Tag Archives: paper

Johnson’s Covid policies are killing his core voters but the mass media are hiding it

Get the message? You won’t see Boris Johnson actually sitting over a dying pensioner making rude gestures at them (and the rest of us), but he might as well. Until pensioners realise that his policies on Covid-19 add up to the same, he can carry on – aided by the papers and TV channels that keep the over-60s tranquillised – easy prey for the cull.

Simon Wren-Lewis makes an excellent point here:

The people most at risk from this pandemic are those who predominantly voted this government in.

The article points out that people aged over 60 are most at risk from Covid-19. There are 16 million of them and 60 per cent – 9.6 million – voted for Boris Johnson and his Conservatives.

Meanwhile, Johnson has made mistake – if you can call them that – after mistake and more than 70,000 people have died, according to official figures. Unofficial figures put the number much higher.

How can a government that lived through March 2020 not just repeat the same mistakes again, but make worse mistakes?

When a Prime Minister, supported by his ministers, ignores medical advice again and again, the responsibility rests entirely with him.

Now comes the really nasty bit: the mass media – your friendly daily paper; your cuddly favourite TV channel – has been misleading those at-risk over-60s by hiding the truth from them.

The newspapers they read are doing their best to hide the truth from them, the broadcast media with a few honorable exceptions chooses not to enlighten them, and recently it appears the government has resorted to trying to hide what is happening in hospitals.

So those over 60 will continue to vote for a government that through its failures is literally killing them.

How perverse.

READ: mainly macro: Why the UK’s COVID crisis should be personal for so many Tory voters

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What has happened to the missing £50 BILLION in UK banknotes?

Where has all the money gone? With £50 million missing, someone would need a pretty big sofa to have it all stashed down the back.

MPs are getting their knickers in a knot after around three-quarters of all the UK banknotes in existence dropped out of circulation.

The House of Commons’ public accounts committee has said the cash – £50 billion of it – might be supporting the so-called “shadow economy”.

It could also be overseas or tucked away in homes, unreported.

This Writer thinks there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation. For example, does anybody remember, when the crisis flared up, we were told that we could be unwittingly transmitting the virus via money, which passes unwashed through many pairs of hands as it is exchanged for goods and services?

Also, people no longer trust the banks and have been stockpiling cash to cope with the Covid crisis – and ahead of the financial disaster that we call Brexit.

Remember that banks provide information on your savings to the government, and this can affect the value of benefit claims.

At a time when huge numbers of people are trying to claim state support to get through this short-term pandemic, doesn’t it make financial sense to keep as much as possible in reserve, in the form of physical notes?

I’m not saying it’s an attitude that is particularly helpful to governments – but it has become abundantly clear since March that Boris Johnson’s wishes are not the same as ours.

Personally, I don’t have anything stashed away. As This Site has been able to keep operating in spite of the pandemic, I have not had reason to. Most of my transactions are carried out via card.

But I know I’m among the lucky ones. Millions of people have lost income – or lost their jobs altogether – only to find that they do not qualify for the support schemes offered by Johnson.

What are they supposed to do – lie down and die?

Most people have a bit more life in them than that.

They’ll do what they have to, in order to survive.

If that means stashing away some cash in the belief that the legendary “rainy day” has come, then that’s what they’ll do.

If it means resorting to this “shadow economy”, they’ll do that as well – and Johnson will have been the one who pushed them to it.

Of course, some of us have been having fun with it:

Source: Call for probe into ‘missing’ £50bn of UK cash – BBC News

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BUSTED: Sunday Times ‘investigation’ into Tory coronavirus failures was public knowledge WEEKS ago

We’re supposed to be shocked by new revelations in the Sunday Times – but the facts have been public knowledge for weeks and months.

How strange to see the Sunday Times publishing an ‘investigation’ into the Tory government’s failure to get to grips with the coronavirus crisis, when This Writer published the same information, weeks ago, on my personal blog site!

The ST piece is behind a paywall so I can’t be sure, but from what I can tell (thank you Owen Jones on Twitter), I covered all the major points.

But there seems to be a huge amount of background detail missing.

