For the many? Keir Starmer’s Tepid Tories are expelling people for being socialists. So much for their ‘broad church’!
What a rotten day for democracy in the Labour Party.
The ruling National Executive Committee of Keir Starmer’s Tepid Tories has voted to continue expelling people retrospectively for having anything to do with organisations that the party has since proscribed.
These people would have had no idea that they were doing anything wrong by their contact with these groups.
Indeed, at the time they weren’t doing anything wrong at all.
And in many, if not all, cases there is no reason to believe these groups have done anything to justify being proscribed, even now.
… And that means there is no reason to believe these now-former Labour Party members have done anything to justify the party expelling them.
On the other hand, there is ever reason to believe that Keir Starmer – and those others of his ilk who are responsible for this travesty – have done wrong.
But they can’t be expelled because they twist Labour’s rules to mean anything they want.
I find myself agreeing with a tweet I’ve just read, although I would paraphrase it slightly:
It’s a bad day for democracy, but a great day for corruption.
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Data theft: the Labour Party has admitted that details of members – and FORMER members, that it handed to a ‘third party’ without telling us, have been stolen. This includes information the party should not have had. Should we take the party to court over it?
The Labour Party has informed This Writer – and many others, it seems – that my data may have been hijacked after it was given to a “third party”.
This is very concerning for several reasons:
Firstly: I am no longer a member of the Labour Party and it should not be holding any information of mine, for any reason at all.
Secondly: I have not given permission for any data held by me to be passed on to any third party, and it is illegal for the Labour Party to have done so.
Next: The Labour Party has not passed on details of the identity of this mysterious third party. Why not? Is it embarrassing? Is it potentially incriminating? I want to know, and I reckon thousands of others will want to know as well.
Finally: Why am I hearing about this on November 4, possibly an entire week after the incident took place – and a day after many other victims were informed? Why were we not all informed at once?
According to Labour’s letter to affected people (which the party is apparently asking us not to share, although that part seems to have been cut from mine), party officers were informed of the incident on October 29.
This implies that the data was hijacked on a still earlier date, meaning that we went uninformed that our illegally-held data had been held by wrong-doers for a longer time than Labour suggests and that we have been vulnerable to cyber crime for all of that period without even knowing about it.
The crime itself seems to be a ransomware incident in which data is rendered inaccessible to a user unless it pays the hijacker some form of remuneration. If such payment is refused, the hijacker may go on to use the stolen data to harm the people to whom it belongs. Labour doesn’t mention this in its email.
Nor are we informed of the nature of the data that was stolen. It may include personal information that could be used for identity theft or blackmail, and/or financial information that could result in plain theft from our bank accounts. We don’t know because Labour hasn’t told us.
The email goes on to say that Labour has reported the incident to authorities including the National Crime Agency (NCA), National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). No doubt those organisations are busy doing very little about it (I have experience of the ICO’s dawdling with regard to Labour Party data breaches; it says it has received so many reports about the party that it is swamped).
And we are told that the Labour Party “takes the security of all personal information for which it is responsible very seriously”, which seems plainly untrue, considering the fact that it should not have had any of my personal information at all.
Members – old and current – are up in arms about this:
Labour was in possession of data that should have been deleted years ago.
It is possible to confirm this because tonight they are emailing old email accounts long discarded by members who left years ago.
That on its own poses and exceptionally serious legal question.
Given I resigned from @UKLabour over a year ago via the correct process I'm angry to receive an email from [email protected] telling me my data may have been breached
The fact Labour *still* had my info on file is surely a data breach in itself
i got one too BUT truth is they’ve been leaking my data for YEARS. i complained to ICO who said they had received so many complaints about Labour they were snowed under AND theyn they employ an allegedly ex Mossad spy to oversee Members!!!! these mother f***ers!! https://t.co/6WOKNTs6rR
Just received an email from the Labour Party telling me they have been hacked and that my data has been compromised. I left the Labour Party a year ago. Are they allowed to hang onto my data without my permission?
I’ve just had the email informing me of this data breach but very little detail of what information was leaked or who the third party provider was. #labourdataleak2021@PeterStefanovi2@MidWalesMike
— Aaron M AMUK #SOA #Standup #fairness #equal (@mnet_stratford) November 3, 2021
If the @UKLabour Party need to retain my data- despite expelling me- for future reference, ok, but why have they given it to a “third party”?
