Tory Britain: “one of the most effluent nations in the world” as Dr Louise Raw put it when she tweeted this image.
An informative video clip from the Express? Will wonders never cease?
The big question is why nothing is being done about this.
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Backhander: private health companies are being given a fortune in public money by the Tory government – and the cash will go to firms that are part-owned by Tories and Tory donors.
Can anybody make sense of this?
Sajid Javid has ordered NHS England to give up to £270m to private hospitals in case of an omicron surge, all of which they will keep even if they treat no patients & despite a lack of staff. Beneficiaries include Spire Health, Ramsay & Circle which is part owned by a tory donor
The only reason This Writer can find for such funding is the one that has been causing the Tories all their problems at the moment: deception.
Only recently, we were told NHS England did not have enough Covid-19 tests – LFT or PCR – to cover demand; indeed, it had to take four million kits from NHS Wales in an effort to cover the shortfall.
So when we see that the number of infections is down to around 70,000, can we really believe it? Or is the investment in private healthcare justified?
It doesn’t matter – because the Tory government is deceiving us in any event.
If the number of infections isn’t really down, then the government is lying about that; if it is, then the government is lying about the need to pay private health.
My personal opinion? The number of deaths appears to have reduced as well as infections (although we’ll have to see what Monday’s data brings), so I’m willing to hazard a guess that the Omicron wave has broken.
That means there’s absolutely no reason to give any money to the profit-grubbers and Sajid Javid is simply lining shareholders’ pockets for no reason other than squandering your cash.
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Minehead beach: you might be more sensible than to allow your child to play in the human waste that you see here – but other people clearly aren’t.
We all breathed a sigh of relief and rejoiced that we could once again smell the roses after the government announced its new plan to progressively force water companies to reduce the amount of sewage in our rivers and in the sea. Didn’t we?
No. Here’s our water quality correspondent, Feargal Sharkey:
He also had an answer to Tories like This Writer’s MP, Fay Jones, who claimed that the public would be forced to pay for improvements to the UK’s sewers:
“These are private companies… they have profited whilst filling our rivers with sewage”
On a side note, you have to agree with Omid on this, don’t you?
Did anyone over 50 ever imagine watching Top of the Pops 40 odd years ago that our only reliable information about present day corruption & the destruction of the environment would be coming from the singer of The Undertones? https://t.co/1jM45u0mSl
They weren’t available to be interviewed, of course, because none of them live in the UK!
Our water companies are run by the governments of eight other nations: Singapore, Australia, Kuwait, Canada, Norway, UAE, Qatar and Malaysia.
So let me see if I've got this right 🤔. Thatcher sold off our Victorian sewage & water system to private companies who have made lots of money out of it, but have not updated it. Now they are releasing sewage into our rivers until we pay to update it. #SewageScandal
That’s pretty close to it! Of course, the government has said that it will require the water companies to clean up their act (and our waterways) progressively but it is extremely unlikely that this will happen unless the Treasury provides some stimulus.
In the meantime, we have this:
Raw sewage floating down The River Avon where people swim, paddle board and kayak. This is an area of outstanding natural beauty where we have spotted woodpeckers, falcons and beavers. It’s being destroyed by #Sewage#BBCBreakfastpic.twitter.com/hYaPJgtRg2
The worst part is that a family was letting their child paddle in the Minehead sewage. People really don’t know any better than not to play with the brown stuff. How many people will catch cholera before the government gets the message?
Well, the Tories wanted a workforce that was less educated than they were, and judging from Boris Johnson, that was setting the bar very low indeed.
At least the satirists have been sharpening their tools. Here’s a selection of their offerings – these are the tools we should use to remind the Tories of their big mistake:
And what has actually been done to stop the dissemination of sewage into our waterways, land, crops, food animals and dinner plates in the meantime?
Absolutely nothing.
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Spaffer: Boris Johnson has thrown so much money at private consultants and contractors that the UK’s financial stability is in peril.