Why is nothing said about the fact that the government let all of its strategies to counter a pandemic like the coronavirus fall out-of-date, nearly a decade ago?

Where are the facts about Exercise Cygnus – the test to estimate the impact of a hypothetical influenza pandemic on the United Kingdom that concluded that such a pandemic would cause the country’s health system to collapse, due to a lack of resources. The Tory government of the day refused to buy the recommended equipment on the grounds that it would cost too much.

All those details – and more – are in my piece.

Don’t be fooled by the Sunday Times article.

It seems there’s no new information in it that makes any difference at all.

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Tories get ‘multiple ballots’ for leader vote. Can they resist the urge to cheat?

This is absolutely priceless.

Bosses of both Jeremy Hunt’s and Boris Johnson’s campaign to become leader of the Conservative Party – and prime minister in the process – have begged party members who have received two ballot papers to use only one of them.

It seems that more than 1,000 people could have multiple forms, according to a BBC report citing a party source.

That’s a lot of temptation for the party whose members are known for doing anything to get what they want.

Cheating in a major vote?

I wouldn’t put it past them.

Better count all the papers once they’re in, Tories. Better get someone independent to do it for you. And that includes the spoiled ones.

Source: Tory members sent ‘multiple ballots’ for leadership vote | Politics | The Guardian

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Media bias, fake news – and why you should support our campaign against false anti-Semitism claims

Distraction techniques: The Tory media don’t want you thinking about Islamophobia in the Conservative Party so they have been making up false stories about anti-Semitism by Labour members.

The Mainly Macro blog by Oxford professor Simon Wren-Lewis, in its latest article, discusses the shocking and shameful bias of the national press in reporting anti-Semitism and Islamophobia – and comes to some forthright conclusions about the irresponsibility of the right-wing press.

This Site would support those conclusions, as This Writer has been a victim of right-wing press irresponsibility on this matter.

I am waiting for the green light to make a major announcement about my own case, but in the meantime, consider this:

“The antisemitism story was notable for two important reasons. First religious organisations had publicly complained. Second these complaints had been supported by prominent Labour figures. However exactly the same applies to Islamophobia,” the Mainly Macro article states. “But to suggest equivalence between the two stories is misleading. The Conservatives’ Islamophobia problem is a much bigger issue for two reasons.”

The first is that Conservatives including Home Secretary Sajid Javid (who comes from a Muslim background but does not practise the religion) have attacked the Muslim Council of Britain – attacked it, claiming it harbours members with unacceptable views on extremism and is not representative of British Muslims. Labour has not attacked any Jewish organisations but has engaged in discussions with them.

Secondly, the Conservatives ran an anti-Muslim campaign in their attempt to win the most recent London Mayoral election, which was won by Sadiq Khan, a Muslim. As Professor Wren-Lewis notes: “David Cameron even libeled an ex-Imam in his attempts to link Khan to Muslim terrorism.”

So the news story about the Conservative Party and Islamophobia is more serious than that of Labour anti-Semitism because the attitude of the Tory leadership has been demonstrably anti-Muslim. But, as Mainly Macro has it, “the balance on the BBC has been the other way around, with far more coverage of the latter than the former.”

The reason appears to be that “BBC News tends to ‘follow the story’” – meaning it follows up articles in the pro-Conservative national newspapers. They have suppressed the Tory Islamophobia story and – as readers of This Site know – fabricated lies to boost their claims of Labour anti-Semitism.

We are left with an obvious conclusion:

The right-wing press is supporting Tory religious bigotry and racism – and will continue to do so unless you help put a stop to it.

One way of achieving this is to support my campaign to clear my own name of the libellous accusations of anti-Semitism that have been falsely made by the right-wing press.

If we can undermine their claims about anti-Semitism, we will strengthen questions about their silence on Islamophobia.

It seems to be a ‘dead cat’ strategy. When concerns about Tory Islamophobia come up, the Tory press starts agitating about anti-Semitism – metaphorically throwing a dead cat on the table and saying, “Never mind that – look at this!”

It’s not an argument – especially when the ‘dead cat’ on the table isn’t real, such as the false claim of anti-Semitism against me.

