Tag Archives: job

Tory MP Lee Anderson claims he was ‘guaranteed’ job to defect | BBC News

Lee Anderson with his best buddy Boris: the Tory party has changed a bit since BoJob was in charge but apparently the Leeanderthal isn’t keen to move on to a more Conservative organisation.

He should have taken the deal.

That’s if the Leeanderthal was telling the truth, of course.

Conservative Party deputy chairman Lee Anderson claims he was offered a financial incentive to defect to another party.

Mr Anderson alleges he was offered a job worth the equivalent of five years of an MP’s salary in the event he switched but failed to win re-election.

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Senior Conservative sources say Mr Anderson told them he had been approached by Reform UK.

Its leader Richard Tice has denied he offered any MP any money.


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Economists please note: high inflation may be A POLITICAL CHOICE

This is fine: the image above was originally about climate change but it may be applied equally well to Rishi Sunak’s attitude to the economy. Political policy in the UK for the past 40 years and more has been to impoverish you, together with all the poor people who voted for him and his ilk, thereby allowing it to happen.

All the Tory talk about getting inflation down seems to have confused some people who have failed to consider that high inflation may actually be Conservative government policy.

Look at the usually-excellent Simon Wren-Lewis’s latest Mainly Macro piece, in which he takes issue with left-wing opinions about his current diagnosis of the inflation problem.

He reckons the answer is for private sector wage rises to come down, probably by way of reducing economic demand which will lead to a reduction in the workforce – and, thereby, a recession. This opinion appears to be shared with the Bank of England, whose continual interest rate hikes seem to be an attempt to force the UK’s economy to go backwards.

The problem with that is simple: ordinary working- and even some middle-class people are struggling to make ends meet. Many simply can’t and are going into debt. His solution to the inflation problem will bake that inability to afford the cost of living into the UK economy.

With the Tory government lying to us that workers’ wages are the cause of high inflation and the Bank of England doing as described above, there seems to be only one logical conclusion to draw:

High inflation is a Conservative government policy. It is intended to drive the UK’s lower-paid citizens deep into poverty so you cannot afford the necessities of life.

Just roll that around your mind for a moment.

Think about the real causes of inflation: huge increases in the prices of energy and food, and huge increases in the salaries of FTSE100 executives.

The government could, in theory, neutralise these inflationary pressures through taxation – but the theory fails in practice: as Professor Wren-Lewis notes, the energy firms are multi-national corporations whose profits are received overseas, so there is nothing the government can do about them.

Looking back through history, we see that the reason overseas shareholders have been able to take control of our formerly-nationalised utility firms (energy isn’t the only subject area to have been treated this way, of course; water springs instantly to mind) is privatisation.

The answer should be re-nationalisation – but the Tory government (and also Keir Starmer’s STP – Substitute Tory Party) won’t countenance that; it is against their ideology. This indicates, again, that high inflation that drives you into poverty is a political choice. Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer want you to starve.

In the private sector, we see that the salaries of FTSE100 executives have risen by an average of 16 per cent in the last year alone, despite the fact that there has been no real growth in production in the last 15 years since the Great Recession. The money for their pay rise has to come from somewhere and the logical source is the pay packets of employees; they are taking the rises that should go to you.

That’s if they haven’t increased the prices of their goods or services, of course. If they have then they are still taking the rises that should go to you, while also increasing prices so you can’t afford what your employer sells.

The answer – the way to stop this irresponsible upward drain of corporate funds into executive bank accounts – is to tax executive pay at a rate high enough to make this practice unviable. Again, both Rishi Sunak’s Tories and Keir Starmer’s Tories have refused to do this so – again – we must conclude that the executive wage inflation that puts us all into poverty is a political choice.

Professor Wren-Lewis rightly points out that, where employees have won wage increases intended to match inflation caused mainly by high energy prices, their employers have put prices up; this indicates that shifting the real-terms wage cut onto the profits of other firms won’t work and just generates more inflation.

Professor Wren-Lewis goes on to discuss the reason real wages in the UK have not grown in the last 15 years. As already mentioned above, besides the energy and food price hikes, it is the fact that productivity growth has been extremely weak. There have also been two large devaluations of the Pound.

The low productivity – and one of the depreciations – were caused by Brexit. This is another political policy of the Conservative government that is also supported by Keir Starmer’s STP and may therefore be seen as further proof that the party of government (and that of Opposition) intends to impoverish you as a matter of policy.

Brexit also makes causing a recession more attractive to the government and the party that wants to form a government. Neither of them want inflation to continue running rampant forever; it would eventually wipe out the gains they have made for their very rich friends, so they’ll want to bring it down.