The cost of privatisation: faced with the Covid-19 pandemic, Boris Johnson has paid consultants more than £100 million to do his thinking for him – and the cash has been wasted.
Clearly it’s money for old rope, considering the failure of every policy announced by Johnson and his cronies including Matt Hancock, Gavin Williamson and Dominic Raab.
And the waste is very clearly a result of privatisation; before Tory neoliberalism demanded that even ideas should be outsourced, governments used to rely on people called civil servants who spent their entire careers in public service and could therefore be relied on to know how things worked.
Those people have been largely ostracised, retired or otherwise cast out by know-nothings like David Cameron, Theresa May and now Johnson, in favour of their know-nothing friends in the private sector. Here’s the gist from the Financial Times:
The UK’s largest consulting firms have been paid more than £100m to advise the government on its response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a string of delayed disclosures from Whitehall in recent weeks. A total of 106 contracts worth £109m have been agreed between various government departments and consulting firms such as PwC, Deloitte and McKinsey since March, as civil servants scrambled for support to source personal protective equipment, set up test and trace programmes and acquire thousands of new ventilators as the pandemic gathered pace.
The UK’s public finances are now in a terrible state after Johnson and his people awarded huge contracts to firms that were incapable of honouring them – some of which even turned out to be dormant companies – on the advice of firms like PwC, Deloitte and McKinsey. Weren’t these people supposed to be cheaper than doing the work in-house?
The government has been mired in scandal because it adopted a biased algorithm to award ‘A’ level results, on the advice of an outsourced consultancy firm.
It’s a well known adage that the definition of madness is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results.
And yet we see Johnson going back to these private consultants for more advice.
Why aren’t we all drawing the obvious conclusion?
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This is conclusive: the 2019 general election is now a fight for the survival of the National Health Service.
In a press conference, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn brandished 451 pages of government papers detailing trade talks between the Conservative government and the Trump administration in the USA.
They make it clear that Mr Johnson will sell the NHS to US-based private companies if he wins the election on December 12:
"We've now got evidence that under Boris Johnson the NHS is on the table and will be up for sale."
Jeremy Corbyn says Labour have obtained an unredacted 451-page report which shows there are "secret talks for a deal with Donald Trump after Brexit". pic.twitter.com/gPUGt3IUEj
According to the papers, “total market access” for US companies to all UK service sectors is the baseline from which the trade talks will start.
It is also worth noting that the US demand no mention of climate change in any deal – so if Mr Johnson is elected, the UK’s commitment to carbon neutrality, by any date, will be canclled. Apparently BoJob wants to see us burn.
Mr Trump and his people want a “no deal” Brexit – so any claim by Mr Johnson that he is going to agree a deal with the EU seems to be a lie.
And the talks cover a range of other sectors including financial services, the British film industry, UK nursing qualifications, workers’ rights, data privacy, pesticide control, sugar content labelling and even gender discrimination rules. These represent a major power-grab.
One key sentence in this document is the killer. "Everything that isn't expressly excluded is included" . It's the goodbye NHS sentence.
International trade secretary Liz Truss has responded by saying that Mr Corbyn is “out-and-out lying to the public about what these documents contain”. But that’s a hard stance to maintain when he handed out copies to members of the press.
According to the BBC, Mr Johnson also said the claims were “total nonsense”.
But Mr Corbyn has an impeccable record of honesty while Mr Johnson has been exposed as a liar, time and time again. Here are a few examples:
Here are all the lies, spin & blatantly false statements Boris Johnson inflicted on the public last night. In doing so he treated us with contempt. If you think people deserve the truth please RT pic.twitter.com/5MjjM7eaK7
If Jeremy Corbyn says Boris Johnson is in the process of selling off the NHS, then I believe him – and I think you should too.
