Tag Archives: ignore

As calls for cost of living help proliferate, this UK leader candidate turns a deaf ear

Liz Truss: if she was as doped as she looks, she might have an excuse for her refusal to grasp the sharpest nettle to face the UK in years. Still, after all the crises her Tory Party has manufactured over the last 12 years, she probably can’t tell the difference.

Wow. I can say, at least I didn’t help elect her – but that won’t help me, or any of the other people who will suffer brutally over the winter because Liz Truss can’t be bothered to help.

The leading candidate to head the Conservative Party – and become UK prime minister – has doubled down on her refusal to provide any help to the poorest people who will bear the brunt of energy price increases over the winter.

While the UK’s favourite money adviser has frantically called for her – along with rival Rishi Sunak and current PM Boris Johnson – to get their fingers out and tackle the crisis before it topples the economy, kills uncounted people and changes the way we live forever, she is ignoring it.

While hundreds of thousands of terrified UK citizens sign up to campaigns set to take action across the UK in the months to come, she is ignoring them.

“What’s vitally important at this moment is we get economic growth going,” Truss told reporters on a visit to Huddersfield in West Yorkshire.

“At the moment we’ve got the highest taxes in 70 years. That’s why I believe in lower taxes, to get growth going, to encourage businesses to invest, and that way there will be more money in people’s pockets.”

Asked if she was ruling out any other help for energy bills, Truss replied: “What I’m promising is that from day one, people will have lower taxes. They will also have lower energy bills, because I’m going to put a temporary moratorium on the green energy levy. But what we need is a growing economy.”

She can’t have a growing economy when millions of people won’t have any money to spend in it!

Her comments are the worst kind of imbecility – because they are dangerous not to herself but to millions of other people.

How will you survive, if she becomes prime minister in September?

Source: Liz Truss doubles down on refusal to offer support over rising energy bills | Liz Truss | The Guardian

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DWP ignores legal ruling to deny compensation to 118,000 benefit claimants

The Department for Work and Pensions has unilaterally decided to ignore a ruling by the Parliamentary Ombudsman that it should pay compensation to 118,000 people who suffered maladministration at its hands.

The decision sets a deeply worrying precedent as it could lead to other people suffering maladministration receiving no rectification or compensation.

Here are the details in a handy YouTube video:

And journalist David Hencke, on his Westminster Confidential site, had this to say:

Since seeing this I have contacted Sir Stephen Timms, Labour chair of the Commons Works and Pensions Committee, to see if, as they promised the Ombudsman, the DWP had alerted him to the decision. Initially he said he could not recall getting this and promised to investigate what has happened.

There is another big issue. This could impact on the Waspi campaign and the all party state pension inequality group of MPs to get compensation for women through a report from the Ombudsman. If after the Ombudsman says compensation is due the DWP follows this practice for the 3.8 million – six people will get compensation and the remaining 3.6 million still alive will have to write individual letters outlining their case to the ministry for any money due which will take even more time to resolve. You have been warned.

Read the full story here: DWP ignores the Parliamentary Ombudsman and refuses to compensate 118,000 disabled people hit by benefit maladministration | Westminster Confidential

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‘Optimistic’ PM plots ‘cautious’ lockdown easing. Some fools never learn

After admitting that he ignored scientific advice many times over the past year, making the Covid-19 pandemic much more harmful to the UK’s people and economy than it needed to be, Boris Johnson is planning to do it again.

What a bumbling dimwit.

According to the BBC,

as scientists warned against easing lockdown measures too quickly

Boneheaded Johnson was again planning to ignore them, saying

he is “optimistic” he will be able to set out plans later this month for a “cautious” easing of England’s lockdown.

It seems he really is determined that Covid-19 will kill more of the UK’s population than Spanish Flu. That epidemic killed 228,000 people, so there’s around 100,000 deaths to beat.

Causing another increase in deaths is the only reason any intelligent person could possibly want to open schools before Covid-19 is well and truly under control.

Johnson’s congenital imbecility might excuse him – but not his government, whose ministers should recognise that he is unfit to make such a decision and remove him to ensure he does no further harm.

But they’re not going to do that, are they?

So Johnson will set out his “road map” for easing his excuse for a lockdown (we were never really locked down – that would have meant everybody apart from vital service providers staying inside their houses, all the time, until the danger was past) on February 22.

Whatever timetable he sets then, he’ll follow. That’s what he did in summer 2020, and that’s why an extra 55,000 people died over the winter.

And he can’t stop lying!

“Our children’s education is our number one priority,”

he said – but we all know that the only reason he wants children back in schools is to deprive their parents of any excuse not to go back to work, making money for his Tory donors.

