Tag Archives: public

Privatisation of local government begins – and why it will cost us far too much

Michael Gove: he’s using the few months of government left to the Tories to do as much damage to public services as possible.

Michael Gove has taken another major Tory step towards making public services unaffordable – and his party unelectable.

He has transferred more than £14 million of Middlesbrough Council assets to the Middlesbrough Development Corporation, a private company chaired by Tory Lord Ben Houchen.

So it seems the bankrupting of local councils was a deliberate Tory policy, intended to force the sale or transfer of more public assets into private hands.

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This is problematic on at least three levels:

Firstly, the MDC’s parent organisation, the Tees Valley Combined Authority, is the subject of long-running allegations against it – as described in a report commissioned by the Tory government.

Next: loss of assets means loss of revenue. In local government, assets are property that are used to provide services – that sometimes come with a charge. If they aren’t available to local government any more, then it means less money will come to councils.

Finally: this means the public will be asked to pay more for public services – because the council will have to rent the assets it has lost, back from the new owner.

This is simply a way of passing public money over to the extremely rich, who don’t even have to pay for it. And we all know:

Here’s a quick TV clip in which Houchen was nailed by the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire, proving that he is a liar and his corporations can’t be trusted:

Here’s the bottom line:

Funnily enough, the process described above was discussed on This Site, only a week ago, after economist Gary Stevenson told us why privatisation puts up our taxes. I wrote:

Neoliberal governments since 1979 have sold off all the property they own, meaning that – in order to provide services – they have to rent property from the rich people to whom they sold it all.

This is, of course, a ridiculous proposition because renting property from rich people is much more expensive than owning it oneself. We can see this from the sale of council housing; now councils don’t have any low-cost, low-rent houses, more and more people are becoming homeless because they can’t pay the sky-high rents demanded by private landlords, or the sky-high mortgages demanded by lenders.

So ordinary working people are now having to pay enormous taxes in order to allow our governments to pay for these services at exorbitant prices, because they’ve given all the means of providing these services to the rich.

Gary’s answer is to tax the rich, so they have to sell off their ill-gotten government assets in order to make ends meet.

The problem is that Tories like Michael Gove want the rich to own public assets and charge the Earth for the use of them; it’s an opportunity to say public services are too expensive and close them down, hugely disadvantaging the poor and laying them open to exploitation – by the rich.

Now that Gary has exposed the strategy, we can all see it for what it is.


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Jeremy Hunt misled us about the National Debt

Jeremy Hunt’s last Budget looks set to go down in history as the biggest pack of lies ever told by a politician in one statement.

It’s hard to know where to start picking at his hour-long stream of nonsense, but here’s one item the BBC has teased out, on the national debt. I refer you to “head of statistics” Robert Cuffe:

In his Budget statement, the Chancellor said that the UK’s debt was “falling in line with our fiscal rules”.

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The government’s rules only require that it falls once in the next five years: between 2028 and 2029.

In other years of the forecast, debt is not set to fall – it will rise three times and hold flat once.

The UK’s debt is forecast to be higher five years from now.

People will have heard him say that the National Debt is falling when in fact it isn’t.

Possibly the worst aspect of this is that it doesn’t really matter. It would be a worry if the UK was unable to pay interest on the debt, or it spiralled out of control, causing an inflation crisis. But the recent increase in inflation had nothing to do with government debt.

The UK’s current problems arise from what the government has been doing with the money it has been spending, that has caused the debt – giving it to very rich friends of the Tory Party, in return for nothing at all, meaning that they have had the wherewithal to buy the nation’s assets – businesses and property – pricing the rest of us out of our own market.

Hunt didn’t have a word to say about all that because it suits him to hide the fact that deliberate government actions have made most of us worse-off.


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MPs give themselves £48k pay rise to defend against a threat that doesn’t exist

Backhander: politicians in Westminster have found another way to bleed public funds into their own hands – a fund to defend against a claimed threat of violence against them… that does not exist.

UK Home Secretary James Cleverly has announced Parliament’s response to claims that MPs are being threatened by “Islamists” or “Muslims” or “pro-Palestine protesters” or whoever the bogeyman is today.

It’s £31 million, to be divided between MPs so they can pay for extra security, which comes to almost £48,000 per MP – although it seems likely to be used to help other politicians too:

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People have drawn the obvious conclusion:

With no clear evidence against any individual or organisation, we are seeing MPs diverting public money away from public services and the good of the nation and towards themselves – for no reason.