This election has become a choice between accepting a hugely-expensive US-style insurance-based health system that will keep you sick and bankrupt you while doing so – under Boris Johnson, or a restored NHS, fully public, and free at the point of use – under Jeremy Corbyn.
If you value your health, you must tell our politicians that our NHS is not for sale.
Those of you who think voting for another party – especially the Liberal Democrats – will help achieve this should think again. The Lib Dems helped inflict privatisation on the health service during the Coalition government and cannot be trusted not to get right back in bed with the Tories if they have a chance.
So who are you going to elect? A Labour Party that is telling you the facts? Or the lying Tories who’ll sell your health for pennies?
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The fact that the Tories are asking firms to sign non-disclosure agreements is tacit confirmation – not only that a no-deal Brexit is now likely, but that it will also cause an incalculable amount of harm to the UK economy.
This leads us inexorably to the other reason an NDA would be demanded; the information the Tories would provide to company representatives must be so damning that they think it will seriously harm not just the economy but their party’s electability.
The Conservatives know that they are responsible. Not only did they trigger the referendum that led to this point, they made sure no effort was made to explain what Brexit would mean in the run-up to the vote, and they have squabbled among themselves like children rather than acting in the interests of the country after it.
But they want to hide this from the general public.
So they are forcing gagging orders on anybody they think might give the game away.
With less than five months to go before we sever our ties with our greatest trading partner, the UK is on the brink of Conservative-created catastrophe.
Drug companies are being told to sign gagging clauses before discussing contingency plans for a chaotic no-deal Brexit with the government.
The Department for Health and Social Care has asked drug companies as well as bodies representing the pharmaceutical industry to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) so that officials can talk to them “in confidence” and ensure that “any requests of them are clear, appropriate and deliverable”.
Labour accused the government of silencing the health sector. After last week’s revelations about the retail magnate Sir Philip Green’s use of NDAs, Theresa May vowed to crack down on employers who are “using them unethically” and to “improve the regulation around NDAs”, although the prime minister did not condemn the use of gagging clauses altogether.
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Sell-off: The report calling for NHS hospitals to be sold off to private American firms, was edited by Eurosceptic Tory MEP Daniel Hannan.
At last the plan to sell off the NHS to private companies is out in the open, after years of being denied.
This think tank, the Initiative for Free Trade, should probably be thanked for allowing naked greed to get the better of tact and giving the game away too soon.
It is an organisation that has the support of International Trade minister Liam Fox, so you can be sure that it will be Conservative Party policy in the near future.
Mr Fox has already come out in support of forcing the people of the United Kingdom to eat chlorinated chicken – another move supported by the IFT.
And it turns out the report was written by another Conservative – Eurosceptic MEP Daniel Hannan.
So there you have it. It seems Brexit is being supported by the Conservatives as the excuse they need to fully privatise the National Health Service – or at least, the profitable parts of it.
They have tricked us into voting away our international reputation, our rights, our economy, and now – it seems – our health service.
Ministers should allow American healthcare companies to compete with the NHS to run hospitals as part of a free-trade pact after Brexit, a think tank recommends.
The Initiative for Free Trade (IFT) said that Britain should also end its ban on imports of products such as chlorinated chicken and accept American environmental and food safety regulations as equivalent to those in the UK.
The moves, it claimed, would help clear the way for a UK-US trade deal that would “rewrite the rules” of global commerce and allow Britain to take advantage of trade freedoms offered by Brexit. The IFT has received backing from Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, and Boris Johnson.
Liar, liar: Theresa May said she’d offer workers more representation on company boards as a bribe to get voters to support her in the general election. Now she has ditched that promise – for a second time [Image: Daily Mirror.]
Theresa May has broken her promise to put workers’ representatives on company boards – for a second time.
Anybody who voted for her in the belief that she meant it – this time – must be kicking themselves.
And she won’t be legislating to give shareholders power to veto excessive pay rises for company executives.
This means fat-cat business executives can continue abusing their workers by taking huge pay rises while leaving employees to labour in relative poverty.