The way to do that, according to Prof Wren-Lewis, is to reduce the demand for goods produced by most firms, as this will lead to a reduced demand for labour; firms then lay off workers, meaning more people are seeking employment, meaning in turn that jobseekers will be more likely to accept a job that pays lower wages.

Before Brexit, politicians could always rely on an influx of cheap labour from Europe. That isn’t available now, so they consider recession to be the only alternative. Remember: their future is safe.

Demand is already coming down because people simply can’t afford to buy as much as they used to, due to the real-terms wage cuts they have suffered. The Bank of England’s interest rate rises are hammering that change home.

We may therefore conclude that recession, job losses, further deprivation and misery are all policy points of the Conservative government, and of Keir Starmer’s STP.

Professor Wren-Lewis ends his piece by quoting Bertrand Russell: “Ask yourself only what are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed.”

Sadly, he fails to follow his own (and Russell’s) advice.

The truth that the facts bear out is that privatisation, executive pay rises, Brexit, austerity (the other driver of the Pound’s depreciation) and interest rate rises are all intended to push the majority of UK citizens into poverty.

Other solutions besides reducing demand by causing a recession and mass unemployment are available – but the low-quality politicians with whom we have accepted that Parliament should be filled are not interested in them; their only concern is filling their own bank accounts.

Our concern must now be to put a stop to this.


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One rule for them: shocking government double-standard over pay is revealed

Under a cloud: considering the number of MPs who work long hours on multiple secondary jobs, it’s a wonder any of them ever have time to set foot in this place at all.

Once again Rishi Sunak is undermined by the behaviour of his own MPs.

In the week he insisted that a below-inflation, six per cent pay rise for junior doctors (meaning it is a real-terms pay cut) is not negotiable, the obscenely inflated amounts his fellow Tories (and a couple of others) earn from secondary employment have been revealed.

And some MPs are saying they need the extra cash from these second jobs because they can’t make ends meet otherwise.

Their MP salaries put these people among the highest-paid in the UK and they still reckon they can’t live without having more. They cannot justify this while pushing down pay for public sector workers including the junior doctors.

Here’s Sunak, follow by commentary that puts him right in his place by the great Peter Stefanovic:

The pay imposition means that, depending on their experience, junior doctors will receive a raise of between £3,000 and £3,700 per year (rising to £32,300 and £43,900 respectively).

If that seems like a lot, bear in mind that these are highly-skilled jobs for which they spend many years in training.

MPs, on the other hand, are unskilled; you don’t need any training for the job – you just need to persuade people to elect you.

Then you receive £86,584 a year as your basic wage (this is the figure as of April 2023), rising to £167,391 (as far as I can tell) if you are prime minister Rishi Sunak.

This puts him in the top one per cent of earners – and all MPs in the top two per cent.

And still they want more.

Sky News has published an exhaustive list of MPs’ earnings from second jobs, and it is a catalogue of greed, with those who have held ministerial jobs among the top earners. Now why would that be…?

The article states:

MPs with second jobs have an average wage of £233 per hour, Sky News can reveal.

The typical rate for MPs is 17 times the national average – and over 22 higher than the minimum hourly wage.

Indeed. According to the pay deal Sunak is determined to impose, junior doctors will get just £14 per hour, which is only slightly better than the absolute minimum wage.

Ms Truss’s most lucrative work since leaving Number 10 has been a speech in Taiwan. She was paid at a rate of £20,000 per hour – nearly 1,500 times the UK average hourly wage – for her insights into global diplomacy.

Even higher than Ms Truss is Boris Johnson, who resigned as an MP last month. His hourly rate comes in at £21,822, but having left parliament, he is free to work without having to publicly record his earnings.

The leaderboard of the MPs with the 20 highest hourly rates in this parliament reveals a clear pattern: 18 have government experience, suggesting a ministerial background is valued by some employers.

Or it means employers have been paying them in order to influence their decision as ministers?

Here’s Sky‘s Sam Coates explaining it:

Let’s have a look at the list.

Top is Boris Johnson (Conservative) – now an ex-MP after one Partygate scandal too many. He worked 117 hours outside Parliament and earned £2.5 million. That’s £21,800 per hour.

Then:

Liz Truss (Conservative): 12 hours, £189,200, £15,700 per hour.

Alok Sharma (Conservative): four hours, £20,000, £5,000 per hour.

Theresa May (Conservative): 622 hours – that’s nearly 12 solid working weeks! £2.7 million, £4,400 per hour.

Fiona Bruce (not the broadcaster)(Conservative): 245 hours, £733,100, £2,900 per hour.

