it in your pants"
— MrsAitchBee 3.5% #3PointFivePercent #FBPE (@MrsAitchBee) September 19, 2020
Still, there’s a lot of good advice for him, such as this, from WeeHalfPint: “If we all clap, that should help him put food on the table, yeah?”
Queen Neferure has more practical help for him: “Hi @BorisJohnson I’m sorry to hear you are struggling on £150k. I get ESA, which for the over 25s is less than £4k per year. If you need any help with budgeting, do not hesitate to contact me or contact your local jobcentre, @CitizensAdvice or @StepChange for help.”
How about this?
Can someone please set up a go fund me page to help out our impoverished PM Johnson, struggling on just a six figure income + his side deals?
I would but I’m too busy grinding my teeth.#PoorBoris
— Love in the Time of Covid #Rejoin 2030 (@WasOnceLoved) September 19, 2020
Alternatively, perhaps he could try taking advice from a fellow right-winger, as suggested here:
Sara Anzani adds: “He should try living on £5.65 a day, like he and the rest of his government expect asylum seekers to.”
Of course, Johnson isn’t struggling to pay the bills on his own; he has a partner. These Novel Thoughts was prompted to make the following suggestion with this in mind: “Is Carrie working? If so, surely that’s another salary coming in. If not, why do they need a nanny? And given the fact that Johnson only works about a day a week, can’t he do some cleaning?”
As for the misery on his face. Well, The Times stated that being a performing monkey prime minister was his life’s ambition.
Perhaps he has discovered the truism that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting.
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Boris Johnson can’t be trusted with cash: he seems to give it to his friends whenever he can – and the fear is that he’ll do it with the budget of the soon-to-be-scrapped Department for International Development.
Boris Johnson is being urged to forget his plan to scrap the Department for International Development on the grounds that money would go to the wrong nations.
The DfID is being merged with the Foreign Office but whereas the DfID has spent a majority of its budget in the poorest countries and has a reputation for transparency, the same cannot be said for the FO – especially under Boris Johnson.
When he was Foreign Secretary (between 2016-2018), it was in the middle of spending £84 million on China – which can hardly be said to require aid.
Indeed, 39 per cent of FO cash has gone to higher- and middle-income nations, with just 22 per cent going to the poorest countries.
The facts of the matter have only just been revealed, so it seems the FO can get away with hiding its spending – handy if you want to hand public cash to your mates.
So the question is:
Is Johnson scrapping the DfID so he can appropriate its money and give it to his dodgy contacts in foreign countries, in the same way he has handed billions of pounds of Covid-related cash to firms run by his cronies, who have provided nothing in response?
And, if that is even the suspicion:
Shouldn’t the plan to scrap the DfID be itself scrapped – to avoid trust in the government collapsing even more than it already has?
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Jenrick and Johnson: both have personal connections with property developer Richard Desmond, so why have they been interfering in the determination of his planning applications?
Here’s an interesting kink on the Westferry planning scandal:
Boris Johnson can’t sack Robert Jenrick for taking a decision if – big if – he told him to take it… https://t.co/8hjbzbN5Zn
Let’s assume there’s something in what John Stevens – and Henry Mance – are saying and that Richard Desmond, the man behind the Westferry development plan, had a considerable amount of contact with Boris Johnson. That would create cause for concern, and we would certainly be justified in wanting to know the nature of any communications.
A key player in the controversial Westferry Printworks development can be revealed as an investment firm owned by a super-rich Tory donor and crony of Boris Johnson.
The “development manager” is a company which has donated £200,000 to the Tories.
[The planning application] was made by a company owned by Mr Desmond but the developer was London and Regional Properties, a firm behind £9billion of building projects owned by [Ian] Livingstone and brother Richard. It is unclear if LRP is still involved, but Westferry Printworks is listed as a development on its website.
The company donated nearly £202,000 to the Tories between 2005 and 2012.
It is run by [Mr] Livingstone, who the Prime Minister appointed to the board of his Mayor’s Fund for London.
Mr Johnson approved the original plans for the East London site during his final days as Mayor of the capital.
So now this “cash for favours” row has a strong connection with Boris Johnson and Downing Street.
Also suspicious is the Tories’ apparent desperation to distance themselves from any interest in Mr Desmond and his firm – for example, by banning the BBC from using photographs of Mr Desmond and Robert Jenrick together at a Conservative Party fundraising event:
The Conservatives have banned the BBC from publishing pictures of Robert Jenrick and Richard Desmond at a party fundraising dinner.
The pictures are owned by Conservative Party, with the BBC saying it was prevented from publishing them. A spokeswoman for the corporation told Yahoo News UK on Thursday: “We didn’t use them for legal reasons.”
The same article states that Johnson is standing by his minister:
Isn’t that what a prime minister would say if he was unable to fire his underling – for example, because the flunky was only doing what the PM had told him to do?