The decision to water down the government’s legislation on boardrooms has been attributed to pressure from Philip Hammond, but who can say whether this is true or not? Hammond was in danger of losing his job as Chancellor in the run-up to the general election and this could be an attempt to smear him again.
Either way, who cares? The members of the Conservative cabinet are all as bad as each other.
And they are all determined to allow corporate corruption to continue.
Labour has it right. A spokesman was quoted as saying: ““Yet more words and no action from May. Fat cats, rip off bosses, tax dodgers and billionaire bankers – the whole rigged system – support the Tories because the Tories support them.”
True. And that’s why the corruption will continue.
Theresa May has confirmed she will not implement tough measures to crackdown on excessive executive pay.
The Prime Minister said that bosses who milked their companies had become the “unacceptable face of capitalism” as she announced a package of measures designed to show her party is prepared to tackle boardroom irresponsibility.
But they will fall short of previously floated plans to give workers representation in the boardroom and shareholders more significant votes on bosses’ pay.
said the Government reforms would include measures to ensure workers’ voices were “properly heard in the boardroom”, but made clear listed companies would choose for themselves whether to do this by having an employee advisory panel, a dedicated board member or an employee representative on their board.
A new public register will also be established by the end of this year, listing companies which have faced shareholder revolts over salaries and bonuses, she said.
The register will enable potential investors to identify firms where existing shareholders do not feel that bosses’ rewards are justified.
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Nicholas Paget-Brown, former leader of Kensington Council, has set up NPB Consulting [Image: Mark Kerrison/Alamy Stock Photo].
Let’s get this straight: The Tory politician who tried to hold a council meeting about the fire at Grenfell Tower in secret – and had to resign because of the ensuing row – is now advising businesses on how to work with councils?
The man who, as leader of Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council, allowed firms to get away with putting dangerous flammable material all over a housing block is now offering advice to firms on how to get what they want?
Does anybody else think it would be a bad idea to associate with him at all?
Still, it does show one thing:
Tories have no shame.
Nicholas Paget-Brown, the former leader of Kensington Council, has set up a consultancy service for organisations who wish to work with local authorities.
Paget-Brown, who was forced to resign last month in the wake of the council’s response to the Grenfell Tower disaster, has set up NPB Consulting.
According to his LinkedIn page, the company offers “policy analysis, seminars, briefings and drafting assistance”.
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We’ve established that the citizens of the UK – whether we use trains or not – are subsidising rail companies by nearly £4 billion a year.
We’ve also established that £3.5 billion of that money is used as profit by the railway operating companies.
Now you have proof that most of the £3.5 billion goes to German, Dutch and French nationalised railway services. It makes their services better while we are given trash.
This is the ultimate result of Conservative privatisations. They LOVE it!
Tories don’t care where your money goes, as long as you don’t have it, or anything like decent services or a decent standard of living.
That’s why they intend to continue privatising your assets and services, until foreign nationalised industries control everything (apart from, maybe, the courts and defence, if you believe David Cameron).
If you think about it, the Tories are making sure that Germany won the Second World War after all – 70 years after the event.*
Even if you can’t accept that, ask yourself whose side the Tories are really on.
It will never be yours.
Here’s the TSSA video that hammers the point home:
British taxpayers are paying for nationalised rail services in Europe, and the French, Dutch and German people would like to say thank you.
And it’s nothing to do with us still being in the EU.
As ticket prices skyrocket again today, a new video points out the absurdity at the heart of Britain’s privatised railways.
Huge chunks of Britain’s rail operating companies are now owned by the French, Dutch and German governments.
A chunk of the profits made from hiking fares in the UK are paid in dividends to state-owned companies such as Keolis, Arriva and Abellio.
*This is not to suggest that the Nazis could ever be said to have won World War II. If you want to find anything corresponding with Nazism in Germany or the UK, your best bet is – again – the Tory government.
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