Sajid Javid (Conservative): 174 hours, £412,300, £2,300 per hour.

Julian Smith (Conservative): 67 hours, £147,800, £2,100 per hour.

Greg Clark (Conservative): 14 hours, £17,770, £1,200 per hour.

Ian Blackford (Scottish National Party): 31 hours, £38,120, £1,200 per hour.

Michael Gove (Conservative): three hours, £3,100, £1000 per hour.

The next 10 are all Conservatives, most notably including Sir Geoffrey Cox at 12 (2,560 hours, £2.4 million, £960 per hour). This means he worked nearly 49 weeks solidly for other employers than Parliament. Has he actually turned up to represent his constituents at all? Even if he has, how can he be expected to have done a good job, working full-time for other employers?

And Jacob Rees-Mogg is at 18 (123 hours, £92,910, £750 per hour).

Some MPs are saying they need multiple jobs because the current salary isn’t enough for them. One can only agree with Richard Burgon:

Nor does our democracy need Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, who earns almost as much in a week as many of us do in a year, and wants employers to push your wages through the floor. Here’s Jon Trickett:

Yes it is. “Do as I say – take home rapidly-decreasing remuneration for the grinding hours of hard work that you do, while I spend increasingly less time in the job where I’m supposed to represent your best interests so I can moonlight for the big corps and earn 17 times as much as you.”

Put like that, do you think you’re getting value for money from your Tory MP?

I don’t.

Note this also:

Now consider this:

These are the kind of people we need in Parliament. But Keir Starmer is doing his best to purge Labour of its left wing in order to make it into his dream: a Substitute Tory Party (STP). The SNP is incapable of forming a government because it would never have enough MPs. And the Green Party is habitually ignored by voters who think they have to support Labour or the Tories because their choice is the only one they think can keep the other one out.

Without better representation, the situation described by Robert Peston below will worsen:

Finally: the information provided in this article is vital for anybody in the UK who has a vote. It tells you what you need to know in order to make an informed decision when you come to vote. But I can predict that only around 200 people will read it.

This is because Vox Political must depend on the social media platforms for articles to be seen, and they are run by corporations that depend on other corporations’ advertising revenue to make their own profits, and fear regulation by a right-wing government that wishes to suppress dissenting viewpoints. So of the 42,000+ people who supposedly like This Site’s page on Facebook, only around 300 will actually see the link to this article on their newsfeed.

This is how Sunak, Bailey and the other greedy fatcats keep you down:

By making sure you don’t know how to impose change.


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MP extra jobs: Led By Donkeys’ investigation rushes to unexpected conclusion

Hancock shock: he was the only MP interviewed by Led By Donkeys’ fake firm who actually pointed out that he had a responsibility to his constituents.

This took me a little by surprise. The last three Led By Donkeys video films about MPs trying to get an extra job with a fake foreign firm, ignoring the plight of their poverty-stricken constituents, have been released over the last 24 hours.

Here they are. Firstly, Tory Wimbledon MP Stephen Hammond, who already has two extra jobs that make as much money for him as his Parliamentary salary. The (relatively recent) saying is true: money isn’t earned any more – it is a commodity that may be demanded in greater or lesser amounts according to circumstances…

Here’s the clip:

It’s fascinating how he talks about his price range being at the lower end of the scale suggested – then he readily agrees to suggest remuneration at the middle-to-top end of the scale.

Next up: Sir Gavin Williamson, who left his last Tory government job under a cloud of bullying accusations:

Interestingly, he at least took a more sceptical attitude toward the fake company, seeking to establish that it was bona fide. But he still joined a Zoom call to discuss the fake job being offered to him.

And when he found out the firm wanted to meet government ministers, he made his excuses and hung up. It seems he did not want to be involved with an organisation that may seek to influence government policy.

It provides a curious footnote to Williamson’s career. After years on the wrong side of the headlines, he suddenly did the right thing.

That being said, and as with all the other Tories, the well-being of his constituents still took second place to his own comfort as he has since taken a second job with an education firm, for which he takes £50,000 per year.

Finally: Matt Hancock – described by Led By Donkey’s as an independent MP, having lost the Tory whip due to his appearance on TV’s I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, and by a commenter on the video clip as the kind of person you have to admire: “Imagine waking up as Matt Hancock every morning and not simply throwing yourself into the ocean.”

He was interviewed in the week his damning WhatsApp conversations about the Covid-19 crisis were publicised in the press, and announced he would be standing down as an MP at the next election.

He still seemed to have time to discuss a second job with a foreign firm – although, let’s be fair: he was the only MP in the Led By Donkeys investigation who mentioned any responsibility to his constituents at all.

