Tag Archives: interests

Latest row over Sunak’s wife shows his new declaration of interests is worthless

Akshata Murty and her husband, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak: he has taken extraordinary steps to hide any commercial interests either of them have from the electorate. We must therefore conclude that he may be dishonestly using his position to funnel public money into his bank accounts and hers.

The row over whether Rishi Sunak’s wife benefited from the work that went into an ’emergency alert’ test affecting mobile phones on Sunday (April 23) shows one thing: the public do not believe the prime minister’s latest declaration of interests.

Sunak published a new register of MPs’ financial interests last week, in response to anger over his failure to declare that a company part-owned by Akshata Murty will benefit from a new policy to attract people into child-minding.

It doesn’t include significant details, either of his own personal financial investments or his wife’s.

Some of us have drawn the obvious conclusion: that Sunak thinks he and his wife are above such declarations – even though he takes public money, the same as the lowliest Universal Credit claimant.

And UC claimants have to declare their partners’ financial interests:

He didn’t even bother to turn up to an Urgent Question demanding a statement on his entry in the register, on the day the stink over alleged interest in the “emergency alert” broke out across the social media:

Instead, one of his lieutenants piped up to say it’s unreasonable to demand of the prime minister what his government demands of every benefit claimant. This confirms that Sunak thinks he’s better than the rest of us and doesn’t need to give an account of himself.

Apparently Sunak’s entry on the register includes his local rotary club, brass band and community pub but not any business interests owned by him or his wife.

The Byline Times article states:

A spokesperson for Sunak insisted that only such declarations judged to be “relevant” had been added to the list.

This means that while, according to Sunak, the fact the he is a patron of his local brass band is judged to be a “relevant” interest relating to his role as Prime Minister, the fact that his wife is now set to potentially massively financially benefit from a Government policy, is not.

Also not included in the new register are any of the Prime Minister’s own personal financial interests, save from the fact that they are now contained within what Downing Street refer to as a “blind management trust”.

This arrangement is ostensibly designed to prevent the Prime Minister from personally being involved in any future investment decisions that may be affected by his own policies.

However, by placing his existing investments within this “blind” arrangement, the public are prevented from ever knowing which Government policies are directly enriching the Prime Minister and his family.

It is hard to think of a reasonable justification for this continued refusal to be fully open about his own financial interests and those of his wife.

It is clear that Rishi Sunak is doing everything he can to prevent the rest of us from knowing how many commercial pies he and his wife have stuck their grubby fingers into.

It is dishonesty at the top level of government. No wonder he is currently being investigated over whether he has approved a policy that funnels money to a company part-owned by his wife. Other government contracts with companies owned by her should also be investigated.

The dishonesty implied by any investigation is exactly the opposite of what Sunak himself promised when he became prime minister.

By his own standards, he does not deserve to remain in office. There’s a local election next week in England and Northern Ireland; I hope voters there use it to drive that point home.


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Matt Hancock in new row over ‘I’m a Celebrity’ cash

Matt Hancock: is the former Health Secretary really so thick that he doesn’t understand the difference between gross and net earnings?

Former Tory Health Secretary Matt Hancock has got himself into yet another fix over money.

It’s only a little more than two weeks since we learned that he gave only a little more than three per cent of his I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here fee to dyslexia campaigns – the reason he said he was doing the show.

Now we find it wasn’t even that much, because his fee wasn’t £320,000 – as he claimed – but £400,000.

So – only 2.5 per cent went to dyslexia. What a deceiving skinflint.

Hancock’s problem now is that he lied in Parliament’s Register of Members’ Interests.

He was duty-bound to enter all of his earnings on Celebrity – the gross amount – but didn’t.

Here’s Robert Peston to explain what we know:

Hancock did respond to Peston’s inquiries later. Here’s his update:

Peston is being too charitable in his last two tweets. Gross is gross – the whole of the amount a person is paid. ITV paid Hancock £400,000. That is his gross earning from that engagement. What he did with it afterwards – handing £80,000 to an agent, handing £10,000 to dyslexia organisations – was his decision over his money.