Once again, it’s all about greed.

How many people have to die for the sake of Boris Johnson’s friends’ balance sheets?

Source: Covid: ‘Optimistic’ PM plots ‘cautious’ lockdown easing – BBC News

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Johnson has admitted he was lying about ‘following the science’ – and doesn’t regret causing thousands of deaths

Two-fingered salute: Boris Johnson sends a candid message to everybody who died of Covid-19 – and their surviving families and friends.

That’s a hell of a confession.

Remember all those times Boris Johnson and cronies like Matt Hancock said they were “following the science”?

They weren’t.

They were ignoring the science – and lying to you.

You want some examples?

Scientists warned reopening schools and universities would spread the virus through communities and around the country – which it did.

The PM was urged to keep Brits working from home in a bid to avoid a winter spike a month before the Government launched a campaign to encourage the public to return to the workplace.

Mr Johnson, who has claimed his response to the pandemic has been “guided by the science”, only rowed back on plans to allow as many as three households to mix over the [Christmas] holiday when his hand was forced by the emergence of the Kent variant.

Asked if Johnson regrets these decisions, that have led to tens of thousands of deaths, Boris Johnson’s spokesperson avoided a direct answer – which indicates that he doesn’t.

That’s right.

The UK electorate gave a huge, 80-seat Parliamentary majority to a prime minister who proactively chose to ensure that tens of thousands of people died of Covid-19 – and doesn’t regret it.

He won’t face criminal charges, of course.

He’s above the law. The voters put him there.

Source: Boris Johnson ‘doesn’t regret’ ignoring advice which could have avoided ‘worst case’ Covid-19 – Mirror Online

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Since Brexit the UK has lost 68% of exports to its biggest market – because Gove ignored the experts

Michael Gove says the UK has had enough of experts: it seems his Chelsea scarf has cut off the supply of blood to his brain.

Now we know why senior Tories have been quietly telling us we’ll have to wait a number of years before seeing the benefit (ha ha) of Brexit.

I notice that the number of years mentioned seems to vary between five and 50. That also tells us much.

But it is our memories that we should be consulting. We were told that Brexit would take us out of the shadow of the EU and into the “sunlit uplands” of independence (even though we were never dependent on the European Union, when the UK was a member).

That was the happy fantasy; this is the bitter fact:

The volume of exports going through British ports to the EU fell by a staggering 68% last month compared with January last year, mostly as a result of problems caused by Brexit.

It’s a drop of two-thirds – a disastrous amount for any country. For the fifth-richest in the world, it signals a precipitous fall to a place much lower in the international wealth rankings.

And there must be no passing of blame. Responsibility lies firmly with Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove, it seems – who ignored repeated warnings from the Road Haulage Association.

In a letter to Gove dated 1 February, the RHA’s chief executive, Richard Burnett, also told the minister he and his officials had repeatedly warned over several months of problems and called for measures to lessen difficulties – but had been largely ignored.

In addition to the 68% fall-off in exports, about 65%-75% of vehicles that had come over from the EU were going back empty because there were no goods for them to return with, due to hold-ups on the UK side, and because some UK companies had either temporarily or permanently halted exports to the EU.

“I find it deeply frustrating and annoying that ministers have chosen not to listen to the industry and experts,” he said.

Ah, well. We all know Michael Gove’s views about experts.

Yes indeed. Mr Gove said the people of the UK had had enough of experts getting it wrong all the time.

Unfortunately for him, it seems the experts – and, yes, they do come from an organisation that can be reduced to an acronym – were right and he was wrong.

I wonder how many billions of pounds he has cost his fellow UK citizens?

Source: Fury at Gove as exports to EU slashed by 68% since Brexit | Brexit | The Guardian

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Home Office ignored warnings to prevent Windrush suffering. Why isn’t this a scandal?

The Empire Windrush: if the people who arrived on it to help the UK rebuild after World War Two had known how they and their descendants would be treated after 2010, would they have bothered?

If at first you don’t succeed (in persecuting and killing people), try, try and try again seems to be the Conservative motto.

The Windrush scandal was a national outrage. Now we learn that the Home Office could have avoided harming people – but deliberately chose not to.

Where is the fury over this?

the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration (ICIBI) said the department had failed to implement a series of recommendations he has made since 2016 calling for better monitoring of the impact of the hostile environment.

“Had they been, some of the harms suffered by the Windrush generation and others may have been avoided,” said the chief inspector, David Bolt.

The Windrush Lessons Learned review, published in March last year, demanded a “full review and evaluation” of the hostile environment policy devised while Theresa May was Home Secretary – and current incumbent Priti Patel accepted the recommendation in July.

