Money, money, money: why doesn’t Boris Johnson spend some of his own, instead of ours, for a change?
Boris Johnson has sacked the legal team selected for him by the government, after its members provided information to the Cabinet Office that led to a new criminal investigation
And now…
Taxpayers are set to be billed more than a million pounds for Boris Johnson ’s new lawyers, after he sacked the government-provided legal team defending him at the Covid-19 inquiry.
In fact, taxpayers aren’t paying for it – other than indirectly. It’s public money, and if the government wants us to pay it, it will need to tax the money back from us. That hasn’t happened yet.
That being said: I don’t see any reason for the public to continue paying for lawyers that public servants didn’t appoint.
I mean,
Boris Johnson's new lawyers to cost taxpayers more than £1m for his Partygate defence.
Johnson made £6m last yr. Just been to US, giving six-figure sum speeches.
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Quiet money: it’s not really a backhander, but we certainly have good reason to ask what Egyptian billionaire Mahmood Mansour hopes to buy with his £5 million payment to the Conservative Party.
Almost as soon as I published my story about Boris Johnson being investigated by the police, someone responded by asking what major story that ‘dead cat’ had been slung on the table to cover up.
Normally, one can just ignore those remarks because they’re made by Tory supporters trying to divert attention from their government’s latest atrocity.
But this time I thought I’d cast around – and here’s a story that seems to have been buried: of an Egyptian billionaire who has donated £5 million to the Conservatives – the biggest bung to a UK political party in 22 years.
Now, why would anybody do that?
The Conservatives have received the largest political gift in 22 years from Egypt-born businessman Mohamed Mansour.
Praising the “capable” Rishi Sunal, the party’s treasurer rejuvenated the Tory coffers ahead of the next general election to the tune of £5 million.
Writing in The Telegraph he said: “I look at what he has achieved in his first months in office and think what he could do in five years.”
Some, commenting on this donation, have made the point that the Tories shouldn’t be able to criticise Labour for having “trade union paymasters” after taking this.
But if we’re to talk about the Tories having a “billionaire paymaster”, then we need to ask what Mr Mansour wants from them “in five years” in return for that still-huge amount of money – if anything.
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Money, money, money: but Boris Johnson never seems to use any of his own – it’s always yours.
This is the story – and I should have got to it before The Times, of all places:
Boris Johnson has earned nearly a million pounds in just over six weeks – but is claiming public money for legal representation at the Partygate inquiry – and the amount seems to be limitless.
Sadly, the story is behind a paywall, so this is all I can show you –
Boris Johnson has earned nearly a million pounds in just over six weeks, it has been revealed. The former prime minister registered more than half a million po
– plus the link below.
His earnings were mentioned in a previous Vox Political piece, here.
And his public-money funding for Partygate is the subject of this article in the Graun, although it’s covered by many other media outlets if that one isn’t your cup of tea.
Entitled arseheads like Johnson really take the biscuit, don’t they?
He’s taken a million quid on the side – that’s additional to his MP salary, and has anybody actually seen him in the House of Commons lately? – but he wouldn’t dream of using any of it to fight the Partygate allegations.
He’ll happily take it from you and me instead.
That’s how they stay rich and you stay poor.
£320,000 for Matt Hancock, £1m for Boris Johnson, £27m for Nadhim Zahawi and £29m for Michelle Mone. What cost of living crisis?
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Backhander: private health companies are being given a fortune in public money by the Tory government – and the cash will go to firms that are part-owned by Tories and Tory donors.
Can anybody make sense of this?
Sajid Javid has ordered NHS England to give up to £270m to private hospitals in case of an omicron surge, all of which they will keep even if they treat no patients & despite a lack of staff. Beneficiaries include Spire Health, Ramsay & Circle which is part owned by a tory donor
The only reason This Writer can find for such funding is the one that has been causing the Tories all their problems at the moment: deception.