Those are the rules for the rest of us. If they aren’t the rules in Parliament, then we should be told when they will be changed – and we should demand that they be changed retrospectively.


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‘Richie’: Sunak’s referral to ethics watchdog over wife’s vast wealth won’t address the real problem

The paper trail: financial holdings of Rishi Sunak, his wife Akshata Murty and her family are explained in this image, originally published by The Guardian.

How can a man as insanely rich as Rishi Sunak is – through the wealth of his wife and her family – honestly have any understanding of the struggles normal people are suffering as a result of his many decisions to cut their income?

He can’t.

That is the concern that we face after the revelation that the Tory Chancellor did not declare wealth larger than that of the Queen in the register of ministerial interests.

It won’t be addressed by Lord Evans, chair of the committee on standards in public life, because there is no rule requiring him to.

So the referral to the ethics watchdog by Labour’s Tonia Antoniazzi and James Murray may be seen as a pointless waste of time.

Here are the facts, neatly summed up in a couple of tweets:

More information is in the Guardian stories here and here.

According to the second of those stories, the Labour MPs’ referral to the ethics watchdog arises because they are concerned that Sunak’s wife’s holdings may create a potential conflict between his public and private interests.

But the Treasury has already said that Sunak “followed the ministerial code to the letter” in his declarations.

It seems he met the government’s then head of propriety and ethics, Helen MacNamara, to decide what needed to be declared before he joined the Treasury.

However: as This Writer learned only last week, a person can comply with the letter of the law and still be doing something wrong.

It doesn’t surprise me that Labour MPs are trying to tease out the nature of any wrong-doing by Sunak, because it was Labour that mistreated me.

Despite adhering to the letter of its rules on investigating anti-Semitism allegations against me, Labour ignored the requirements of its actual procedures in order to falsify a case against me, and manufactured an incorrect verdict. I had to go to court to have the facts revealed.

Will anything come of an investigation into Sunak? Doubtful. There’s no law against being ignorant of the way the other half live.

But if we know that Sunak is so far removed from the rest of us, we may also draw logical conclusions about his ability to create policies for everybody in the UK, no matter how deprived – or his lack of any such ability.

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.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/


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Soundbite Britain: This is a game we can ALL play!

Here's a good anti-Coalition soundbite: It's based on a well-known saying and it tackles the falsehoods put out by Iain 'Returned To Unit' Smith.

Here’s a good anti-Coalition soundbite: It’s based on a well-known saying and it tackles the falsehoods put out by Iain ‘Returned To Unit’ Smith.

Sitting in the cafe yesterday, I was discussing the situation in Egypt with a couple of friends. One was getting quite heated because he considered the problem to have been created by the “fundamentalist Islamic government they elected”.

He said something like, “These fundamentalists promised everyone the world. They said they would make everything better, did whatever they could to secure the vote – and then once they were in power they forgot all those promises and did whatever they wanted instead. They got what they wanted from the people and then the people could go hang.”

I couldn’t resist. “So you’re saying they’re exactly like the Conservative Party over here, then,” I replied.

Laughter all around. We laugh because it’s funny and we laugh because it’s true. And because the only alternative is tears.

Let’s not dwell on the Egyptian situation beyond what I said afterwards – that the ‘Arab Spring’ countries seem to need help in establishing the basics of real democracy but there is nobody around who can provide it. They would (rightly) distrust any foreign power that claimed to offer help, but there’s no independent organisation that offers such a service either.

The UK would be one of the last places I would advise Egypt to look. Consider the last general election here. People with a lot of money to spend on it funded a hugely expensive election campaign to get the Conservative Party into power, in order to serve their interests which are to accumulate an even larger share of the available wealth, along with the power that goes with it, while removing and restricting the freedoms of the people from whom that wealth was to be drained.

Those people got involved in politics and worked very hard to make sure they got a government that genuinely serves their interests – selfish and cruel as those interests are. They ended up having to put up with a Conservative-led government, rather than a fully Conservative one, but are now working very hard to finish the job with a propaganda campaign – based on lies – that appears to be swaying public opinion.