And take careful note of the comment about Diane Abbott – who has received more abuse and threats than every other MP in Parliament combined, but was never offered any publicly-funded protection before now. Is it because she doesn’t kowtow to the rich and powerful?

The conclusion – about the Tory and Labour MPs who made this possible – is painfully clear:

They are lining their own pockets while they can.


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Condolences for Palestine’s ambassador amid fears that Israel is preparing worse atrocities

This Writer had no idea, when preparing my earlier article about the death of Sidra Hassouna, that she was one of the relatives mentioned by Palestine’s ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, in the video clip of him that I used.

Here is his message confirming what happened:

And here is the video clip. In it, he states, “Israel has massacred from 60 to 100 – we don’t know the exact number because, still, people are under rubble including the family of my own – of my wife: her aunt, the husband, all the children, all the grandchildren are gone.”

Now we know they are gone forever – victims of the so-called Superbowl Massacre, in which Israel bombed a refugee camp in Rafah to provide fake cover for a fake rescue operation, to be able to say two hostages had been rescued (who had in fact been rescued days before).

This Site can only offer deepest sympathies to Mr Zomlot. Nobody should ever have to see the children of their family in the way he has been forced to see them, due to Israel’s brutal genocide – an atrocity that is made worse by the clear delight that the Israeli military forces take in killing civilian children, women and men (see my previous article).

I think of the children in my own family, and the younger friends I have, and I consider how I would feel if such savagery was inflicted on them. To understand the horror of what is happening in Rafah, you should do the same. And remember: there is no need for this to happen. There were always better ways of responding to the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

No: Israeli forces are murdering children and dismembering their bodies because they want to.

What else should we expect when their political leaders are encouraging them?

Such killings of female and child non-combatants are now routine, with white flags ignored by the IDF, as this Sky News report makes clear. Note also how the IDF refuses to comment on its atrocities when confronted with the facts:

Others have also offered condolences to Mr Zomlot – both public figures and members of the public:

Yes. Isn’t it strange that the UK’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has had nothing to say about this?

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In fairness, Foreign Secretary David Cameron has pointed out that, as the occupying power that controls everything going into and out of Gaza, Israel has a duty to civilians there:

But neither Cameron nor anybody else in the UK government is lifting a finger to stop the slaughter – instead we provide funds and weapons to Israel, and as such the UK is aiding and abetting genocide.

The public is speaking, though: there is a petition calling on the government to revoke all arms export licences to Israel. Please sign. This Writer has no doubt that the government will ignore it (money talks) but it may demonstrate the strength of public feeling if it gains a significant number of signatures:

It seems more – and worse – is on the way. With 1.5 million people now trapped in Rafah and Israeli forces closing in for a ground assault – on civilian children, women and men, remember – they have no way out.

Attacks on Rafah are already taking place, as we have seen, and the Israeli forces are also taking time to murder civilians who remain in other parts of Gaza. If anybody – especially our UK politicians – remains under any illusion that the IDF is under orders to protect civilians, you should unburden yourself of that illusion now.

For example: remember Nasser Hospital, which is a protected site under the Geneva Convention; it is a war crime to attack anybody there?

I already reported on the way a child was shot in front of the hospital, by snipers who then targeted anybody who tried to reach him.

It seems the IDF then sent a handcuffed Palestinian prisoner into the hospital to order everybody there to evacuate – and then they murdered him when he returned:

Meanwhile – apparently for fun – Israel bombed the hospital:

And now – faced with no choice – patients and civilians have left the hospital, under the waiting guns of the Israeli butchers. I fear that Mark Seddon’s words, below, may be prophetic:

The IDF’s actions have been condemned by Medicins sans Frontieres, who wrote:

Since the war in Gaza began, our medical teams and patients have been forced to evacuate nine different health care facilities in the Gaza Strip, after coming under fire from tanks, artillery, fighter jets, snipers and ground troops, or being subject to an evacuation order. Medical staff and patients have been arrested, abused and killed. Provision of healthcare and scaling up lifesaving assistance is being made impossible by the intensity of Israel’s bombings and shelling, as well as intense fighting.

Warring parties must always respect and allow unhindered access to medical facilities and their surroundings and protect medical staff and patients.