So please visit my crowdfunding page and pledge as much as you can spare.

You will be supporting justice, fighting Tory lies and helping to promote honesty in our hate-filled right-wing media.

Visit our JustGiving page to help Vox Political’s Mike Sivier fight anti-Semitism libels in court


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The DWP has been silencing news stories that criticise its policies – here’s the proof

The DWP closely monitors media output, and compiles a “sentiment of articles” chart every month to make sure that they receive positive coverage.

The DWP closely monitors media output, and compiles a “sentiment of articles” chart every month to make sure that they receive positive coverage.

Ministers have been doing their best to pretend that they never do anything wrong – and have then done their best to hide the fact that this is what they’re doing.

Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about the DWP?

Officers for the Department claimed that the information was “commercially sensitive”, of all things.

That just leads one to ask why. What commercial contracts would this information prejudice?

Clearly the Information Commissioner was not convinced by whatever argument the DWP produced, because we have our information now.

This Blog is one of the social media sources that offers almost exclusively negative coverage of the Department for Work and Pensions, and it is interesting to note how the DWP treated one of my biggest stories.

In August 2015 the DWP “proactively briefed” the media about the long-awaited statistics which showed the amount of ESA claimants who had died after being found fit for work.

I had no way of knowing this at the time, but this action was successful in ‘spiking’ coverage in the FT (whose editors should have known better), the Express (this is more understandable) and on ITV.

The DWP’s commentary stated that the most critical initial coverage of the statistics misrepresented their details. This was because the DWP had done its best to present them in a manner that would be misunderstood. Still, it was able to secure corrections in the Grauniad and the Mirror which weakened the story.

We are left with a clear message: The DWP is more concerned with distorting the facts – or preventing them from being known at all – than with the facts themselves.

It does not matter to Conservative ministers that their policies have killed thousands of people.

They just want to make sure nobody finds out about it.

Following a 13 month battle, the DWP have finally been forced to release secret documents illustrating the tactics they use to control and manipulate the media.

The documents reveal that the DWP monitors and analyses both mainstream and social media to reduce and manage negative coverage.

And even more worryingly, the documents show the DWP have managed to kill hundreds of stories by making sure that they are not reported.

Almost every month since March 2014 the DWP communications team has produced “Media Evaluation Reports” detailing the ways and methods that the DWP controls negative stories about them in the media.

The reports give valuable insight into a department that is unhealthily focused on the press coverage [it receives].

The fact that they have managed to kill so many stories that they don’t approve of raises serious questions as to how the department is exercising its influence over the free press.

The role of journalism is to bring people the truth behind the DWP’s rhetoric, not to act as the chief mouthpiece for it.

Source: Secret DWP Documents Prove They Silenced The Media From Running Stories They Didn’t Approve Of | EvolvePolitics.com

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Petition for DWP to drop appeal against revealing benefit deaths tops 50,000

Mark Wood starved to death four months after a DWP medical assessment found him fit for work. He lived in David Cameron's Witney constituency.

Mark Wood starved to death four months after a DWP medical assessment found him fit for work. He lived in David Cameron’s Witney constituency.

There is a recent addition to Twitter which claims to offer a chance to catch up on relevant information, called “While you were away”, or some such. It seems events have transpired to create a similar effect for This Writer.

Yr Obdt Srvt has been helping Mrs Mike with family business that necessitated a trip to Hereford yesterday. Upon our return, late into the evening, certain developments became clear:

  • A petition on Change.org, launched to support Vox Political‘s demand for the Department for Work and Pensions to publish the number of people who have died while in receipt of incapacity benefits since November 2011, has received nearly 60,000 signatures (at the time of writing); and
  • The Information Commissioner’s Office has sent a notification that any information on the tribunal hearing triggered by the DWP’s appeal against that demand should be requested from the Information Tribunal. This Writer should write to that organisation in order to be “joined as a party to the appeal”.

The Information Tribunal will be contacted by this writer shortly!