It is the Labour Party I was a member of & the Labour Party which I was expelled from.
We do need to know the identity of the “third party”. For one thing, it might be an organisation we would not want to have any of our information at all.
I would also be concerned if my information had been handed to the Jewish Labour Movement, the organisation Labour has said it would task with providing training to members on the nature of anti-Semitism and indoctrination against it.
That organisation is highly prejudiced, in the experience and opinion of This Writer, and I would not trust it with my personal details in any event.
One final point: Labour Party members may have no choice on who receives their information because party secretary David Evans and the leadership helmed by Keir Starmer demand that they automatically agree to everything the party does with it, as a condition of membership.
But I am no longer a member.
I think a class action lawsuit on this case may be appropriate, don’t you?
I would certainly be interested in hearing from anybody who feels the same way and is interested in taking the matter forward (although I would not want to be the principal claimant as I am already involved in a highly time-consuming court case, as is well known).
Who’s interested?
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Bottomley: the Father of the House of Commons doesn’t think MPs earn enough and says they should have as much as GPs. In the interests of “levelling up”, perhaps Boris Johnson should consider making their £100k-a-year the National Living Wage?
What an inconsiderate narcissist Peter Bottomley is!
On the day Universal Credit – the main unemployment benefit but also the subsidy paid to working people to make up for the failure of businesses to pay them a living wage – was cut, plunging 4.4 million people into poverty, he complained that his £82,000 MP’s salary isn’t enough.
Tory MP Peter Bottomley asks for a pay rise because he can't manage on his £82k a year. So insulting & insensitive considering the £20 cut to UC. Who are these people?!
— SueHsy #BDS💙💜Cult member 054- (@Thehopper7) October 7, 2021
He thinks he should get around the same amount as GPs – slightly more than £100,000 a year. Average salary – which is skewed upwards by the top 10 per cent of earners – is £31,000.
Strangely, he admitted that he is not suffering financially himself:
Although he said he currently is not struggling financially, he believes the situation is ‘desperately difficult’ for his newer colleagues.
The representative of Worthing West in West Sussex added: ‘I don’t know how they manage. It’s really grim.’
That didn’t stop people like his former colleague Michael Portillo leaping to support him on TV, with what can only be seen as a false argument:
Conservative MP Sir Peter Bottomley says some MPs are finding it “really grim” to live on a salary of £82,000 and their annual salary should be higher.
Ben points out these comments may not be welcomed especially at a time where the cost of living is increasing dramatically. pic.twitter.com/UwzvKEVSlz
Portillo was saying it must be hard for older MPs to put up with receiving the same amount as their younger colleagues, when Bottomley was saying it must be harder for younger MPs.
They can’t even get their story straight!
And the comparison with GPs doesn’t work, either, because doctors are paid according to the amount of time they work and MPs aren’t:
An MP gets paid over £6000 a month even if they only work one hour MPs pay should be paid by the hour like the rest of us.
— Jen Wood – est optimum simpliciter (@unojen_wood) October 7, 2021
This Writer doubts it would work if we paid MPs by the hour; it would just give them another opportunity to submit false claims (expenses scandal, anybody?).
Bottomley deserves all the sympathy he received from satirical songwriter Mitch Benn:
For most of the rest of us, £82,000 a year is an impossible dream. That’s why Bottomley has received a huge amount of criticism for his selfish words. Here’s one of the milder rebukes.
Still, Boris Johnson likes to talk about “levelling up” and he’s currently waffling about wages to anybody who can still be bothered to listen.
So, what about it, Boris? The Father of the House thinks wages should rise.
How about accommodating him, and increasing the National Living Wage to £100k all around?
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The flag and the faker: Keir Starmer has revealed his true – blue – colour in an 11,500-word rejection of Labour Party values, and is attacking party members both electorally and psychologically. He must be stopped before he does any more damage – and could face a challenge to his leadership if he pushes ahead with these vicious plans.
This Writer was practically salivating with anticipation about what I might read on BBC News after discovering the following on Twitter:
🚨 | NEW: During a key meeting between Trade Union leaders and the Labour leadership today, Keir Starmer was told in no uncertain terms that he needs to stop trying to rig rules in his favour, and instead "refocus the Labour party on the country and concerns of working people".
If this is what he stands for then it could have been done in far fewer than 11,500 words – and that’s down from his original claim that it would be 14,000 (let’s thank providence for small mercies)!
