Dodgy dealings? Rishi Sunak’s government has given a large commercial contract to Infosys, a firm part-owned by his wife Akshata Murty, even though it had failed to stop operating in Russia. Why?
Remember Infosys?
This is the technology company in which Rishi Sunak’s wife owns shares worth an alleged £400 million, and which was found to be operating in Russia after the UK had sanctioned firms that operate in, and profit from, connections with that country after it invaded Ukraine.
Infosys claimed in April last year that it was closing its office in Russia – providing a lucky escape for the then-Chancellor, who had refused to take any action about the company’s continued commercial interest in a country that the UK should have been shunning.
Now we learn the following:
Florence Eshalomi: Infosys was still operating in Russia, 8 months after they said they would withdraw.. they got a contract worth £1.8m of taxpayers money… should public money go to those operating in Russia?
So, after Sunak became prime minister the UK government gave a large contract to the company his wife partly-owns, even though it had not left Russia as it had promised.
Should we not have a statement from Sunak on how this has happened and what he proposes to do about it?
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Conflict of interest: why would companies that helped run the government’s publicity campaign about Covid-19 ever want to contact people who lost loved ones because of failures in that campaign?
People who lost loved ones while the Covid-19 pandemic raged through the UK are being put off contributing to the inquiry into what happened – because a PR firm that was hired to manage the government’s response to the crisis has been hired to help run it.
23Red, which worked on government messaging including hand hygiene advice and the “Stay at home” slogan, has been sub-contracted by the Tories’ favourite advertising firm, M&C Saatchi, to run part of the Covid inquiry’s “listening exercise”.
Apparently its role will be to “help the inquiry reach those most affected by the pandemic, so that they can share their experiences”.
The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group has pointed out the flaw in that argument: because 23Red worked for the government in its efforts to control Covid-19, the group says, it will either screen out people with the most harmful stories to tell, or those who were most affected will be put off participating.
23Red were working with the Cabinet Office throughout the pandemic and their conflict of interest is obvious.
They shouldn’t be anywhere near the Covid Inquiry, never mind being responsible for how it reaches those worst affected. https://t.co/OY0aYcyENW
— Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK (@CovidJusticeUK) February 17, 2023
In the Guardian report (link above), group spokesperson Susie Flintham is quoted as saying:
The fact is ‘many of those worst affected’ will question 23red’s motivations and integrity, and won’t feel comfortable engaging with a process they’re involved in.
“The fact that these PR companies have rebranded the listening exercise ‘every story matters’, suggests they don’t have a clue on how to reach those ‘most affected’.”
“Why is the inquiry paying a hefty sum of taxpayers money, during a cost of living crisis, to a company whose involvement will put people off participating in it? It feels self defeating and like a clear waste of resources.
“If the inquiry is serious about listening to those worst affected by the pandemic then it must give them a meaningful voice, which at the very least means allowing them to speak at each day of the hearings.”
The group’s concerns were raised at the inquiry by their counsel, Pete Weatherby KC, after reporting on the matter by the website Open Democracy:
The correct response to these concerns is to remove the companies from any involvement in the inquiry.
That has not happened.
Instead, the team carrying out the inquiry has said that no conflict of interest will arise because “M&C Saatchi and 23red do not have a decision making role with the inquiry, and they have no direct access to the inquiry’s legal team or the wider work of the inquiry.
“Additionally, M&C Saatchi and 23red will not be carrying out any of the listening or have any access to the experiences shared with the inquiry’s listening exercise. Their role is only to help the inquiry reach those most affected by the pandemic, so that they can share their experiences.”
I’m not convinced. You should not be convinced either.
In an inquiry that exists to collect the strongest evidence of the worst effects of the government’s response (or lack of it) to the Covid-19 pandemic, efforts to seek out the most important stories are paramount.
Yet the inquiry team has hired companies that were intimately linked with the government’s public relations campaign during that time – Boris Johnson’s efforts to play down the seriousness of the situation and to pretend that Tory policies were succeeding when they weren’t.
More than 200,000 people have died of Covid-19 – and most of those deaths could have been avoided if Johnson, Matt Hancock and their cronies had acted more quickly and in a more responsible way (rather than diverting vast amounts of money to hastily-set-up companies run by their friends, for equipment that did not work, for example).
And the number of deaths is still increasing, as I understand it.
It is not in the interests of these companies to seek out the most damning stories of government failures when they were responsible for even part of the government’s publicity campaigning.
I fear the Covid-19 inquiry is just another Tory sham.
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Amber Rudd: This image from 2017 probably reflects her mood when she was discussing Brexit.
Here’s an interesting allegation:
According to Dominic McGrath the former home secretary Amber Rudd considers that some Brexit supporters will acknowledge that the choice to leave the EU has been a “mistake” after “a drink or two.”