Only recently, we were told NHS England did not have enough Covid-19 tests – LFT or PCR – to cover demand; indeed, it had to take four million kits from NHS Wales in an effort to cover the shortfall.
So when we see that the number of infections is down to around 70,000, can we really believe it? Or is the investment in private healthcare justified?
It doesn’t matter – because the Tory government is deceiving us in any event.
If the number of infections isn’t really down, then the government is lying about that; if it is, then the government is lying about the need to pay private health.
My personal opinion? The number of deaths appears to have reduced as well as infections (although we’ll have to see what Monday’s data brings), so I’m willing to hazard a guess that the Omicron wave has broken.
That means there’s absolutely no reason to give any money to the profit-grubbers and Sajid Javid is simply lining shareholders’ pockets for no reason other than squandering your cash.
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The briefest of briefing rooms: your local parish council could have done a better job, and cheaper, but Boris Johnson gave the contract to a company based in a hostile state. Now it is being withdrawn from service. How many times was it used?
Boris Johnson has scrapped plans for White House-style press briefings from a new £2.6 million TV studio in Downing Street – meaning he spent all that public money for nothing.
Apparently the room will be used for internal government briefings by Johnson and his ministers instead. They could do that in any ordinary Whitehall office.
Most of us have been doing much the same from our own homes, using Zoom, Skype, or even Facebook Messenger.
The decision confirms what This Writer believed – that this was nothing but another hugely expensive vanity project for Johnson.
His overspending on fripperies like this, described by some as “spaffing cash up the wall”, has brought a new meaning to the phrase “quantitative easing” (which is what the Bank of England has been having to do in order to allow the nation to cover the cost).
Johnson was shamed into admitting the existence of the studio in February, after it was reported on the social media that, after the huge expense, the space was going unused.
Last month he announced that he would be using the studio after all – and we all warned that he doesn’t have the personality to pull it off.
And then we discovered that the studio had been fitted out by a tech firm based in Russia. Who knows what surveillance equipment was installed there?
(I suppose we’ll find out soon enough, if Johnson really intends to have private briefings there instead of public, press affairs; any really embarrassing secrets will soon get out if the place is full of bugs.)
The whole sorry saga has been a national embarrassment.
Our man-child of a prime minister wanted to play with a new toy that he thought would make him look good – and has wound up looking like a spoilt brat squatting in his own mess.
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Hospital ward: many people who desperately need medical care will not get treatment in one of these for years, because the Conservative government spent years starving the NHS of cash and resources (including staff) before the Covid-19 crisis.
That’s right – around one-fifth of the UK population did not receive hospital care because Boris Johnson’s Tories couldn’t be bothered to fund the NHS properly.
Don’t tell me the money isn’t there because experience over the last year has shown that it quite clearly is – the Tories simply don’t want to spend it on a service they are quietly trying to privatise.
We all knew that the Covid-19 pandemic would disrupt normal NHS services; this was inevitable no matter how well-resourced the health service would have been.
But the Tories have spent years starving it of funds and hiving off elements of it for sale to private companies that are simply incapable of helping in a crisis, even if their bosses were inclined to do so.
As a result, we now see that 4.6 million people missed out on hospital treatment – mostly because hospitals suspended their normal services in order to handle the huge influx of people who were severely ill with the virus as a result of Boris Johnson’s incompetent failure to lock down the UK in time to prevent a tragedy.
A further six million fewer people were referred by GPs to hospital for diagnostic tests and treatment because of the disruption to care, a wish not to further pressurise the overstretched NHS, and a reluctance to send patients to a place where they could catch the virus.
This means the NHS is likely to face even more pressure as these missing millions demand treatment as the pandemic eases off. And what if another wave pushes hospital admissions up again?
More to the point: how many patients have died?
And crowdfunding website GoFundMe has reported a huge increase in the number of people seeking donations to support medical care: 87 per cent more citing “waiting lists” as their reason, 60 per cent more stating they need cash for “clinical trials” and a deeply concerning 55 per cent more saying they need cash to buy cancer drugs.