The short version is that Starmer has abandoned all Labour Party values. He proposes a “contribution” society – not in which contributions go from those according to their means, to those according to their needs – but (if I’m reading this right) from those who can be made to work the hardest to the UK as a whole (by which I’m presuming he means rich people like himself).
And he’s suddenly fully in favour of privatisation:
So, after everything that has happened today, LOTO now briefing that Starmer’s pamphlet marks a shift away from re-nationalising railways, water, Royal Mail and broadband providers. He writes “the role of government is to be a partner to private enterprise, not stifle it.” Mad.
And there’s a nasty return to the old “strivers v skivers” rhetoric that demonised a generation of people with disabilities and long-term illnesses and sent many of them to early graves because of benefit refusals on the basis of trumped-up excuses.
Some commentators have referred to fascist language that is reminiscent of Vichy France.
Others were more visual in their condemnation:
Keir Starmer’s 11,500 word essay has been released.
Personally I think that, if it’s supposed to be an essay, we should give it a mark and a comment:
D-
Needs improvement.
The BBC story unaccountably neglects to mention the meeting with the unions, so let’s see what we can get from elsewhere.
It seems that not even one union supported Starmer’s plan to return to an “electoral college” system of voting in Labour leadership elections, that would steal a huge amount of power from party members by depriving them of their individual votes altogether, and hand a huge amount to MPs – the party’s 200+ elected representatives would have one-third of the vote.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise – Starmer’s offer would not have benefited the unions in any way so they were able to reject it without any qualms:
Even under the electoral college, trade union members have one member one vote in their section. They have minds of their own. Often, they don't vote for the candidate their union recommends (e.g. they voted for Blair). This change won't give union leaderships any more leverage.
Because of that, over about a decade, trade unions, including, importantly, the GMB, worked hard to unshackle themselves from this system so leadership and deputy leadership candidates more responsive to their members' needs had a chance. This rule change undoes all that work.
Starmer's change also reintroduces some ridiculous anomalies, which several of the people who seem to be supporting it used to say were intolerable. Because this has been sprung on the party, none of this has been considered…
Will, horror of horrors, supporters of proscribed groups who have only just been expelled from Labour get a say over the next Labour leader through their trade union?
There's no answer, because it's just a factional power grab.
And of course, handing veto powers to 200 high-earning middle-class MPs will do nothing to make Labour relevant to working-class people.
Now: we had understood that, if he didn’t get enough support from the unions (or indeed any, as has happened), Starmer would scrap the plan and would not take it to the NEC for inclusion in the agenda for the annual conference at the weekend.
It seems that claim was a lie.
So my understanding is Starmer is bringing his leadership stitch up plan to the party's National Executive Committee on Friday, despite it having being rejected by unions, and his team are not even looking for a deal, but as one source says, "doubling down".
I think Starmer is panicking. He reckons this will be his only chance to force through the changes he needs to secure his position as leader.
You see, Starmer’s hired guns at the Governance and Legal Unit have apparently been busily despatching notices of suspension to constituency party delegates, in order to ‘fix’ the result of conference votes.
What kind of 'democratic reforms' have to be forced through by anti-democratic means?
Recipients of these letters are being told, it seems, that the reasons for the suspension of their membership will only be revealed after the conference, in what must be a breach of investigatory rules that is also attacking them financially (because they’ll already have paid for transport and accommodation at the Brighton-based conference) and psychologically:
To understand, you’d have to walk in the shoes of activists who’ve dedicated their lives to making the world a better, more equal, more peaceful place; to facing down racism, often at great personal cost & given countless hours to educating the next generation. (2/6)
Of course, this has always happened to good people. Socialists & trade unionists have always faced attack – some physical, some mental – but in a world where social media captures everything, that shaming is now both context-free & public at the same time. (4/6)
I’ve said it many times before, but the Labour Party as an organisation cannot go on exposing their members (unpaid volunteers for the party, remember) to this reckless, vicious treatment, whilst remaining silent, or worse, complicit. It’s beyond unacceptable. (6/6)
As a victim of this treatment, I can confirm the truth of Mr Sellers’s words.
So Starmer has launched an attack against the Labour movement, on several fronts: against the trade unions, by snubbing them and ignoring their wishes; against party members, by pressing on with his plan to disenfranchise them while also subjecting them to the torture of the disciplinary process; and to the wider Labour-supporting electorate by betraying everything the party should represent, in his scummy little screed.