MSF reiterates its call for an immediate ceasefire that will spare the lives of civilians, allow adequate and vital access to food and other basic commodities, and re-establish the healthcare system on which the survival of the people of Gaza depends.

After This Site showed video of Israelis partying in the street in order to prevent aid from getting to Gaza, it seems others are moving to prevent it from entering by other routes:

Here in the UK, those of us who are of good conscience are still trying to make our own will clear, and push our leaders into doing the right thing.

So we boycott Israeli goods in our shops:

If you’ve got a mobile phone (who hasn’t, these days?) but don’t yet have the No Thanks app that tells you whether an item was produced by Israel and should be boycotted, get it from the Google Play store or other appropriate app store now.

And the Scottish National Party is forcing another ceasefire vote in Parliament, likely to happen as an Opposition Day motion next Wednesday (February 21).

Here’s Stephen Flynn, leader of the SNP in the House of Commons:

“History will judge all of us by our actions,” he says in the clip.

This Site’s actions are clear to all. Will you take action too?


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Public opinion turns further against Israel after Rafah slaughter. So what?

Now we have a name for the little girl whose body, hanging from a window with its legs shredded and absent below the knee, has become synonymous with Israel’s so-called Superbowl Massacre:

Here’s video of Sidra while she was still among the living:

This was Sidra on February 12, and I make no apology for the graphic nature of what follows; Israel should apologise:

We’re told that the Superbowl Massacre was set up under the pretence that it was cover for a raid on Hamas to rescue two Israeli hostages; Israel ran an advert during the Superbowl with the tagline “Bring back our dads”, and then magically produced two such “dads”.

But it has been claimed that these “dads” had actually been rescued on February 2, and there was no raid to rescue anybody; this was simply an excuse for the massacre.

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You can see the wider-scale impact of it in the post below:

This is not the limit of the “pure evil” that Israel has been visiting on the people of Palestine, though. Here are a few more examples:

 

Alongside the murders – looting:

And lies. Israel is apparently claiming that it is helping send aid into Gaza, but the clip being used as evidence of this is from two years ago:

In fact, it seems Israelis are blocking aid from entering Gaza:

Looking at the evidence, some of us have been working backwards to find out what Israel has actually been doing. Here’s what they found:

It’s certainly true that the United States, courtesy of President ‘Genocide Joe’ Biden, has sent huge amounts of money to Israel. enabling that country to buy more weapons and ammunition to use on Palestinians:

And the US government has been roundly criticised for it.

But this is not solely a war on Gaza:

Yes it is ethnic cleansing. Yes it is genocide. Yes it is a holocaust.

And, being perpetrated by Jewish people from Israel, it means that the leaders of that country have learned nothing at all from the Holocaust inflicted on them by Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.

It is, therefore, understandable for people to have become more than a little upset at this turn of events:

Yes that is correct – the UK’s government wholeheartedly supports what happened to Sidra Hassouna. On your behalf, it is saying that you wanted her to be blown to pieces by what’s most likely to have been an American bomb, triggered by an Israeli grunt. The UK and the US are drenched in the blood of Gazan children:

Also covered in blood are the Labour MPs who supported this. One of them, Rachel Reeves, was confronted by a member of the public – and ignored her:

Backtracking a little, remember the claim that Israel had persuaded the UK and the US to de-fund the only organisation capable of preventing a famine in Gaza – refugee care organisation UNRWA – with lies?

Here’s Israel’s liar-in-chief, Eylon Levy, failing to provide any evidence that UNRWA workers were involved in the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel:

And this satirical post highlights the differences between what journalists have been told and what they know to be factually accurate:

You may be asking, what’s the situation now?

Here are a few reports:

Palestine’s ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, has been consistently excellent in putting forward the case for his people to receive help from the UK, rather than hostility:

But perhaps if your heart is too hard for you to listen to these adults, it will soften at the words of these Palestinian youngsters:

They want help, so they will be able to go home again. This may be difficult if their homes are now rubble. And the UK’s government remains hell-bent on supporting Israel.

But the tide of public opinion has turned further against our government – not just here in the UK but across the world, wherever Israel is receiving indiscriminate support for its genocide.

Ordinary people are refusing to accept it – here in the UK:

In the Netherlands:

In Japan:

And, yes, in the United States:

So far, our pleas for our governments to stop fuelling genocide have fallen on deaf ears.