Ms. Rudd, who resigned from her position as an MP in 2019 due to disputes within the Conservative Party over how to handle Brexit, claimed she was unable to continue in politics because “you have to be able to declare Brexit is a success to be a spokeswoman for the Conservative Party.”
Ms. Rudd discussed her political career and her decision to leave Parliament during an interview with Sir Craig Oliver, the former director of communications for Downing Street. The discussion was part of the podcast Desperately Seeking Wisdom.
Coming on top of the revelation that the migrant boats crisis was caused by Boris Johnson’s “oven-ready” Brexit agreement, but no Tory MP seems willing to admit it, this is shockingly believable.
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Spaffer: Boris Johnson splurged hundreds of billions of pounds during the Covid crisis and his successors have continued the trend. It all went to people who were already rich and has caused huge hardship to the poor, and nobody in government wants to re-balance the situation. Why?
It’s time to follow up on Gary Stevenson, the former City trader who became an economist and anti-inequality campaigner.
Last time, I shared Gary’s contributions to the BBC’s Politics Live via a YouTube clip that became extremely popular, with more than 140,000 views as I type this. Rest assured, there will be more content on YouTube in the future!
Now, Gary himself has shared what he himself took from his experience on the show, with which I’d like to couple his more recent clip, What is money? Together, I think they may explain why it’s so important that we find out who has the £700 billion that Boris Johnson’s government has splurged, and find a way to get them to spend it back into the economy or tax it off of them.
Here’s the first clip:
So: an enormous amount of money has been transferred from the government to the richest people in the UK, leading to a huge increase in government debt which triggers austerity, and a big increase in cash accumulation by the richest, leading to inflation and a cost-of-living crisis. The reasons for that are below.
Nobody in government seems to know where the money has gone – £14,000 for every adult in the UK. I don’t have 14 grand. Do you? Who’s got it, then? And what are they doing with it? They don’t want to say it has gone to the richest people in the country.
And they definitely don’t want to admit that their decision to hand over that money has forced you into extreme poverty!
That money could be put to good use, if the people who have it spend it back into the economy, one way or another. What did we get for it? Was it worth the cost? If not, something needs to be done.
Here’s the other clip:
Money is created by central banks and loaned out to others – so for every penny anybody has, there is a penny of debt somewhere; the total amount of money, minus the total amount of debt, always equals zero.
So if one group of people – like a government – goes heavily into debt, somebody else must be accumulating money or credit.
(The government then has to pay interest on the debt, and in a closed system, that means taxing more out of the economy than it put in; this is a way of regulating the money supply, of course. Commercial banks that borrow from the central bank would charge higher interest than it does when they make loans, in order to make their profit – meaning they rely on the system putting you into debt.)
We know that the government spent – splurged – £700 billion during and after Covid – £14,000 per UK adult. But every UK adult hasn’t had £14,000 from the government; somebody else had it.
People who are in debt – including governments – need to get money back from people who are in credit, otherwise they can’t balance their books. Until they can manage such a feat, that debt creates austerity – it harms public sector pay and public services don’t get the investment they need.
The problem is that only a small number of people are in credit, while the government – representing all of us – and a lot of others are in debt. There’s an imbalance between the large number of people owing money and the small number who have it, and (by the way) can lend it, and can therefore demand interest from the people to whom they lend it, in the same way a bank can.
So now, not only do we have a huge amount of government debt to pay off, but we may have private debt as well, because the cost of living has risen.
And why has the cost of living risen?
As Gary said, there has been a massive increase in asset prices: both gold and shares have hit (by now, I think) an all-time high, and that’s because rich people have been buying them up, with a view to profiting on them – because they have so much money, it won’t hurt them to invest much of it.
This creates scarcity, and that pushes up prices, meaning that ordinary people cannot afford to buy as much as they could before. The amount of resources available within the economy is the same, more or less, but fewer people can take advantage of it because the redistribution of money means they can’t afford it.
We have seen a resource run low – gas – and that has simply piled extra pressure on the poor.
We have a government that is not interested in resolving its £700 billion debt. Instead, it is planning to spend even more. So prices will continue to rise and living standards – for the majority – will continue to fall.
And that is why the current Conservative government has presided over the largest increase in inequality in UK history.
It occurs to This Writer that pushing huge debt onto the vast majority of the population may have been government policy all along.
Expect (probably) a video clip in the near future, explaining why.
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Well, we know about the money (allegedly) connected to Michelle Mone, along with sundry others.
But that still leaves billions of pounds of lost cash that needs to be fully explained. Doesn’t it?
Read:
The Department of Health and Social Care’s annual accounts for 2021-22 have revealed a further £6 billion write down in connection with PPE and other inventory. This follows a staggering £8.9bn write down in 2020-21.
The total – almost £14.9bn – exceeds by almost £2bn the aggregate sum spent on PPE. The National Audit Office reported in March 2022 that “DHSC has so far spent £12.6bn of the total £13.1bn it expects to spend on almost 38 billion items of PPE.”