But Mr Bolt said ministers had done little to evaluate the measures, both in terms of the efficiency of the processes underpinning them, including the costs to third parties carrying them out, and their effectiveness in delivering the hoped-for outcomes.

Chai Patel, legal policy director at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, said the hostile environment must be scrapped before “more lives are lost or destroyed”.

“Even the government’s own immigration inspectorate no longer has any faith that Ms Patel’s Home Office intends to fix the mess it has made of the immigration system,” he said.

Does anyone?

But this story seems to have been buried.

Do thousands more people have to be harmed, deliberately, by Priti Patel before we all wake up again, or are we going to let her get away with it next time?

Source: Home Office ignored warnings that could have prevented Windrush suffering, finds watchdog | The Independent

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If Matt Hancock has broken his own 10pm pub curfew, why should YOU honour it?

Matt Hancock – and the best word to describe him.

So much for the 10pm pub curfew. Once again, it seems, the Tories have led by example – if it’s okay for them to break it, it’s okay for you to break it too.

According to the Mail, of all papers, Matt Hancock – the Health Secretary who championed lockdown measures like the curfew – was caught breaking it after a late-evening vote:

Health Secretary Matt Hancock was last night accused of breaking his own Covid curfew by drinking in a Commons bar beyond 10pm – where he made a crass joke about the Government’s test and trace failings.

Mr Hancock arrived at the bar just before a 9.40pm vote, ordered a glass of white wine and announced: ‘The drinks are on me – but Public Health England are in charge of the payment methodology so I will not be paying anything.’

His ill-conceived joke came after he had tried to explain to the Commons why the quango had lost nearly 16,000 positive coronavirus tests – a fiasco which Labour claimed had put ‘lives at risk’.

A senior Tory MP told The Mail on Sunday that Mr Hancock remained in the Smoking Room bar until at least 10.25pm, despite Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle insisting that Commons venues must abide by the same 10pm drink-up-and-leave curfew as all English pubs.

A spokesperson for Hancock has tried to explain away what happened, but the comment lacks something – namely any explanation of where Hancock was after 10pm on the evening in question:

In a carefully worded statement last night, a spokesman for the Health Secretary said: ‘No rules have been broken.

‘The Secretary of State was in the Smoking Room prior to the vote that evening.

‘The Secretary of State left the Smoking Room to vote. The vote took place at 9:42pm. ‘The Secretary of State then departed the Parliamentary estate to go home.’

Asked whether Mr Hancock had returned to the bar after voting and before he went home, the spokesman failed to respond.

Doesn’t that tend to indicate that he had?

The public verdict is out already:

But the story was omitted from mention on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show today (October 11) – for no apparent reason:

I publish this tweet also, as it links Hancock with the acts of other Tories:

The practical upshot of all this is that Hancock has provided us all with an excuse to drink – in pubs – after the 10pm curfew.

If it’s okay for the Health Secretary to carry on drinking in the Smoking Bar of Parliament, it is clearly fine for the rest of us to do the same.

That’s leadership by example.

And if we all do it, there’s nothing the Tories or the police can do about it.

Yes – there is the question of public safety. But the government has never provided a scrap of evidence that drinking in pubs between 10pm and 11pm actually increases the risk of catching Covid-19 to those involved.

And there needs to be accountability.

If these arrogant, unaccountable Tories keep breaking their own rules, they need to see that we will ignore those rules as well. We are all in this together.

Source: Matt Hancock makes tasteless Covid test joke in Commons bar as he ‘joined MPs flouting 10pm curfew’ | Daily Mail Online

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Backlash against Sunak’s ‘meal deal’ voucher scheme that ignores people in genuine need

Members of the public are speaking out against Rishi Sunak’s offer of vouchers supporting half the price of eating out – pointing out that people need to be able to afford the other half of the cost before they can use it at all.

It’s an upper-middle-class jolly that won’t help people who rely on food banks, or carers, or beleaguered NHS staff who Sunak’s own government is persecuting, they say – rightly.

And they say the decision to offer meal vouchers was in very poor taste when Boris Johnson was keen to stop providing such vouchers to parents of children who receive free school meals over the summer holidays, even though the Covid-19 crisis has put many of them in extreme need.

Here’s just a selection of the responses. See if you agree with them, rather than Sunak:

(Good point about the self-employed.)

https://twitter.com/CptPicardigan/status/1280947082879254528

Yes, what a world.

To think that we could have had fairness under a Jeremy Corbyn government instead, if only people had engaged their brains before going to the polling booths last year.

Come to that, isn’t it incredible that it is too much to hope for people to engage their brains before voting?