Fortunately it seems he’s not going to have it all his own way.
The unions will oppose his plans – and that’s half the conference vote against him before he has even made his first proposal. More than half, if he has deliberately suspended a significant number of delegates.
The remaining delegates – if they’re worth a farthing – will want to reject his plan in solidarity with their wronged colleagues. Right, delegates?
And even some Labour MPs are preparing to rebel against this insult to democracy. Starmer may think this is bad enough:
Strange to think that these shenanigans all started because Starmer was worried about losing the vote to confirm his despotic acting general secretary David Evans in the role that has made him despised across the UK.
Whatever happens, Evans is toast.
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Apt: Keir Starmer reckons he was named after original Labour leader Hardie – but can anyone doubt that his illustrious forerunner might have said these words, if confronted with evidence of Starmer’s abysmal performance.
What else is NuLabour’s suit-in-chief lying about?
Starmer is on the record as saying he opposes ‘fire and rehire’ – the practice of firing employees, only to offer them their old jobs at a significantly reduced pay rate and/or with worsened working conditions.
But at yesterday’s (July 20) meeting of Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee, he pushed through a plan to axe 90 full-time jobs, while also taking on 30-50 staff on short-term contracts.
That’s ‘fire and rehire’ because you know some of the axed staff will have been doing the same work that the new employees will be asked to do – and some of these jobs will be occupied by the same people.
And what work will they be doing?
They will be identifying members of the Labour Party whose left-wing/socialist tendencies make them likely candidates to be victims of Starmer’s next purge.
But Starmer promised he would not attack party members too – didn’t he?
We already have such a man making a complete mess of running the UK.
Nobody is going to vote for Labour if it is only offering a Hobson’s Choice of the same evils with a different face.
POSTSCRIPT: You’ll notice that the 90 Labour staff who lost their jobs were the lowest-paid. This is because Labour refused to take a single penny from the salaries of its overpaid elite senior apparatchiks:
If there’s one quote that captures liberal ideology it would the one below. They choose to make 25% of their staff redundant (almost all the lowest paid) but won’t take a single penny off the bloated salaries of their senior management. pic.twitter.com/qDuPbmpWvg
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Maureen Lipman: this is an old image from 2018 because she honestly doesn’t rate the time it would take me to get a new one.
Once upon a time, Maureen Lipman was best-known as a legend among her fellow actors. Oh, and as Beattie from the British Telecom ads.
Now she’s best known for quitting the Labour Party – multiple times, apparently – and today for quitting actors’ union Equity.
Here’s Metro:
Coronation Street actress Dame Maureen Lipman has resigned from Equity, the actors’ union, after the organisation urged members to join a pro-Palestine march, it has been claimed.
‘I’m going to resign and I’m also going to ask for my £1000 a year membership fees to be given back to me, and I’m going to send it a charity for the victims on both sides,’ she told [The Telegraph].
‘I didn’t join a political union. I joined a union to protect its members. You don’t dictate to artists what they believe in, and don’t incite them to join a mob.’
This Writer is sure that the 200,000 people who took part in the “mostly peaceful” event in London last weekend will be nonplussed to learn that Lipman has branded them a “mob”.
And while some may say she is right to ask, “Where is [Equity president] Maureen Beattie on the Uyghurs, Rohingyas, the Sudanese, the Yemenites?” some of us applaud the decision to take a stand on a topical issue.
And when there’s a major demo for Yemenites and the others, I for one will look forward to seeing Equity representatives standing alongside everybody else.
A few misguided souls have supported Lipman’s stand:
Congrats to Dame Maureen Lipman for quitting the actors' union Equity after 54 years following the union president urging people to sign a petition calling for sanctions against Israel. Lipman says the union is "stacked full of Corbynistas".
I wonder whether she feels validated by the support of a former journalist who, as editor of The Sun, falsely accused Liverpool supporters of responsibility for the Hillsborough disaster?
And, as she is falsely accusing Equity of drumming up support for a “mob”, I can only surmise that she does.
Perhaps she prefers the statement by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which falsely claimed that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza happened because that overwhelmingly better-armed nation, supported as it is by the weaponsmiths of the UK and the USA, needed to defend itself against some home-made fireworks that mostly rebounded from the so-called Iron Wall.