And, again, he stressed he’d stick to Parliamentary rules about meetings with government ministers.

Surprisingly, Led By Donkeys did not sum up their findings at all.

Well, I have a few – and here they are:

Firstly, it is clear that all five of the MPs who interviewed for the fake job were quite happy to have such a position alongside their work as MPs and for their constituents; they all wanted to get on the gravy train.

Four of them had no concerns about security – doesn’t that make them security risks?

Three of them did not have apparent concerns about being used as conduits for a firm to talk to ministers. Another one, who said he could not lobby directly, said there was a way around the rules. Only one refused to have anything to do with behaviour that might be used to attempt to influence government policy. So it seems the majority were happy to help influence the government by these means.

And only one MP – possibly the one who might be least expected to do so – actually mentioned a duty to constituents.

So the intention of the investigation is proved: it seems clear that, among some MPs at least, the well-being of UK citizens comes a distant second to the opportunity to use status as an MP to rake in pots of cash.


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MPs’ extra jobs: Tory backbench chairman Sir Graham Brady interviews for SIXTH job

The latest Led By Donkeys video clip on MPs taking extra jobs is now available – and focuses on Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the Tories’ backbench 1922 committee.

He’s a highly important Parliamentary figure being the MP who takes ‘no confidence’ votes in Tory Party leaders and announces the result in the leadership elections that may follow.

He also has four other jobs already. How much opportunity does that provide for commercial concerns to influence him, and for him to influence Parliament in turn?

Here, he participates in a job interview for the fake South Korean firm set up by the campaigning group:

He never mentioned his obligations to his constituents.

It is possible that this is because – as he stated to Led By Donkeys when the group contacted him – he is planning to quit Parliament at the next election, and he took part in the interview because he is looking for new opportunities beyond his life as an MP.

Looking at what he said in the interview, do you think that’s true?


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While we face financial hardship, Tory MPs demand a fortune to work for a fake firm

Matt Hancock: of course the MP who took a six-figure sum to appear on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here was interested.

Remember Led By Donkeys – the campaign group that came to public knowledge by putting posters on billboards showing politicians’ hypocrisy about Brexit?

Well, as people in the UK face continued financial hardship, and at a time when MPs may reasonably be expected to be concentrating on their main job, this group wanted to see how many may be tempted to take a second job, promoting a foreign firm (that doesn’t exist), to boost their own fortunes.

The operation netted interest from some big names, as you can see from this trailer:

I’m willing to bet you can’t wait for the next episode.


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Lee Anderson’s second job hypocrisy

Lee Anderson: he’s the one on the right, pictured with another controversial man at the moment, Boris Johnson. Strangely enough, ’30p Lee’ has not, to This Writer’s knowledge, criticised Johnson for the many other paying engagements he takes on and it seems unlikely he ever will, now that he has also taken a second job.

Tory MP ’30p Lee’ Anderson, who once said MPs should not take second jobs but should quit Parliament altogether before seeking a higher-paying career… is taking a second job.

He’ll be drawing down £100,000 a year on a GB News TV show:

The hypocrisy is clear. I don’t have video clips of Anderson saying the words quoted above, but here’s one of him saying MPs who can’t live on their £84,000-a-year salary should get a job as a lorry driver instead:

The funny side is, Anderson wouldn’t even do that.


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Struggling to afford food? Work longer hours, says Tory Coffey. Does she work at all?

Let them eat overtime: this is because working people can’t have any fruit and veg under a Tory government.

Here is your regular reminder that Therese Coffey is rubbish.

It’s from last week but got lost among all the other rubbish the Environment Secretary threw at us then:

Here’s a video clip of her actually saying it:

Meanwhile, let’s have an update on the fruit and vegetable shortages her government has caused:

And how about a reminder that the Tory Brexiters were adamant that we wouldn’t suffer any shortages at all?

And what is her plan to end the food shortages?

Apparently, it is to choke on her own words:

If you noticed that Luke Pollard asked if Coffey wanted to go down as the Secretary of State for Sewage, you may welcome this update on the pollution of our rivers:

All the fish dead because the Tory government couldn’t be bothered to properly regulate the water and sewage firms it created by privatising a national utility and asset.

It should be a criminal offence and these people should be locked up – and forced to eat and drink the produce their incompetence has polluted.*

*I know that’s a death sentence but it will never be carried out, even though it would be poetic justice.


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If this is why the Bank of England is making the UK recession worse, it stinks

The Bank of England: it is not your friend.

One of the strangenesses of running a political website as a commercial endeavour is that one is reliant on the articles to pull in advertising revenue, and this means more popular items take priority.

