Gavin Williamson turned down an offer to get free or cheap broadband for thousands of disadvantaged families, the Mirror has learned.
Broadband giant BT offered to supply families basic connections to allow children to access online learning with schools closed for months during the Covid-19 pandemic.
And the firm’s Chief Executive revealed they had given free wifi vouchers to the Government in June but the Department for Education ‘struggled to distribute them effectively’ and returned them.
A spokesman for the education department said a pilot of the scheme had not provided “reliable and consistent” internet connection.
Who do you believe?
Well, BT is an Internet Service Provider of very long standing, with experience in providing a reliable service to many thousands – if not millions – of homes.
And the Conservative Government of which Williamson is a member has also displayed consistency – in wasting public money on services offered by cowboy companies cobbled together by Tory donors or spoilt friends of Cabinet members.
It looks like another ideologically-motivated attack on the poor; pretend the offer doesn’t meet what passes for Conservative government quality control and reject it – to ensure that poor kids miss out on the education that might otherwise give them an advantage over rich kids who tend not to have two brain cells to rub together.
It’s just been exposed that Gavin Williamson refused an offer from BT to provide free/cheap broadband to kids who need access to online learning. The Tories don’t care and are going out of their way to hurt the poorest kids.
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‘We starve children’: Rishi Sunak’s slogan was a little different when he published it, but a member of the public has corrected it for him.
There’s a reason we call her “Thicky” Nicky. Tory High Command will be fuming this morning.
The reason? Former education secretary Nicky Morgan admitted on the BBC’s Question Time that she and her Conservative colleagues voted down a motion to give poverty-stricken children free school meals during the holidays – not for any practical reason, but because a Labour MP insulted one of them during the debate.
Angela Rayner has apologised for using that word during a speech by Christopher Clarkson. Considering the content of his speech, one is moved more to sympathy with her point of view than his.
So it is doubly hard to accept “Thicky” Nicky’s excuse as she peddled it out on Question Time – more so because she backpedalled in the face of criticism and tried to say the Labour Party was wrong to introduce the debate as an Opposition Day motion.
And she was still saying the Tories were reacting petulantly to the way the debate was being carried out, rather than to its content – the necessity of helping to feed children in England.
Those children are now set to starve, because Tories like Nicky Morgan made up excuses to be upset.
Here’s her outburst, as televised:
“The Labour party might have found they got more supporters if the deputy leader hadn’t called one of the Conservative MPs scum.”
So Nicky Morgan on #QuestionTime essentially just admitted that kids are going to go hungry over winter because they didn't want Labour to look good politically……@AngelaRayner was right, all 322 Tories are #SCUM
(There are more than 322 Tories but that’s the number of their MPs who voted down the motion to feed starving children.)
Did Nicky Morgan REALLY just say that supporting FSM children in school closure period would have been higher had Conservative MPs not been called scum Really? Really?????? Absolutely unbelievable@bbcquestiontime#bbcqt
I hope everyone can see the irony of a Tory Nicky Morgan saying she was happy to watch poor kids starve as revenge for being called scum.#BBCqthttps://t.co/fAx71wcdBd
There are now moves to shame all the Tories who voted against this motion online, simply by pointing out what they did to their electorate.
This Writer notes that my own MP – Fay Jones – voted against it. She represents a Welsh constituency – and I don’t think it’s a good look for a Welsh Tory to be voting to starve English children.
Do you?
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Rosie Duffield: she broke lockdown to meet her married lover and had to resign as a Labour whip as a result. Now she’s claiming she is a victim of misogynistic abuse.
Former Labour whip Rosie Duffield is trying to reclaim the moral high ground by playing the victim and we need to reject her.
She has given an interview in The Times in which she claims that she is the victim of misogynistic abuse and death threats over her opinions about anti-Semitism, Brexit and – particularly – transphobia.
The article points to her Commons speech about domestic abuse – for which she received a standing ovation from teary-eyed fellow MPs – as a sign that she’s on the side of the angels.
It doesn’t mention the fact that she broke lockdown in order to commit adultery with a married lover last May. Is her new media appearance an attempt to rehabilitate her image?
Many seem to think so, and the article has triggered a storm on the social media – mostly, it seems to This Writer, between opponents on the transphobia issue.
I stay out of that discussion as much as I can. My personal opinion is that the way a person identifies their gender is nobody’s business but their own.
Nobody should receive death threats for the simple holding of a belief; if their belief is against the law, or encourages people to break the law (especially in violent ways) then there are legal remedies. I wonder whether the Times reporter responsible for the article has seen evidence of such threats, though.