Before reading this, let’s remember that the violence happened because Israeli soldiers had been attacking residents of Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem, turfing them out of their homes in what’s known as ethnic cleansing, and had invaded the Al Aqsa Mosque, hitting worshippers there with rubber bullets and stun grenades:
Equity have taken a moral stand against the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush 🟨🟥🥀🇵🇸 (@WarmongerHodges) May 25, 2021
Strangely enough, accusing Jews in the UK of being more loyal to the people they know in Israel, has been described to us all as an anti-Semitic trope. Draw your own conclusions on what this says about the Board of Deputies.
Would you appreciate some more rational responses?
Some have reminded us that Lipman spent the last few years threatening to quit Labour over the false claims that the party had become a hotbed of anti-Semitism:
What with Maureen Lipman leaving the actors union Equity presumably its that time of the year when she leaves the Labour party again? Or is that twice a year now?
In fact it seems this isn’t the usual time of year for Lipman to quit Labour – that’s October or November, as far as I can tell.
Others have pointed out that Lipman’s stand is a contradiction: by opposing Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, she supported anti-Semite Boris Johnson’s racist Conservative Party back into power…
Maureen Lipman doing her comedy routine again. Supporting anti-Semites. Who knew? pic.twitter.com/yND94YVoXc
(If you don’t think Johnson is an anti-Semite, you need to read his novel 72 Virgins – or at least those parts of it that he stuffed with anti-Semitic tropes.)
… and by supporting apartheid Israel, she supported – well, read it for yourself:
This week, Israel has begun rounding up a new generation of Palestinian activists who led recent mass protests – a clear message from the Israeli state that resistance to apartheid will not be tolerated. https://t.co/ntQQevS5Du
As a Jew I'm disheartened that the likes of Maureen Lipman & #Israel do not seem to understand that a free, economically viable #Palestinian state living in peace with its Israeli neighbour is in everyone's best interest, including Israel's. Thankfully they are a dying breed.
— Bruce Paley Cofiwch Dryweryn #Corbyn 3.5% 🎸🏴☠️ (@ObrovskyTC) May 25, 2021
But the message that people have taken from her announcement is all too clear:
How the mighty have fallen. Lipman has brought a once-glittering career down to end in ashes.
Postscript: There is some good news:
Breaking news.
National treasures Maxine Peake and Miriam Margolyes will *not* be resigning from Equity because, unlike Maureen Lipman, they strongly oppose Israeli soldiers shooting 9-year-old Palestinian girls in the back in the name of "self defence".
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush 🟨🟥🥀🇵🇸 (@WarmongerHodges) May 25, 2021
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Keir Starmer: A suit, a haircut, and flag-waving fascism. Labour supporters – and the whole of the UK – deserve much, much better and we won’t get it from this gaslighting fake.
If Keir Starmer really thought he could deflect criticism by reshuffling his cabinet and removing any remaining socialists from control of the Labour Party, he was badly mistaken.
The following Twitter thread was written before the reshuffle but identifies the reasons Labour members and supporters are not going to accept Starmer’s leadership any more.
Already, CLPs (local party units) across the UK are preparing motions of “no confidence” in his leadership. Anticipating that the party’s unelected general secretary, David Evans, will undemocratically try to rule them “out of order”, they are being advised to frame them as motions of confidence, with wording like, “This party has 0.1 per cent confidence in Keir Starmer’s leadership” – and then vote against those motions to show that they don’t have any confidence in him at all.
“Roadside Mum”, below, provides many reasons party members have no confidence in the man who has been dubbed Labour’s worst ever leader, a betrayer of the values that brought the party into being and a deceiver who is trying to hoodwink voters into supporting the removal of their democratic rights.
These include:
The campaign to punish Labour left-wingers.
The campaign to silence criticism.
The erosion of Labour’s share of the electorate.
Starmer’s support for the loss of our right to protest.
Starmer’s attempt to gaslight us into thinking Jeremy Corbyn is responsible for Labour’s loss of support.
Starmer’s sustained support of Conservative policies and legislation.
Starmer’s support of the so-called Spycops Bill in particular.
Starmer’s adoption of fascist symbolism, in line with the Tories – flags, haircuts and suits preferred over socialist policies.
Efforts by right-wing Labour Party officers and representatives – many of them unelected – to disenfranchise party members and deny them representation.
And an attitude of entitlement that tries to tell us that we must accept Starmer sneering at us because he thinks he knows better.