The further write down is made up of:
£2.5 billion write-down of items procured in 2021-22 which relates to items the Department no longer expects to use or due to falling market prices;
£3.5 billion for onerous costs relating to PPE, vaccines and medicines for items it had agreed to purchase before 31 March 2022, but which it now does not expect to use.
The annual accounts also reveal that storage costs were running at approximately £24m per month. Good Law Project has previously revealed that PPE storage costs exceed £1bn in total and hundreds of millions of pounds were going to Uniserve, a ‘VIP’ that had also supplied substantial quantities of PPE.
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Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham has at last given voice to what could be the real reason the government is not talking about pay with the unions responsible for strikes in the National Health Service.
It’s a simple reason, too:
The Conservatives are planning to privatise the NHS outright.
This Site has made the point already; private health companies are more likely to snap up elements of the service if payroll costs are low.
Here’s the discussion between Ms Graham and Sky’s Sophie Ridge:
It’s good, also, to see someone making it plain that the government has been lying – about ambulance drivers endangering lives and about pay discussions.
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Most people cannot avoid paying tax; it is taken from them automatically, or they face the threat of hefty penalties if they fail to file their tax return properly.
So when they see government officials getting away with apparent tax evasion with only a metaphorical slap on the wrist, they get very angry indeed.
Members of Rishi Sunak’s Tory government have closed ranks around Nadhim Zahawi, claiming that his tax affairs are perfectly in order – even though we know they haven’t been in the recent past.
And ‘Seatbelt’ Sunak himself hasn’t covered himself in glory lately either.
Will the Zahawi affair sink the government? Consider – and enjoy Maximilien Robespierre’s pronunciation of Zahawi’s surname:
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Business secretary Grant Shapps explained the need for a new law demanding “minimum service levels” during strikes – with a pack of lies.
The trick was in the way he framed the situation.
He claimed that the aim was to protect lives and livelihoods – that the right for nurses and ambulance workers (for example) to strike should not come at the expense of the lives of people across the UK.
And he said the wave of strikes sweeping the UK had been caused by the invasion of Ukraine by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and by the Covid-19 crisis that created huge backlogs in NHS healthcare procedures.
See for yourself:
In fact, as Labour’s Angela Rayner pointed out, the strikes were caused by the government’s own policy of running the NHS (to use the same example) into the ground, starving it of resources and forcing employees to seek alternative jobs, simply to make ends meet.
She said people had been dying while waiting for ambulances long before ambulance workers took the decision to go on strike – because of delays caused by Tory defunding and de-resourcing.
In fact, ambulance workers had continued to work, coming off the picket lines in order to respond to emergency calls. Shapps’s legislation was jeopardising that.
Excess deaths were at their highest level since the Covid crisis, she said – because of staffing shortages caused by the Tory government.
Livelihoods and lives were already being lost, she said. Everybody wanted minimum service standards – but it was the government’s job to provide it (implying that the government had deliberately chosen not to).
Again, see for yourself:
Rayner was correct; Shapps had been telling untruths.
This Site has been reporting on failures in ambulance responses for years – since long before the Covid crisis or the invasion of Ukraine. Likewise with the shortage of nursing staff due to low pay.
Take a look at some of the articles from previous years – firstly on nursing:
The Tories have been demolishing public sector pay since they came into government in 2010. They know a low wage bill is appetising to private firms when public services are privatised. And that’s the end goal of Tory policy – certainly on the NHS.
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Marxists and neo Marxists have been saying this for decades. Now Carol Vorderman has said it. Legality and illegality are created by politicians. They make the statutes. As Marxists argue those statutes are often made to punish us and protect them.
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The Tory government is suing the company that Baroness Michelle Mone recommended to it as a supplier of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) during the Covid crisis – for £122 million.
PPE Medpro won contracts through the government’s so-called VIP lane in 2020 after being recommended by Baroness Mone.
But the government is now trying to get its money back on one of the deals – to supply medical gowns – through the High Court.
It has been claimed that Mone’s recommendation was duff because the equipment provided was substandard, but PPE Medpro has denied any failings on its part, saying that it supplied its gowns to the correct specification, on time and at a highly competitive price.
Instead, it was the Department of Health and Social Care that acted incompetently, by failing to correctly specify and procure the PPE it needed during the crisis – according to the company.
But how will this affect the allegations against Baroness Mone?
She is currently on a leave of absence from the Lords – and suspended as a member of the Tories – after it was alleged that she had recommended PPE Medpro as a supplier, and then taken a payment of £29 million from the firm.
Will the allegations against her be affected, depending on what the High Court decides?
This Writer thinks not.
The question hanging over the former underwear magnate concerns whether she took money from the firm after lobbying on its behalf, which is not permitted according to Parliamentary rules.
The quality of the equipment, and the robustness of the contract under which it was supplied, would be irrelevant to that – although…
They would weigh heavily on public opinion of the Lady in question.
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