I have seen many tweets like this:
Well done for speaking out Rosie. “It feels as though women’s voices aren’t particularly wanted here, that’s what’s so frightening,”https://t.co/ar6VgDjDFU
More evidence Rosie Duffield actually just doesn’t want to be an MP anymore. She’s not really keen on representing all of her constituents and seems she’d prefer being a media personality. https://t.co/uWLIi7lCnG
— Looking California, Feeling Minnesota (@ijclark) October 12, 2020
And then I saw these two…
Rubbish. Rosie Duffield was called out for her transphobia, dug her heels in, and was criticised for it!
It’s got NOTHING to do with being a woman.
Now she’s just playing the victim card for sympathy – It’s called DARVO.https://t.co/WjKLrQBX3T
If you check the Metro article, DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender“.
It states: “First you have Deny – that’s pretty self-explanatory. You’ll see the person accused of wrongdoing simply denying that that’s the case; ‘I do not hold those views’, ‘I never said that’, ‘I did not do that bad thing’.
“The Deny stage is where gaslighting starts to come into play, with the person often trying to simply deny someone else’s lived reality. ‘No, that doesn’t happen’, ‘no, you’re making that up’, or ‘that might have happened, but it’s not as bad as you say it is’.
“Then there’s [the] Attack bit. This is when the accused person will turn around the criticism to focus blame on the person calling them out. So let’s say a celebrity was called out by someone on Twitter – they might go into attack mode by accusing that person of just being jealous, or bitter, or a liar.
“Finally, you’ve got the Reverse Victim and Offender stage. This is where things get sneaky and subtle. Suddenly, the accused person will turn things around and say that actually, they’re not guilty of doing something terrible. In fact, they are the ones being treated poorly.
“In this stage, you might see someone introduce their own trauma as an excuse or a distraction tactic. They’ll respond to accusations of racism, for example, with a story about how they faced gender discrimination when they were younger. Or they might focus their statement on how they feel ‘bullied’ by the accusations, so those reading feel that the person who has been called out is actually the victim, facing online abuse rather than being challenged on their actions.”
Metro goes on to give an example that is pertinent to Duffield’s case:
“Let’s say an influential person is accused of transphobia. They issue a response in which they deny that they are transphobic – ‘I love trans people! I have many trans friends!’ – then attack their critics – ‘people saying I’m transphobic are just cruel, hateful people who want to cause division’. Finally, they Reverse Victim and Offender: ‘I’m receiving so much online abuse because I’m a woman and we live in a sexist society’.
“Now, as a critic, you’re stuck. If you continue to call that person out, you’re ‘cruel, hateful and want to cause division’. You’re being sexist. You’re piling on the online abuse.”
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Frequent flyer: but This Site isn’t convinced that this is the way Boris Johnson arrived at Perugia (if, indeed, he did).
Boris Johnson may have thought – briefly – that the heat was off and he could come out in public again after the boss of Perugia airport said there had been a mix-up and it wasn’t the current UK prime minister who was seen there, but former PM Tony Blair.
The possibility of Johnson having been there is significant because it would have indicated that he was visiting the villa of his Russian friend Evgeny Lebedev, at a time when he and the Conservative Party in general are suspected of taking Russian government money and being influenced to carry out the wishes of that country’s President Putin.
So this would have been a significant exoneration…
Perugia airport boss admits his staff mixed up Boris Johnson with Tony Blair https://t.co/6QhUpLqVWe
President of #Perugia airport tells me #BorisJohnson ‘definitely’ did not come through here this month. Says original press release confused him with Tony Blair, who did #perugiagate
… had it not been refuted very quickly (indeed, apparently before the excuse was made):
The airport statement lists them as "…PM Boris Johnson, followed by his predecessor Tony Blair (Ex PM)…" Whoever made the statement clearly know they're not the same people. pic.twitter.com/s7Df0M7Wv6
Perugia airport statement: "Over the past few days, many names and personalities from the political, sporting and economic world have arrived here. Prada CEO Patrizio Bertelli, British PM Boris Johnson, Tony Blair and footballer Luis Suarez."https://t.co/Rbq9YexKID
BUT there are some pretty inconvenient details. Perugia Airport actually put out a statement on Sept 17 confirming Boris Johnson’s presence at the airport ‘over the past few days’… pic.twitter.com/RrORIZrHP0
Add in Johnson’s weirdly dodgy central London 20-minute wifi issues on Friday & his cancelled meetings on Monday morning & 🤔 pic.twitter.com/i0BKWLxoFE
Of course, the Twitter wits have been working overtime and, whether the story is true or not, these comments are worth preserving:
As the President of Perugia airport says the press are mistaken and it was a former Prime Minister who passed through their gates, Tony Blair reveals the results of his Italian hair transplant operation pic.twitter.com/U1vF57gnSD
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The High Court – also known as the Royal Courts of Justice – in London.