There is even an addendum copying in a message, presumably from a Starmer supporter, actually proving the last point: “These elections are a lot more complicated than you think.” No, they’re not.
It’s a statement that insults the intelligence of “Roadside Mum” and every other Labour voter who expected – and deserved – better from Starmer, from his leadership team, and from every other party officer who enabled the betrayal that the party has endured for more than a year.
Labour won’t improve with the removal of left-wingers from positions of power and their replacement by anti-Semite-supporting fascists like Rachel Reeves, that’s for sure.
It can only get worse.
And the rot is seeping down from the top.
This is not simply about removing a bad leader.
It is about saving a political movement – and saving a nation from sliding into Boris Johnson-controlled fascism that Keir Starmer supports with all of his heart.
Here’s the thread. Read it for yourself.
I have been polite and I have been nice for a Really Long Fucking Time at this point (over a year). My patience just wore out.
At first I didn't have anything but defence for Keir Starmer because the initial Tory attacks were both bollocks and within my capacity to refute.
All the time, we are told put up with it, shut up for the greater good, if you don't accept this, you keep in power the most ruinous bunch of far right serpents ever to darken the corridors of power.
Keir Starmer does not give a flying fuck that the protest rights which brought into being every important social change of the last 2 centuries are being dismantled. Soon you will have no voice at all. At 10PM the night before that vote, he still was whipping to abstain.
Labour increased the vote share under Corbyn by record amounts in 2017 and even in 2019, he retained a greater vote share than either two leaders before him. The loss of seats was not in any way reflective of the support of the public and the way KS team has endlessly hammered/
I've watched Labour Leaks lay bare the lengths to which half this party is invested in ensuring that the working class British voter, upon who's blood, sweat and tears, this movement was founded, fought for, built and defended, may not ever experience actual representation.
Ummuna was of course on the list of Labour MPs who, all of about 6 months after Corbyn won in a LANDSLIDE accross every membership demographic, decided to try to take him out of power.
It backfired. Members strengthened Corbyn's majority even harder. But/
And you know who else was in that coup too don't you.
Starmer.
Starmer, deep down, is no better.
Ultimately, he thinks he knows what you want more than you do. You only *think* you want not to be legally murdered by spycops and other agents of the state. Silly you.
I am done being nice. I voted for an arsehole today. An arsehole with 6000 Twitter likes from telling people like me, that we only believe in fairness because we are inferiors.
Inferiors like our forebears who literally built the services, that arsehole wants to control.
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Snout in the trough (all right – bucket): perhaps the Conservatives should rename themselves the Corruption Party?
A lobbyist is running the Tory government’s inquiry into the Greensill scandal.
A lobbyist is running Parliament’s watchdog on lobbying.
And more people in public life are being identified as employees of the collapsed finance firm Greensill Capital, meaning their loyalties were divided between working for the public good and making profits for this private company. And this is just one firm. How many other MPs, former MPs and people in charge of other public organisations are also enmired in this corruption?
Consider this:
For those who can’t read images well, it says the government review of lobbying is being headed by Nigel Boardman, a consultant with law firm Slaughter & May – which lobbied against tightening lobbying laws.
It seems clear that the ‘fix’ is in – anyone who works for a firm that wants more freedom to lobby the government won’t find any corruption in David Cameron’s activities for Greensill, right?
Now let’s look at how Parliament got into a position where a former prime minister was able to insinuate himself into the corridors of power on behalf of his new employer and influence current ministers to provide Greensill with huge amounts of public money. Why didn’t the lobbying watchdog spot it and put a stop to it?
Hogan-Howe – now a Lord, and therefore well-placed to put in a good word for his employers – has only been discovered because of the focus on Greensill.
But how many other firms have their fingers in government pies via members of Parliament they just happen to have in their pockets?
And how much are our MPs and former MPs earning from second (or third, or fourth, or however many) jobs with these organisations?
Yes, there’s a Parliamentary inquiry happening, independently of Boris Johnson’s Slaughter & May-led whitewash, but that won’t go far enough either.
We need a full investigation into the current employment situations of all former MPs. Do they work for firms that have government contracts and, if so, how were those contracts secured?
Let’s find out how deep the rot has set in.
Because if we don’t – and if we don’t then clear it all out – then we may as well accept that Tory corruption is here to stay; it isn’t only part of the fabric of political life – it is the heart of the UK’s politics.