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Expert legal advice supports law graduate in crowdfunded private prosecution of Dominic Cummings

Mahsa Taliefar: there is a case against Dominic Cummings and she needs your help to take it to court.

Dominic Cummings could find himself facing an unlimited fine for breaching the Covid-19 lockdown after expert lawyers said there is a case against him.

Law graduate Mahsa Taliefar launched a funding campaign to help her bring a private prosecution against Cummings over his now-notorious trip to Durham at the end of March this year.

She sought legal advice from Benjamin Douglas-Jones QC and Nathaniel Rudolf on the practicalities of bringing a prosecution.

Their opinion is that he could indeed be prosecuted under Regulation 6 of the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020
Prosecutions.

These state that “during the emergency period, no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse”.

The lawyers’ advice states: “The published guidance… in our view reinforces the conclusion that there is a realistic prospect of conviction in relation to this conduct.”

The penalty, if such a conviction is won, would be an unlimited fine.

Concerns had been raised that Regulation 11 of the same law prevents private prosecution. It states: “Proceedings for an offence under these Regulations may be brought by the Crown Prosecution Service and any person designated by the Secretary of State.“

The advice states: “At first blush this may be seen as preventing a prosecution by anyone other than the CPS or a person designated by the Secretary of State. In other words preventing a private prosecution.

“The regulation is not drafted with any precision: a literal (and absurd) reading would be in that in the absence of anyone designated by the Secretary of State the CPS may not prosecute.

“It seems to us that… permitting the Secretary of State to designate people who can prosecute the section simply clarifies that this does not oust the ability of the CPS to do the same. It does not go further.

“If Regulation 11 were to be read as excluding private prosecutors, it would also exclude the police from prosecuting, unless the police were designated by the Secretary of State as persons who can prosecute. As far as we can tell no such designation has taken place.

“Our view is that the Regulation 11 is sufficiently clear so as not to warrant, at this stage, our consideration of whether the right to bring a private prosecution had been prevented by its language. A private prosecution may be classed as a ‘constitutional’ right founded in statute (or common law). It would require the most explicit language to extinguish that right.”

So not only could Cummings face a large fine if found guilty of breaching the regulations, but it seems entirely possible that a private prosecution may be launched against him, in order to ensure that he does so.

As This Site has already reported, Ms Taliefar is already crowdfunding for this purpose and her site may be found here.

If you agree that Cummings should be brought to book, feel free to contribute to the fund.

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Planning corruption: it seems Jenrick isn’t the only Tory accused of breaking the rules

Robert Jenrick: while he was presenting press conferences about Covid-19, he has also been mired in an apparent corruption scandal.

The evidence is mounting against planning minister Robert Jenrick in the scandal over the Westferry development – and interest in the controversy has revealed further potential corruption.

It seems Robert Jenrick was induced to overturn the refusal of the Westferry planning application after property developer Richard Desmond showed him a promotional video for the £1bn development. Here’s The Guardian:

“What I did was I showed him the video,” Desmond told the Sunday Times, adding that Jenrick had watched it for “three or four minutes”, and adding: “It’s quite long, so he got the gist.”

Jenrick subsequently overturned a decision by a local council and the government’s planning inspectorate in order to approve a 500-apartment, 44-storey development at Westferry Printworks, a former printing plan in east London.

Viewing the video would appear to constitute lobbying by Desmond, potentially giving rise to a conflict of interest.

Labour will use the opportunity of a three-hour opposition day debate on Wednesday to discuss the controversy.

That’s today – June 24.

Meanwhile, according to The Mirror…

A Tory former planning minister is reportedly under investigation for failing to declare an interest in a hotel development in his constituency.

Sir Bob Neill wrote a letter to his local council in December 2018, urging them to approve the redevelopment of The Royal Bell – a neglected hotel in his Bromley Constituency.

But he failed to mention in his letter that he was on the payroll of the Substantia Group – the firm handling the planning application for the hotel.

Sir Bob has been paid £50,000 by the firm for “strategic consultancy advice” since 2016, according to the register of members’ interests.

But his links to the firm were not explicitly outlined in the letter.

Shadow Housing Minister Mike Amesbury said: “It beggars belief that a former planning minister would not be aware of the obvious conflict of interest in this case.”

And the Telegraph today reported Sir Bob had intervened in another planning application being handled by the same firm – again without mentioning his paid position.

MPs voted in 2018 for investigations by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner to remain secret. Some might suggest that this was an offence against justice, which must be seen to be done.

But it has been reported the Commissioner has launched an investigation into Sir Bob’s involvement in the project after receiving a complaint.

Source: Jenrick under growing pressure after fresh Desmond revelation | Politics | The Guardian

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