The concern here is that people who pay for private surgery often end up being sent back to the NHS to have botched operations fixed.
So people who pay for operations to take pressure off the NHS could find that they are still only making matter worse.
The extent of the problem is highlighted by The Guardian:
The number of people forced to wait more than a year for their operation has rocketed from 1,613 before the pandemic to 304,044 in January this year, and more than 1 million people have been waiting at least six months, even though 92% of patients are supposed to be treated within 18 weeks under the referral to treatment scheme.
“The waiting list is already at the highest level it’s been since comparable records began in 2007, and if it did rise from 4.6 million now to 9.7 million by March 2024 as we estimate, that’s more than double the waiting list now,” [said Tim Gardner, a senior policy fellow at the Health Foundation].
Rachel Power, the chief executive of the Patients Association, pointed out that patients have gone without life-saving treatments:
She said the association was “particularly concerned by reports of treatments being cancelled that could be life-saving”.
Finally – and to hammer home the point that this is a political issue: the disruption to hospital treatment was almost one-and-a-half times as bad in poorer areas than where people are richest. The worst-affected English region was the North West.
This confirms not only that poverty affects health but also that Tories like Boris Johnson couldn’t care less; after all, they haven’t done anything about it.
It will take years to reduce the number of people waiting for treatment until the 18-week target time is achieved – even with a government that genuinely wanted to help. The experts say it won’t happen until long after the next general election.
But local elections are happening much sooner – on May 6. Tories will be concerned that voters will use them to express their displeasure with a government that let them down badly, and has been lying about what a good job it has done.
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Some prime ministers would have taken the hint after a £2.6 million TV studio attracted flak, first as a white elephant vanity project that was built only to gather dust, and then when it was announced alongside a meagre one per cent pay rise for NHS staff.
Not Boris Johnson!
No, he has decided to announce a further £9 million “situation room” to be used as a command centre during emergencies like terror attacks and disease epidemics.
What’s wrong with Cabinet Office Briefing Room ‘A’ – the eponymous “COBRA”?
That is, what’s wrong with it apart from the fact that Johnson seems allergic to the place?
It took months for anybody to entice him into it when the Covid-19 pandemic first struck.
But here’s a thing: There’s no reason to believe Johnson will darken the doorss of this new facility, should an emergency occur. He’s far more likely to run away again like the coward he is.
This is money for old rope – far better spent on developments the UK needs.
This is not the time for Johnson’s over-expensive vanity projects. Someone should have the guts to tell him.
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Money, money, money: and none of it is for hungry children. The £63m fund mentioned so often by Boris Johnson and others was not for that purpose and was all spent before they even started talking it up.
You know that £63 million fund Conservative ministers like Robert Jenrick, Nadhim Zahawi, Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson keep saying is available to feed poor children over school holidays?
It was all spent weeks ago.
It came to only a few hundred thousand pounds per council.
When they Tories provided it in July, it was with a proviso that the money had to be spent within 12 weeks.
And it wasn’t specifically for feeding hungry children anyway.
Here’s Peter Stefanovic:
This has to stop!
Truth twisting Gov’t Minister Robert Jenrick still citing £63m allocated in June to justify his cowardly decision to vote down a motion to prevent more than a million kids going hungry during the holidays
Next time a Tory minister turns up on the media peddling this lie, complain.
Complain to that minister personally, and also to the media outlet, be it the BBC, Sky News or some local radio station operating out of a Portakabin.
Let’s expose these liars and child-starvers for what they are.
Note: This Site has been reminded that a handful of Conservatives voted in favour of feeding children during the school holidays, in rebellion against their party’s line that called for your kids to starve. Obviously they should not be targeted during protests. The are:
Caroline Ansell( quit Government post)
Robert Halfon
Jason McCartney
Anne Marie Morris
Holly Mumby-Croft
No doubt there are perfectly good reasons to criticise the above-named people as well – they are Tories, after all – but this isn’t one of them.