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Long-term readers of This Site will remember Mo Stewart, the researcher into the harm being caused to claimants of sickness and disability benefits by successive Conservative governments’ determination to convert the social security system to a for-profit insurance scheme.
After the 2019 general election, she became concerned that the huge new influx of Conservative MPs – along with those from other political parties – were ignorant of the harm that government policies had caused.
So she wrote a briefing paper specifically addressing the issue and sent it to all of them.
Labour’s John McDonnell has apparently offered to arrange a debate on the subject, if possible.
Whether or not that happens, Mo has provided me with a copy of the document so we all have a record of what these MPs should know – and so they won’t be able to plead ignorance.
And here it is:
Social Policy Abused: The Creation Of Preventable Harm
Executive Summary
The Preventable Harm Project (the Project) ran for ten years and closed in November 2019, with the evidence identified within the Project findings widely promoted during 2019/20. The Project identified the bipartisan political ambition to eventually remove the UK welfare state, to be replaced by private income replacement health insurance. In order to remove the welfare state, it was first necessary to remove the psychological security provided by the welfare state. This was achieved by the adoption of a flawed disability assessment model, and the manipulation of the general public aided by the tabloid press, that successfully demonised claimants of disability benefit(s). Large numbers of suicides linked to the adoption of the Work Capability Assessment are overlooked by the Department for Work and Pensions, and successive Rule 43 ‘prevention of future deaths’ Coroners’ reports, highlighting the link between the Work Capability Assessment and suicides, have also been disregarded. The Work Capability Assessment was fatally flawed by design and should be abolished, and the departmental intimidation of disability benefit claimants should be outlawed.
Introduction: The Creation of Preventable Harm
1. Introduced in 2008 to restrict access to the new Employment and Support Allowance long-term out-of-work disability benefit, the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) is a ‘non-medical functional assessment’ that disregards all clinical opinion. Since 2010, the WCA has been linked to the deaths of thousands of chronically ill and disabled benefit claimants who applied for state financial support when unable to work, yet were deemed to be ‘fit for work’ by the fatally flawed WCA.
2. Twelve years since the adoption of the WCA there is an identified and growing mental health crisis within the UK linked to claimants of disability benefit(s), and a disturbing increase in suicides directly linked to the WCA, as identified by published academic research but dismissed by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
“The worst thing, I find, is realising that I am forced into looking for a life that I want but have no chance of having. I seriously feel I may kill myself because being sick, having next to no money, no life, no future, no cure, constant pain and constant disapproval defeats me.”
An extract from the ‘Fulfilling Potential? ESA and the fate of the Work-Related Activity Group’ project, conducted by Catherine Hale and published by MIND and the Centre for Welfare Reform.
3. In both 2006 and 2007 the government’s own expert medical panel warned the administration not to adopt the WCA, advising that it was ‘not fit for purpose’ due to the predictable negative impact on public mental health. The expert panel’s clinical opinion was disregarded by the DWP. The removal of clinical opinion from disability assessment using the WCA guaranteed that many of those in greatest need were destined to die, as the state removed the financial and the psychological security of a guaranteed income when unfit to work.
4. There have been two official Rule 43 ‘prevention of future deaths’ Coroners’ reports linking the WCA to suicides, with other Coroners expressing concern at inquests due to the identified enforced suffering of the deceased by the DWP. Coroners’ official Rule 43 reports and identified concerns are disregarded by the DWP, whose social policy reforms since 2010 created preventable harm to those in greatest need linked to intimidation. The constant threat of sanctions, which removes all disability benefit income, leaves the chronically ill and disabled community in need of state financial support living in fear of the DWP.
5. Regardless of the Jobcentre being advised that a claimant is unable to attend an interview due to ill health, disabled claimants are routinely met with an ‘institutional reluctance’ to meet their needs, as identified in Coroner’s reports. Jobcentre staff’s decisions to sanction a claimant can cause death by starvation, in C21st UK, when all income is removed for a period of weeks or months. No-one is held to account when some of those in greatest need are starved to death by the state.
6. The WCA is used to limit access to all state disability funding including the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), Personal Independence Payment (PIP), Universal Credit and the War Pensions for older working-age disabled veterans, which is a military medical pension not an out-of-work benefit.
7. The WCA is regularly and inappropriately referred to as a ‘medical assessment’ by the DWP, MPs, academics, policy advisers and journalists. The WCA is not a medical assessment and is totally unrelated to clinical opinion. The adoption of the WCA is identified as being attributed to psychocoercion by successive administrations, to remove what once was the psychological security of the welfare state for anyone who is unfit to work.