The petition had been gathering roughly 1,000 signatures a day since it was launched last week (after a piece on the DWP’s appeal was published in Ros Wynne-Jones’s Real Britain column in the Daily Mirror). This is a very healthy performance in itself, but it has now gone stratospheric after Ros published notification of its existence in this week’s column, and after Change.org decided to promote it heavily. It’s entirely possible that support from one or two celebrities on Twitter might have helped, too…

Maggie Zolobajluk, who started the petition, is a former CAB adviser who has prepared countless presentations re benefits including the changes and their impact of the Coalitions changes to benefit and housing legislation. She now has a blog, Telling it as it is.

She emailed me to say a press officer at the ICO had told her the tribunal hearing has not yet been listed. He said it will probably be a paper hearing and she may be able to submit the petition to the hearing. He estimated that it would be October before the appeal would be heard.

Firstly, the possibility of a paper hearing (in which all submissions are documentary and no evidence is heard from people attending in person) is extremely unwelcome. The DWP requested this in its appeal and This Writer intends to oppose it. We are entitled to an oral hearing, that will provide the opportunity to cross-examine the DWP representative. It is in the interests of justice to have an oral hearing, yet the ICO seems happy to accept one on paper instead.

Secondly, submitting a petition on the day of the hearing seems a little late. Wouldn’t it be better to send it in at a time before the hearing, in order to give the Tribunal a chance to take action?

Readers of this blog may be interested to know that the DWP hired a Treasury barrister, whose salary has been estimated at £49,000 per year, to prepare its appeal. This seems entirely out of proportion, considering it may reject a Freedom of Information request of the cost of responding exceeds £600.

Just how free can government information be, if it is prepared to waste thousands of pounds in preventing its release?

This matter is nowhere near ending yet – and in the meantime the death count lurches ever-higher.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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Labour and Green candidates left off postal ballot papers

Postal ballot papers for Hull East. Notice that no Labour or Green candidates are listed.

Postal ballot papers for Hull East. Notice that no Labour or Green candidates are listed.

High-profile Labour MP Karl Turner’s name has been omitted from 480 postal ballot papers in his Hull East constituency due to what the local council is calling an “inadvertent mistake”.

Yeah, right.

If that is the case, why were Mr Turner and Green candidate Sarah Walpole only missed off the papers for people who registered to vote after April 1? Doesn’t that imply that somebody removed their names deliberately?

Hull City Council had better check every single ballot paper it is preparing for election day, to prevent any further “inadvertent mistake”. Mr Turner was elected with a majority of more than 8,000, so the potential loss of 480 votes was unlikely to affect him. The loss of who-knows-how-many votes on the day might be a different matter!

Mr Turner told the BBC the mistake was “concerning” because people were “being denied the right to vote and take part in the democratic process”.

He added: “I have had calls from people in East Hull who are going on holiday this week and are angry that they are unable to vote. I have asked Hull City Council to urgently look into the matter and review their processes surrounding sending out ballot papers.”

The campaign is moving from desperation into criminality now, it seems. This Writer does not believe for one moment that those ballot papers were altered by “mistake”.

Expect further incidents like that in the last days of the campaign – and we can be sure plenty of last-minute voters will be locked out of their polling stations again, on the stroke of 10pm, just like last time. This gives Conservative candidates an edge over others because Tory voters are whipped into voting as early as possible.

In other news, it seems more than 70,000 ballot papers destined for Hastings and Rye, in East Sussex, were stolen along with the van that was transporting them there. Hastings Borough Council says it is putting measures in place to ensure that none of the stolen papers can be used, and we are being asked to believe that the loss of the papers was incidental to the theft of the van.

Yeah, right. But opportunism is a wonderful thing. Let’s see what happens there.

Both these events could lead to electoral fraud, which is a crime. Vox Political readers are urged to be alert for any possible “inadvertent mistake” in your own constituency and report anything suspicious to the Returning Officer (usually your local council’s chief executive) and to the police.

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A Russian Joke about Jeremy Clarkson – Beastrabban\’s Weblog

Jeremy Clarkson

Earlier this evening, in my post about Mike’s article asking that we all look out for and care for those, who will be alone, disabled, depressed and vulnerable this Christmas, I told an old Russian joke about the propagandistic nature of the Soviet press, writes The Beast.