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Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe: this wrongly-jailed woman has become a pawn in an international power struggle.
Just when it seemed Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s Iranian prison ordeal was coming to an end, she’s being dragged back into court.
And that country’s officials have taken great pleasure in letting us know that her plight is due to blundering Boris Johnson, the UK’s prime muppet.
Johnson was the idiot who blurted out in Parliament – in 2017, when he was Foreign Secretary – that Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been “training journalists”.
She had been doing nothing of the kind.
A project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, she had been doing nothing more sinister than visiting her family for the Persian New Year celebration when she was arrested in 2016.
But the Iranian authorities seized on Johnson’s idiotic remark and threatened to use it to add five more years to her five-year prison sentence.
Now – three years after Johnson misspoke, it seems they have decided to follow through on the threat:
Richard Ratcliffe said his wife will appear in court on Sunday accused of “spreading propaganda against the regime” in Iran.
Apparently that’s how they describe the teaching of journalism – which she wasn’t doing in any event.
Of course we all know that Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s imprisonment has more to do with the £400 million that the UK government owes to Iran.
It could not be paid before because of international sanctions – but when Boris Johnson’s career was in danger, it seems such concerns evaporated.
How contrary, then, for us to find that the money has not been paid, apparently because Johnson doesn’t want to upset Donald Trump.
Johnson, it seems, wanted to wait until after the US presidential election on November 3 because he wanted to know whether Trump would still be US president before taking action.
So the Iranian decision to go back to court now has put him in a particularly sticky situation.
Will he pay up and get Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe back?
Or will he delay, to stay on the right side of Donald Trump?
I think we all know the answer to that. Johnson is the runt of international politics.
When powerful people squabble, it is always the innocents who suffer.
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Habitual cruelty: if you thought the Tories stopped persecuting people with long-term illnesses and disabilities during the Covid-19 crisis, think again.
What a waste of time and money.
Over the last two years, Conservative governments have spent more than £120 million in taxpayers’ money fighting disability benefit claims – despite losing three-quarters of tribunal appeals.
That means automatic wastage of £90 million – but it is likely that the quarter of claimants who lost their appeals also had valid grounds to claim Personal Independence Payment and/or Employment and Support Allowance but were outflanked by a prejudiced system.
The increase in expenditure is far greater than the 13 per cent increase in applications would suggest. And it is happening at a time when the country can ill-afford to waste any cash at all. There can only be one reason for it: sick cruelty – the Tories are enjoying torturing sick and disabled people to death.
And why are there so many applications for disability and sickness benefits in the UK? Do conditions here – especially working conditions – cause illness and disability?
The new figures are further proof that the Tories’ convoluted appeal process has nothing to do with saving money from fraudsters and everything to do with starving people with disabilities – to death, if possible.
It is now well-documented that claimants initially have to go through an internal appeal process within the Department for Work and Pensions called mandatory reconsideration.
The courts only recently ruled that a Tory regulation forcing claimants to go without any benefit payments, and therefore without any income, for the period of a mandatory reconsideration – no matter how long that may be – was illegal.
Only after the DWP rules that a claim should be rejected can the sick or disabled person take their case to a tribunal.
And it is at tribunals that 76 per cent of PIP claims, and 75 per cent of ESA claims, are upheld.
This means the Tories have needlessly and cruelly deprived these people of their means of survival for the number of months – years in some cases – that these claims have been disputed.
We all know that there is hardly any fraud in disability benefit claims – the last recorded number This Writer saw was somewhere in the region of one or two per cent of claims.
So the huge proportion that the Tories refuse – and the amount of time and money wasted in the appeal process – can only mean one thing:
The Tories hate disabled people and want them to die.
Why isn’t this a national – if not international – scandal?
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