8. Identified in 2008 by the American Association of Justice as being the second worst insurance company in America, the corporate insurance giant Unum (Provident) Insurance have been advisers to the UK government since 1992, and were appointed as the official UK government consultants for ‘welfare claims management’ from 1994. Concerned by the increase in various conditions that could not be confirmed by blood tests or x-rays, such as chronic fatigue syndrome, Unum Insurance adopted a biopsychosocial (BPS) model of disability assessment, which disregards all clinical opinion.
9. Unum advised the UK government as to how to adopt a similar BPS assessment model in the UK, and funded an assessment centre at Cardiff University for this purpose. The DWP adopted the discredited Waddell-Aylward BPS model of assessment for the WCA, which disregards diagnosis, prognosis, past medical history and prescribed medicines. The human consequences of using the WCA is that many of those in greatest need would die, with many driven to suicide with a common perception that anyone claiming to be unfit to work, and in need of state financial support, will be persecuted by the DWP. The Waddell-Aylward BPS model of assessment failed all academic scrutiny.
Policy recommendations
• Since 2009 every clinical authority in the UK have demanded that the WCA should be abolished. This includes the British Medical Association, the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Nurses and the British Psychological Society. Introduced by the private health insurance industry, disregarding clinical opinion was always dangerous. The WCA is fatally flawed and should be abolished without further delay, to be replaced with a disability assessment that considers clinical opinion, with many assessments being paper-based, so that the chronically ill and disabled community are no longer intimidated by the DWP.
Research findings
• In order to remove the past psychological security provided by the welfare state it was necessary to discredit vast numbers of disability benefit claimants, aided by the tabloid press, which helped to manipulate the British public.
• Social policies were adopted with a fiscal priority whilst disregarding health and wellbeing, which policymakers failed to take into account when recommending policies which were harmful.
• Since 2010 the social policy reforms, and the additional austerity measures, were destined to have a catastrophic and often fatal consequence for many of those in greatest need. Thousands of chronically ill and disabled benefit claimants have died when ‘killed by the state,’ with a 2014 NHS Digital Adult Psychiatry Morbidity Survey report that identified that almost 50 percent of ESA disability benefit claimants had attempted suicide at some point.
• Prosecuted disability hate crimes, including murder, increased by 213 percent between 2010-2016, during the coalition government’s term in office.
• The relationship between physical health and mental health is well documented. The numbers of benefit claimants who have perished due to social policies since 2010 will never be known.
• Published in September 2016 ‘Cash Not Care: the planned demolition of the UK welfare state’ provides the results of the first six years of independent disability studies research for the Preventable Harm Project. The book is now recommended reading for various social policy, health and legal courses at universities in the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
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And, indeed, if you think it actually qualifies as work.
Board members on the UK’s largest financial companies have enjoyed an average pay rise of 79 per cent since 2009.
This means that during the decade of austerity, while you were probably facing a pay freeze – meaning a real-terms drop in income, median pay for the three highest earning non-executive directors (NEDs) in each of the FTSE 100’s 17 financial firms surged from £90,700 in 2009 to £162,000 in 2019.
They received this for attending – just attending, not necessarily contributing to – an average of 26 meetings a year.
The largest increases have been at Lloyds Banking Group, where top NEDs are earning 257% more than in 2009; the London Stock Exchange Group, where there has been a 219% rise; and investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown, where fees have jumped 170%.
Remember, these firms don’t actually contribute anything to our lives – they don’t make anything, and such services as they do supply are highly exclusive.
They make money by betting on whether other businesses will do well or badly. That’s what investment is, after all – a wager that providing money to those firms now will bring a profitable return later.
It’s a game for the very rich.
And it depends on keeping the people who do the actual work very poor.
Payroll is always the largest cost to any firm so, if they are to provide an expected return to investors from firms like Lloyds Banking Group, the London Stock Exchange Group, Hargreaves Lansdown, Phoenix, Barclays, Prudential, Aviva, Admira, RSA, NatWest and so on, businesses have to keep pay low.
So these 79 per cent pay increases for finance firms arise from their board members attaching themselves to you like leeches and sucking out all the benefits that you should be enjoying.
Remember that as you endure the hardships you’ll be asked to face in 2021.
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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