The joke’s a pun on the names of the two major Soviet papers, Izvestia, ‘News’, and Pravda, ‘Truth’. The joke ran, ‘There’s no truth in the ‘News’, and no news in the ‘Truth”. I remarked that the situation was actually reversing, and that despite the considerable restrictions on the press in Putin’s Russia, the Russian press seemed to want to present a far more objective picture of the suffering of Britain’s poor than our own, supposedly unbiased, ‘free’ press.

Well, Communism has fallen, but Russian journalists were swift to point out that, at least when it came to the road infrastructure, capitalism still suffered from glaring contradictions as per Marxist ideology. The Russian newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, succinctly summarised this with a joke about Jeremy Clarkson.

Read it on Beastrabban\’s Weblog – if you think Clarkson’s a joke anyway, this will make you laugh.

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Work Capability Assessment faces replacement if Labour wins election

'To see ourselves as others see us': It is hard to stand on a platform when you can't even stand - but the social media are giving disabled people a stronger voice and a chance to take the spotlight, rather than the sidelines.

‘To see ourselves as others see us’: It is hard to stand on a platform when you can’t even stand – but the social media are giving disabled people a stronger voice and a chance to take the spotlight, rather than the sidelines.

The Labour Party is likely to scrap the hated Work Capability Assessment for people claiming sickness and disability benefits, replacing it with “something that looks very different” – but you haven’t heard anything about it on the news, have you?

Labour’s shadow minister for disabled people, Kate Green, said she would be treating with “great seriousness” the Beyond the Barriers report by the Spartacus online campaigning network, which concluded that the WCA is “inaccurate, unreliable and invalid” – but you won’t have heard anything about that on the TV or radio, or read it in the papers either.

Vox Political found it on the Centre for Independent Living’s website, The Fed Online, after being pointed to it by a link on social media. The article – from Friday (April 11) – said Beyond the Barriers was “backed by evidence from more than 1,200 sick and disabled people”, and drew on the best of the systems used by seven other countries.

It said the report “demands a new system that is ‘radical and ambitious’ and ‘inspires, enables and encourages’ disabled people, rather than the current ‘punishing, penalty-based system'”.

Kate Green said she would not want to scrap the assessment immediately, but would want to replace it as soon as possible.

She criticised the points-based format of the current, computer-based test, and its focus on a one-off “snapshot” of each claimant’s condition – which takes no account of fluctuating ailments.

But she also warned that the Department for Work and Pensions has been pushed into a “very fragile” state by its Conservative Secretary of State, Iain Duncan Smith, with his hopeless Universal Credit project and problems with the new Personal Independence Payment and ESA – both of which were related to the work capability assessment.

She said a Labour government would have to be careful not to “knock the whole department over completely” with any changes.

This blog would rather have the whole DWP dismantled, with its work turned over to a new organisation – or several. It seems clear that the attitudes of the department’s heads, along with the damaging work ethic they have propogated, make the DWP unsustainable in its current form.

For the rest of the article, visit this site.

LabourList, the UK’s top political blog, added its support to Beyond the Barriers, with columnist Luke Akehurst stating: “It cogently promotes a viable policy alternative which protects the interests of disabled people without being profligate with public money.”

He continues: “The report calls for: ‘Work for those who can. Security for those who can’t. Support for all.’

“This is the language of Labour’s values. We could do a lot worse than implementing this report’s proposals if we get into government.

“Read the report. Get angry about what the Government has done to disabled people. And get organised to ensure our Party takes these excellent ideas, from disabled people themselves, seriously.”

The rest of that article is here.

How sad that Beyond the Barriers – and Labour’s reaction to it – has been ignored en masse by the news media. It seems a sensible response to this issue is unwanted in those areas.

And a senior member of the Labour Party supporting this sensible attitude would be a long way off-script for the right-wing press, whose mogul bosses need to depict Labour as even more crazed than the loonies in blue ties that their papers and TV stations support.

Still, there it is.

This blog now awaits the fevered response from commenters who have remained determined to trash Labour’s policies.

Let’s see you get your ignorance out, in the face of all the evidence.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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