So they say (and here I’m quoting Owen Jones in his recent analysis): “We’re clearing up Labour’s mess. Labour overspent and now we’re balancing the books. A national deficit is like a household budget. Welfare is out of control and lining the pockets of the skivers. The unemployed person or immigrant down the road is living off your hard-earned taxes. Labour is in the pocket of union barons.”

All of these are falsehoods. They’re lies. But they’re also very effective soundbites that stay in people’s minds and colour their perceptions of the way things are.

And those responsible get away with it, I’m sorry to say, because the people who stand to lose the most are lazy. They can’t be bothered to get involved and make sure the government they get is one that genuinely serves their interests.

Why do you think Her Majesty’s Opposition is filled with neoliberals who agree with the government that our public services should be carved up and handed to private companies, to run them for profit and not in the interests of the people? Why do you think the Labour Party has agreed to stick to Coalition spending plans for the first year of the next Parliament, if it gets elected? Why do you think Labour has stopped opposing social security policies that have been killing an average of 73 people a week (according to figures that are now well out of date, so the average today is probably much higher)?

Labour doesn’t stand up for you any more. That’s why it has had no effective answer to the Tory lies. The masses can’t be bothered to find out the truth – and certainly won’t lift a finger to get involved and stop the corruption that is eating our institutions away. But that is the only way it can be stopped. You stay away and they get what they want.

At this rate, we’ll all be slaves by 2020.

It doesn’t have to be so hard, though. We could all turn the corner, just by devising a few soundbites of our own.

I was thinking this last night, while I was writing a response to Margaret Johnson. Ms Johnson was commenting on a previous article as follows (apologies to anyone who’s offended; they’re her words, not mine): “It was Labour who signed up Atos, engineered so many civil service jobs that were not needed, opened the borders for the rest of the world’s trash to enter our country, brought in more taxes, actively encouraged the demise of manufacturing and the rise of the banks, signed up to allow Europe to rule us, doubled the rate for income tax for the lowest paid, gave GP’s 100K a year to work 9-5 Monday to Friday, got the most revenue in and still left this country in the worse mess ever.”

So we could say something like (and feel free to include ‘Liberal Democrats’ wherever I have mentioned Conservatives):

“It is the Conservatives who employed a private firm, paying £1 billion to ‘A-toss’ disabled people off the benefits they need to survive.” If Labour was doing its job properly it would add: “A Labour government would save that money by throwing Atos out”.

“No wonder the government can’t make anything work properly – they have been sacking all the professionals. More than 600,000 government employees will have lost their jobs by 2015, replaced by amateurs working for the Conservatives.”

“It’s strange that the Conservatives complain so much about immigration from Europe – they signed the treaties that allow it! The Conservative governments of Edward Heath and John Major allowed the free movement of European immigrants into the UK. Now they see it is unpopular, they want to shift the blame.”

“Simplified tax under the Tories mean the rich pay less and the poor pay more.”

“Conservatives destroyed Britain’s manufacturing base in the 1980s – at the same time they created the conditions that led to the banking crisis.”

“Conservatives want to blame Europe for your problems. Who will they blame when Britain is out of the EU and your problems have multiplied?”

Going back to Owen’s examples:

“Conservatives: The only people who think they can clear up a mess by making a bigger one.”

“Conservatives say Labour overspent – but they have always spent more than Labour. You can’t trust them to balance the books.”

“If the Tories handled their household budgets like they’re handling the deficit, they would all have been evicted by now.”

“Privatisation is out of control; the Tories are using taxpayers’ money to line the pockets of greedy bosses.”

“You paid for Iain Duncan Smith’s £39 breakfast. How much do you spend on your own?”

“The Conservative Party is in the pocket of big business and the bankers.”

Of course, the above are just essays in the craft of soundbiting; I’m just a beginner.

So let’s have a competition to see who can invent the best soundbite, challenging the government’s lies with facts!

Please send your ideas in to this blog – but also put them out to the national media as well, any way you can. Try to get anyone opposing the government to use them, because this may lead to them being picked up by the newspapers and TV news reporters as well.

Above all, please try to make this fun. A soundbite is many times more effective if it makes people laugh, and the Tories and Liberal Democrats are silly, silly people. Let’s bring that out.

Or is it too much like hard work after all?