The High Court has just ruled that a rule allowing the Department for Work and Pensions to force some benefit claimants to wait – unpaid – for a mandatory reconsideration before they can appeal against refusal is unlawful.
The system previously demanded that, if a claim for income-related Employment and Support Allowance was refused, claimants would have to wait for a “mandatory reconsideration” of their case to take place before they could appeal.
This could take weeks, and has often taken months, in which the claimant – who is claiming because of serious illness, remember – has no income on which to survive.
Mr Justice Swift ruled that the demand that a mandatory reconsideration must take place before a claimant can appeal is a “disproportionate interference with the right of access to court” – in some cases.
This case was brought by law graduate Michael Conner, with crowdfunded aid from the website Benefits and Work – and represents a considerable victory for the claimant, the website, and crowdfunded legal proceedings in general.
Mr Connor had been forced to wait 18 weeks while the DWP carried out a mandatory reconsideration of his ESA decision. During this time he had no right to claim ESA.
If he had been able to lodge an appeal, he would have been paid ESA on a probationary rate, dependent on the provision of medical evidence by his doctor.
The judge said that after his benefit was cancelled on October 18, 2018, Mr Connor applied for a mandatory reconsideration.
But, in an “error” of the kind that benefit claimants have come to expect from the DWP, he said “no action was taken in response… The request for revision was incorrectly entered onto the Secretary of State’s electronic document management system.
“The document was not recognised or recorded as a request for reconsideration, and instead was classified as ‘unstructured whitemail'” and “it was not until 6 March 2019 – 4 months after Mr Connor’s request had been received – that it was identified as a request for revision.”
Mr Connor had managed to claim Income Support and Carer’s Allowance in the meantime, so he decided not to appeal the decision. Instead, he informed the DWP that he intended to challenge the legality of the rule making him unable to appeal until a mandatory reconsideration had happened.
He pointed out that:
The rule creates an open-ended deferral of the right to appeal that could leave claimants without income for an unlimited period – as evidenced by his own case.
Its effect is anomalous as ESA is payable before a decision is made and while an appeal is taking place, but not while the DWP is going through the mandatory reconsideration process [or, more likely, forgetting about it – in the opinion of This Writer].
If an appeal is started, there is no provision for back payment of ESA to cover the period of the revision decision while an appeal is ongoing.
So the interference is disproportionate because “it places benefits claimants, such as him, who are vulnerable, in a position of ‘legal and financial limbo, distress and destitution’ for the duration of the revision process that must be pursued before an appeal can be commenced” – and there is “no limit on the time permitted to the Secretary of State to determine an application for revision.”
In his ruling, Mr Justice Swift said: “It is anomalous that the payment pending appeal arrangements for ESA … do not extend to ESA claimants who are required … to request the Secretary of State to revise a decision and await her decision on that request before initiating an appeal.
“At the hearing of this case I gave the Secretary of State the opportunity to … explain why no provision exists to pay ESA to claimants… None of this further information provides the answer.
“My conclusion is that [the regulation in question] is a disproportionate interference with the right of access to court, so far as it applies to claimants to ESA who, once an appeal is initiated, meet the conditions for payment pending appeal.
“The advantage permitted to the Secretary of State by [the] regulation … comes at a cost to ESA claimants. There is no explanation for that.
“There is no evidence to support a conclusion that the objective pursued by [the] regulation … would to any extent be compromised if payments like the payments pending appeal made to ESA claimants who are pursuing appeals to the Tribunal, were made to them while they waited on the Secretary of State’s revision decision.
“In the absence of payment equivalent to payment pending appeal, the application of [the] regulation … to ESA claimants does not strike the required fair balance, and for that reason is an unjustified impediment to the right of access to court guaranteed by ECHR Article 6.”
Benefits and Work has stated: “Sadly, the ruling does not apply to other benefits such as PIP or DLA.
Nonetheless, it is an important victory and it means that ESA claimants, who are often faced with the prospect of many weeks without funds if they wish to appeal, are now in a much better position when challenging a decision.”