It seems they will not heed the plight of children like Sidra Hassouna, and will instead continue funding Israel so Benjamin Netanyahu can continue buying the bombs and bullets that blew her apart.

But with public opposition growing, the tide will turn. How long will it be before we have a government that demands justice for Sidra; justice for Gaza?


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Labour is planning to betray its supporters by cutting taxes for the rich

Taxes are for poor people: under Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, it seems this is the Labour Party’s attitude.

At a time when everybody with any sense is screaming for governments to tax the rich equitably, Keir Starmer’s Labour is promising to cut taxes for billionaires.

Look:

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Here’s where you can see Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves confirming the policy:

This is a Labour Party that has lost its way and may never find it again.


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Israel supporters hold demonstration – on much smaller scale than pro-Palestine marchers

This is revealing.

Supporters of Israel and its genocide in Gaza held a demonstration in London – and the pictures tell the full story of how well it went in comparison to that held by supporters of Palestine.

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Here’s the Israel demo. Notice the low camera angle to disguise the numbers. A better shot follows immediately below:

And now here’s the pro-Palestine demo:


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Did Sunak ‘undermine trust’ with false claim he cut public debt? Judge for yourself

Rishi Sunak: he said his government had reduced the national debt but this is not true. It hasn’t happened yet – and may not happen at all, even in the way that was actually predicted.

Rishi Sunak is in trouble again – with the UK Statistics Authority, this time – for being unable to talk straight.

(In all honesty, if the UK had wanted “straight-talking, honest politics”, voters would have elected Jeremy Corbyn prime minister in 2019 – right?)

Here’s the story. Keep it handy for when you’re preparing to vote in the next general election:

The head of the UK’s official statistics watchdog has challenged Rishi Sunak over his claim to have reduced public debt, saying the prime minister’s definition of this was so specific and limited that it risked being misleading for voters.

Sir Robert Chote, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), said Sunak’s claims last month “may have undermined trust in the government’s use of statistics and quantitative analysis in this area”.

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Writing to Sarah Olney, the Liberal Democrats’ Treasury spokesperson, Chote said the Office for Statistics Regulation, the UKSA’s regulatory arm, would “work with the prime minister’s office to ensure further statements on debt levels adhere to our guidance on intelligent transparency”.

Olney raised the issue with Chote’s office after Sunak said “debt is falling” in a No 10 social media video posted on 7 November, the day of the king’s speech, and then said “we have indeed reduced debt” during prime minister’s questions on 22 November, the day of the autumn statement.

Downing Street told the UKSA that both claims referenced forecasts by the Office for Budget Responsibility that net debt would be falling as a proportion of GDP during the final year of the five-year forecast, in the context of the autumn statement meaning 2027-28.

In both cases this was mainly happening due to changes to the OBR’s fiscal projections, with government decisions on tax and spending actually making debt higher.

Chote’s letter noted that while it was fair to use debt as a proportion of GDP rather than absolute numbers, the “average person in the street” would most likely have taken Sunak’s statement to mean that debt was already dropping and that government decisions had helped do this – “neither of which is the case”.

“This has clearly been a source of confusion and may have undermined trust in the government’s use of statistics and quantitative analysis in this area,” he wrote.

“Members of the public cannot be expected to understand the minutiae of public finance statistics and the precise combination of definitional choices that might need to be made for a particular claim to be true.”

The gist is that if Gross Domestic Product – the amount of money created by the whole of the UK – increases by 2027-28, then the national debt will be reduced as a proportion of that money.

It will not be reduced – in real terms – in any way.

And in any case, Sunak was claiming to have achieved a reduction in public debt – now. That hasn’t happened at all:

So Sunak was lying – wasn’t he?

Source: Sunak challenged by watchdog over claim to have cut public debt | Rishi Sunak | The Guardian


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Tory austerity is set to continue under a Keir Starmer government. How will that help?

Keir Starmer and money: he’ll carry on enjoying lots of it but you’ll have to wait before any government he runs will give you a sniff of it.

Tory austerity will not go away under a Keir Starmer-led Labour government, he has warned.

Starmer says he will continue to impose “huge constraints” on public spending if he becomes prime minister:

This could create a problem for him – because many voters have had more than enough of being deprived of the necessities of life by politicians who have diverted huge amounts of money into their own pockets.