More meaningful items then take a back seat until such time as they can be funded by the other material – but fortunately, today, lots of people are enjoying the Suella De Vil song, so I have an opportunity to look at why the Bank of England is hiking interest rates and worsening the UK recession.

I’m taking the information from Professor Simon Wren-Lewis’s Mainly Macro article (link below), which suggests the most likely reason I’ve seen so far – and it isn’t to stop energy price inflation, nor is it to stop food price inflation.

No – it’s to stop wage inflation. The aim is to impoverish you by increasing the difference between what things cost and what you can afford.

Here’s Prof Wren-Lewis:

A UK recession will do almost nothing to bring energy and food prices down. Instead what has worried the Bank for some time is that the UK labour market appears pretty tight, with low unemployment and high vacancies, and that this tight labour market is leading to wage settlements that are inconsistent with the Bank’s inflation target.

You can see the reasoning behind this, just with the forthcoming strike by the Royal College of Nursing, that is calling for a 17 per cent pay increase. The Bank’s inflation target is just two per cent, and has been for many years.

The article continues:

Earnings growth is around 7.5% in the wholesale, retail, hotels and restaurants sector, about around 6% in finance and business services and the private sector as a whole.

Domestic firms are under no obligation to compensate their employees for high energy and food prices, over which they have little control and which are not raising their profits. As a result, if firms were free to choose and there was abundant availability of labour, they would offer pay increases no higher than the increases we saw during 2019.

Average private sector earnings running at around 6% are not a problem for the Bank because it is anti-labour, but because it believes wage growth at that level is inconsistent with its inflation target of 2%… Earnings growth will slow as the UK recession bites.

What this means in layperson’s terms is that, by increasing interest rates, the Bank intends to make it harder for many firms to survive in the hope that they will lay off staff, forcing more people back onto the labour market.

Then, firms would be able to offer whatever wages they wanted (above the minimum, of course) on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, and if you couldn’t make ends meet, then that would be your problem.

It is a premeditated, deliberate attempt to worsen poverty for millions upon millions of UK residents.

I wonder whether this is another unintended consequence of Brexit? When the UK was obligated to accept workers from the European Union, employers benefited from exactly the kind of loose labour market that allowed them to offer subsistence, or lower-than-subsistence, wages.

Now those workers have gone and employers are forced to take on native workers, the pendulum has swung the other way. It’s a thought, isn’t it?

Prof Wren-Lewis goes on to explain that developments in economic thinking mean that the tight labour market should not require an interest rate hike to “correct” it (his word).

nowadays macroeconomists believe it is possible to end a boom [in this case an over tight labour market] and bring inflation down without creating a downturn or recession, because once the boom is brought to an end a credible inflation target will ensure wage inflation and profit margins adapt to be consistent with that target.

The lags in the economic system mean a central bank should stop raising rates while inflation is still increasing. If a central bank believes it will lose credibility by doing this, and feels it has to continue raising rates until inflation starts falling, this will lead to substantial monetary policy overkill and an unnecessary recession.

If that is why central banks in the UK and the Euro area keep raising interest rates as the economy enters a recession, then the truth is central banks are throwing away a key advantage of a credible inflation target. Credibility is not something you constantly have to affirm by being seen to do something, but something you can use to produce better outcomes. Furthermore central banks are more likely to lose rather than gain credibility by causing an unnecessary recession.

Of course raising interest rates to 3% is not enough on its own to cause a prolonged recession. Probably more important is the cut to real incomes generated by higher energy and food prices, which is enough on its own to generate a recession. On top of that we have a restrictive fiscal policy involving tax increases and failing public services. Both together should be more than enough to correct a tight labour market. To have higher interest rates adding to these already large deflationary pressures seems at best very risky, and at worst extremely foolish.

This will affect you all.

Sadly, as I indicated at the top of the article, only a few of you are likely even to have read any of the information here – certainly not to the end. So very few of you are likely to make any preparations for it.

For the rest, the next few years are going to be very difficult indeed.

Source: mainly macro: Why is the Bank of England making the expected UK recession worse?

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Jobs for Tory friends again as Rees-Mogg pal gets peerage and two government posts

Jacob Rees-Mogg, making a gesture that well defines him.

A city business partner of Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg – one Dominic Johnson by name – has been given a peerage by the Tory government, along with two government jobs.

There appears to be no reason for this, other than that this Mr Johnson is a friend of a member of the Tory government.

Here’s a quick take on this:

This Writer wonders how this will affect the reception Rees-Mogg will receive from the public on his way to the Tory Party Conference in Birmingham this week.

After all, look what happened on Sunday – before his buddy’s elevation was announced:

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.

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