It will be interesting to see what will happen now.
The ruling is that the current situation is unlawful but no further remedy has been put in place beyond a statement to that effect.
What will happen to ESA claimants who must go through the mandatory reconsideration process now? Will they be paid while their case is reviewed?
That seems the logical course.
But I fear the DWP may find a way to duck out of it.
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Rishi Sunak: he won’t give the NHS any more cash because the Tory story is that Covid-19 is over.
Is anybody surprised that Rishi Sunak is refusing to give the NHS £10 billion to prepare for an expected new wave of Covid-19 infections?
The Tory narrative is that Covid is over.
Their government is sending people back to work, despite the number of deaths per day still being higher than when lockdown started. Tory donors are tired of going without their huge daily profits so the rest of us are being forced back to work, whether it kills us or not.
The pubs reopening, and the beaches being open before them, are just a means for the Tories to excuse themselves. They’ll say that any deaths arise from people’s leisure experiences, not from being forced back to work too soon.
Of course, putting money towards the treatment of renewed infections runs against this story – so Sunak won’t do it.
It doesn’t matter how many plebs die as a result.
NHS bosses have accused the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, of breaking a pledge to give the health service “whatever it needs” after he refused to provide a £10bn cash injection needed to avoid it being crippled by a second wave of the coronavirus.
They have warned ministers that without the money the NHS will be left perilously unprepared for next winter and the second spike in infections which doctors believe is inevitable. Nor will they be able to restart non-Covid services or treat the growing backlog in patients needing surgery.
The row piles pressure on Sunak to find more money for the NHS ahead of his summer statement on Wednesday.
The NHS England chief executive, Simon Stevens, has told the Treasury that it needs at least £10bn in extra funding this year to cover the costs of fighting the virus and reopen normal services. The money would mean the NHS could create extra beds in hospitals, keep the Nightingale facilities on standby, send patients to private hospitals for surgery and provide protective equipment for frontline staff.
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The United Kingdom is never going to get to grips with Covid-19 if its government ministers continue to lie about it.
Grant Shapps – a man well-known for playing fast-and-loose with the facts – was up to his old tricks at a press briefing last week when, as Transport Secretary, he claimed trains were not overcrowded since the Tories ordered people back to work, despite numerous photos of overcrowded trains.
Let’s have a look, shall we?
That looks pretty crowded – and this was the Victoria Line. The Central Line at the height of rush hour must be a nightmare.
Bear in mind that social distancing rules still apply and we are supposed to stay at least two metres away from other people.
Shapps claimed that tube trains have been at just five per cent occupancy – which leads This Writer to wonder whether he has been averaging out usage over each 24-hour period, rather than examining the situation at times when people are most likely to be infected by close proximity to others.
He has announced that it will be mandatory to wear face masks on public transport from June 15, when the government intends to ease lockdown restrictions further and send more people back to work.
There is no justification for such easing; the nation remains at Covid alert level 4, meaning the virus remains at large and its reproduction rate is increasing.
But this is a government that won’t accept our truth; it is too busy pushing its own on us.
So snake-oil salesman Shapps told us, in very poor English: “In fact, there hasn’t been very much crowding situation going on.
“It’s not the case … that transport’s been overcrowded. We’ve been watching it very carefully.”
He continued to deny the facts, despite being shown photographic evidence of overcrowding on trains, taken on different days since the lockdown was eased:
“We tracked it on a day by day basis.
“I can literally tell you the trains where there was an issue, because the train was broken down, or Canning Town [in east London], where those pictures were shared very widely.
“But actually the broad picture is there have been one or two people sitting in carriages a lot of the time.”
What can you do, in the face of such blatant denial of the facts from a government minister who is hell-bent on exposing you to a killer disease?
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Test and trace: if you’re credit’s not good, you don’t get to be part of it. The Tories are using Covid-19 to attack the poor again.
Typical Tories: if your credit isn’t good, you don’t get to take part in their new online test-and-trace system.
It doesn’t work anyway, so the penalty isn’t as bad as it may at first appear.
But it still represents an attempt to harm the poor – many of whom, amazingly, would still vote for their persecutors.
Disadvantaged groups may be excluded from the government’s online coronavirus test and trace system because it requires a credit reference database check to decide whether to deliver a home test, HSJ can reveal.
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This should be seen as absolute proof that it has been a policy to deny coronavirus care to people with long-term illnesses and disabilities.