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Economist Richard Murphy has been running a poll, asking – well, see for yourself. Vote if you feel like it:

Never say “never”, of course; Starmer is only saying he won’t raise public spending if the government has to borrow hugely more than it takes in tax, because he doesn’t want to increase debt and/or inflation (at least, This Writer expects those to be the reasons).

His mission (he likes missions) over the first period of a Labour-led Parliament, then, should be to establish ways of boosting spending on what the public needs, either by diverting it from places it should not be going (ending corruption), by closing tax loopholes to ensure that tax avoidance and evasion by the super-rich is ended and they fund the services that help to make them so rich, or by supporting policies that increase the wealth of the whole nation, starting with the poorest of us.

There is just one problem that could stymie all those good ideas, and here it is:

He’s Keir Starmer.

If you were still planning to vote Labour at the next general election, that should be enough reason to turn elsewhere. Do your homework, find out who’s available in your constituency, and vote for the policies that will help you.


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Is public opinion finally turning as Israel’s lies and atrocities come to light?

Rishi Sunak: “Netanyahu’s poodle” digs his heels in, during a Parliamentary debate. But how long can he ignore growing public opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza?

Rishi Sunak offered Israel unequivocal support in its “defence” against the Hamas attack of October 7 – a “defence” that has already been more than three times more deadly than the attack itself, while doing nothing to end any threat Hamas poses to that country.

He said he spoke for the British people. But there is growing evidence that, once again, he is speaking only for himself.

Here’s Peter Oborne to explain some of it:

Here’s SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn to explain that, in supporting Israeli war crimes, Sunak can only be speaking for himself. At the end of the clip, Sunak rises to repeat the falsehood that Israel is only defending itself. We can see that this is not true:

It seems the people of the UK are tired of hearing that Israel has a right to defend itself when the numbers coming out of Palestine are so horrific:

We want a ceasefire and we want efforts to resolve this crisis peacefully – and it seems clear that feeling for this is growing among our politicians:

The message isn’t getting through to Israel’s representatives, though. Tzipi Hotovely, that country’s far-right-wing Ambassador to the UK, told Piers Morgan that the UK was happy to bomb civilians in order to defeat Nazis, as if that justifies her country’s actions now.

She’s wrong, by the way. The bombing of Dresden was hugely controversial at the time and became more so after World War II. And morality in the UK has changed in the decades since, to the point where we would not do such a thing again.

We, as a nation, have grown. Why has Israel not?

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The apologists are still out in force, with Israel supporter Andrew Neil giving full-throated support to the latest reel of video clips to come from Tel Aviv, purportedly showing Hamas atrocities committed on October 7:

This Writer actually responded to his post, pointing out that it’s hard to believe a post like this when it starts with a lie. If these people were killed by Hamas, it wasn’t because they were Jewish but because they were Israeli settlers who had stolen Palestinian property (as that group would have seen it).

If this footage was taken on October 7, why was it not released immediately it was taken from the Hamas bodies? Israel was desperate to justify itself in the early days after the attack but resorted to lies instead. Even if it is real, the footage is hard to believe in this context.

Finally – and also on context – I asked: can we see some footage from IDF bodycams of what they’ve been doing to kill – what is it? – 250 Palestinians in the year up to October 7? Or has that all gone missing?

I wasn’t the only one asking the last question – although others were able to add more detail to it:

Here’s another response on similar lines:

We must remember, also, that Israeli propaganda about the way Hamas has treated Israeli citizens is being disproved with every hostage released by that organisation:

So we come back to the possibilities for the future. Jeremy Corbyn stood up in the House of Commons, demanded to know why the UK’s representative in the United Nations had been instructed to abstain on a call for a humanitarian ceasefire, and called for positive steps toward peace – but his words fell on deaf ears. Here are a couple of possible explanations for that:

Let us not forget that violence begets violence. What Israel is doing now will not bring an end to hostilities between that country and Palestinians – it will only make them worse. Israeli politicians know this, and are devastating the area anyway.

Meanwhile, in other countries, Israel’s aggression and accusations are more obviously untrue:

Control of the narrative is slipping away from Israel – and also from its supporters like Rishi Sunak.

If he doesn’t speak for the United Kingdom, then for whom is he speaking?

And isn’t it past time he was made to do what we want?


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