I ask merely rhetorically.
Meanwhile, it seems Jenrick is now embroiled in another “cash for favours” row:
Labour has called on… Robert Jenrick, to explain a ministerial meeting with a “family friend” who had a financial interest in the future of a rival mining project that Jenrick was overseeing.
The Guardian revealed this week that Jenrick met the Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer while the then exchequer secretary to the Treasury was considering a request for financial support from Sirius Minerals for a mining project that would have rivalled Ofer’s own firm Cleveland Potash.
A spokesperson for Jenrick said on Friday that Ofer was a “family friend” and that the minister had notified officials, who advised him to step back from the decision on Sirius.
But the spokesperson did not say when Jenrick recused himself and the Guardian understands he retained oversight of Sirius’s request for support for at least six months after the meeting.
Put this together with the amount of money that property giants give to the Conservatives…
The Tories have received more than £11m from property developers since Boris Johnson became prime minister, an investigation has found.
Concerns have been raised about the apparent increased influence property developers have over the Conservative government. Their contributions make up nearly a quarter of the £47.5m in donations received by the party from last July to March, up from 7.9 per cent of the total two years ago.
The latest analysis by the OpenDemocracy website found that the Conservatives’ top 10 property donors have given more than £5.7m to the party since Mr Johnson took the helm in July – up from around £1.5million for the equivalent top 10 in the final 12 months of Theresa May’s premiership, a three-fold increase. In total, around 120 individuals and companies from the sector have donated since July last year.
… and there is certainly enough evidence to ask questions.
Of course, there can be no implication of wrongdoing by Conservative donors whose contributions are made only through support for Tory policies; who have no personal connection with Conservative ministers.
But when there is a connection, as with Idan Ofer and Jenrick, and with Richard Desmond and both Jenrick and Johnson, it is not only right to ask questions – an investigation is positively demanded.
The Westferry matter goes a step beyond even this – because wrongdoing is known to have happened, and because the person who is refusing to take action against the minister responsible for the transgression himself has a connection with the developer – and the development itself.
I mean, who can blame us for questioning Jenrick when it seems he won planning permission for an extension to his Westminster home, against planning officers’ recommentations, from councillors who were his fellow Conservatives?
Conservative councillors on Westminster council gave planning permission for an enlargement of Jenrick’s townhouse despite officers recommending the application be refused because it would harm the appearance of the building and the conservation area.
Planning officers were recommending refusal of this third application but Steve Summers a Tory councillor and a neighbour of Jenrick made an official request that a planning committee take the decision and not officers.
In November 2014 the three Conservative members of the planning committee — Richard Beddoe, Robert Rigby and Paul Church — voted to overturn the officers recommendation and approve the scheme. Ruth Bush, the single Labour member of the committee voted against the application.
In March 2018 Robert Davis who was chair of planning at Westminster council for 17 years resigned after the Guardian revealed he had received hospitality and gifts hundreds of times including from property developers.
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A few coppers and some silver coins: all the Tories think you’re worth.
The Tories are using the Covid-19 crisis to force more of the UK’s struggling population into poverty, it seems, with increasing reliance on food banks as disposable incomes plummet:
One in four adults in the UK have struggled to access food they can afford during the coronavirus pandemic, leaving them susceptible to hunger and potential malnutrition, a new report warns.
Research by Feeding Britain and Northumbria University’s Healthy Living Lab indicates a far broader group of households, in addition to the poorest, are now struggling to pay the bills and put food on the table, often following a loss of earnings or problems with the benefits system.
The findings, based on a survey with 1,004 responses, shows nearly 25 per cent of adults looking after children have eaten less during the pandemic so they can feed them, while half have tried to cope by buying less expensive food they would not ordinarily choose to buy – a figure that rises to nine in 10 among adults who live in the poorest households.
Even strategies commonly used during lockdown – such as buying less expensive food, borrowing food, using food banks and restricting the food eaten – have not enabled adults to become food secure and live free of hunger and potential malnutrition, the report says.
It comes after figures published earlier this month revealed demand for food banks is greater than ever – with The Trussell Trust, the UK’s biggest network of food banks, handing out 89 per cent more food parcels in April compared with the same month last year, while the Independent Food Aid Network (Ifan) recorded a 175 per cent increase over the same period.
This is not an accident.
Other countries’ governments have been able to support their people through the crisis – most of them much poorer than the UK.
So this is a conscious choice by your Conservative masters; they are using Covid-19 to put you firmly in your place.
It seems they think that place is in debt – and this should come as no surprise. People who have to work long, hard hours trying to pay off debts that (no doubt) are increasing in spite of those efforts have no time or energy left to question the corrupt antics of their political leaders.
Think about that when you open your bank statement and find it is red.
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.
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