This Writer has noted some scepticism in the responses to yesterday’s article about the GP practice in Wales that wrote to people with ongoing medical conditions, telling them that equipment used to treat coronavirus is being rationed and they were not likely to be treated if they contracted the disease. Instead, the letter asked them to sign a form directing medical staff not to attempt to resuscitate them if they succumbed to the virus.
My own attitude to this is clear: as we have all paid into the National Health Service, throughout our lives, we all deserve the best possible care available from it. I asked: do politicians and royalty get preferential treatment? If so, why?
Also, just because a person has an underlying condition, that doesn’t mean they won’t be able to shrug off the virus, given the same help that is provided to everybody else.
Now the British Medical Association, the Care Provider Alliance, the Care Quality Commission and the Royal College of General Practitioners have released a joint statement, saying more or less the same.
Here’s the statement:
It reads [boldings mine]:
The importance of having a personalised care plan in place, especially for older people, people who are frail or have other serious conditions has never been more important than it is now during the Covid-19 Pandemic.
Where a person has capacit, as defined by the Mental Capacity Act, this advance care plan should always be discussed with them directly. Where a person lacks the capacity to engage with this process then it is reasonable to produce such a plan following best interest guidelines with the involvement of family members or other appropriate individuals.
Such advance care plans may result in the consideration and completion of a Do Not Attempt Resuscitation (DNAR) or ReSPECT form. It remains essential that these decisions are made on an individual basis. The General Practitioner continues to have a central role in the consideration, completion and signing of DNAR forms for people in community settings.
It is unacceptable for advance care plans, with or without DNAR form completion to be applied to groups of people of any description. These decisions must continue to be made on an individual basis according to need.
It’s saying that any policy requiring medical staff to write off any individual – of any age and condition – as untreatable without discussing their situation with them is wrong.
If the government has handed that down to healthcare providers as a requirement, then it is wrong.
If anybody has already died as a result of such a policy, then those responsible must be identified and must pay the appropriate penalty.
This is real. It is important. It could be deadly. Don’t let the Tories get away with it.
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People with serious health conditions and disabilities who are registered with a GP surgery in Wales had a nasty surprise in the post.
The surgery sent them a letter saying if they caught the coronavirus, the best thing for them to do would be to reject treatment and wait for death – and it asked them to sign a form confirming it.
Llynfi Surgery, in Llynfi Road, Maesteg, sent the letter to patients with serious health conditions such as incurable cancer, motor neurone disease, and untreatable heart and lung conditions, on March 27.
It comes as further confirmation that people with disabilities will suffer adverse discrimination in the coronavirus crisis – that government guidance is to abandon them.
The letter states that people with these conditions are “unlikely to be offered hospital admission” if they become unwell with coronavirus and “certainly will not be offered a ventilator bed”.
It continued: “We would therefore like to complete a DNACPR form for you which we can share with the OOH [out of hours] GP services and which will mean that in the event of a sudden deterioration in your condition because of a Covid-19 infection or disease progression the emergency services will not be called and resuscitation attempts to restart your heart or breathing will not be attempted.”
Going on, it suggested that the “best option” for patients is to stay at home to be cared for by their family with “ongoing support from ourselves and community nursing services”.
It listed “benefits” to signing the DNACPR form:
“Your GP and more importantly your friends and family will know not to call 999”;
“Scarce ambulance resources can be targeted to the young and fit who have chance of surviving the infection”, and;
“The risk of transmitting the virus to friends, family and emergency responders from CPR (even chest compression alone) is very high. By having a DNACPR form in place you protect your family and emergency responders from this additional risk”.
The final line reads: “We will not abandon you but we need to be frank and realistic about what the next few months holds for all of us.”
Wales Online reported on this scandalous correspondence, saying that the local health board had contacted patients who were upset by the letter, to apologise and “answer any concerns”.
And both the Welsh Assembly member and MP have issued a joint statement saying this was “not a standard letter” and the board is working with the surgery “to offer compassionate and sound advice in the very best traditions of our health service”.
You’ll notice that there isn’t a single line in these comments that contradicts the suggestions in the letter.
If anything, it seems the authorities have simply been embarrassed that it has stated the facts about government guidance on long-term sick and disabled patients who contract the coronavirus in a blunt way.
The affair seems to be confirmation that the government is indeed using the coronavirus to cull “useless eaters”, in line with the eugenics beliefs of Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings, and the Nazi-style persecution of people with long-term health issues that has been carried out by successive Conservative governments over the last decade.
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