If Liz Truss thinks she’s fooling anybody, she is heading for a nasty awakening!
In a BBC interview, she was asked if she was on the side of bankers or the rest of us – and avoided answering.
Everybody knows this means she is on the side of the bankers and the rich – and her approach shows us that she cannot be trusted.
Watch the clip:
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Wasn’t it Jeremy Corbyn who said the best way to gauge a nation’s wealth isn’t to measure the fortunes of the richest but to check on the well-being of the poorest?
By the former standard, the UK is in fact among the top three countries; by the latter, it is doing very badly indeed. By contrast, Norway is higher than us from the top percentile to the bottom.
If you’re in the UK and have the average income, then by comparison with average incomes across the world, this is only the 12th richest country.
Sadly, this information has been made available only in a newspaper that is aimed at and read by the very wealthy; they get the facts. The rest of us get propaganda from the BBC and the mass media moguls.
You are being conned every which way.
Here’s the video clip that inspired the above:
Bear it in mind:
If you’re in hardship now, you’d be better-off in Slovenia.
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Rishi Sunak: he has admitted that, as Chancellor, he diverted cash away from people who desperately needed it and into affluent areas.
Wow. This is a blunder and a half, isn’t it?
Sunak was saying that a funding formula developed by the Blair/Brown Labour governments had prioritised deprived urban areas over affluent rural conurbations.
His argument was that he had restored the proper balance, giving the rich back the funding they deserved.
But of course this is nonsense. The point of the ‘Levelling-up’ policy on which the Conservatives won the 2019 general election is to redistribute national funds to the places that most deserve them – such as deprived urban areas – rather than leaving them with the well-off.
In fact, that’s the point of any form of taxation.
Now this video has emerged, serious questions are being asked about the suitability of this man to have been involved in any form of government at all, let alone holding the highest office in the land.
Labour has written to Levelling Up Secretary Greg Clark asking him to “urgently investigate” the changes made by Mr Sunak to funding formulas.
And spokespeople for leadership rival Liz Truss have been quick to capitalise on the howler, saying ‘Levelling-up’ is not about laying dividing lines between one area of the country and another.
Sadly, in an election that is to be decided entirely by members of the Conservative Party, a candidate who prioritises the rich is probably extremely attractive.
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Another chance missed: Keir Starmer’s Marr Show letdown was the first of two broadcasting balls-ups for the Neoliberal Democrat Labour leader last week. His party is losing members because the people won’t support him – so he’s running to the rich.
It should have been a cakewalk.
Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have screwed up the United Kingdom in the worst possible ways since before the December 2019 election. The leader of the main Opposition party should have had hearts and minds of the public, there for the taking.
But the leader in question was Keir Starmer, currently in charge of the Other Conservative Party, currently masquerading under the misnomer ‘Labour Party’.
When he gave his interview to Andrew Marr, the representative example of the public on Channel 4’s Gogglebox took a look – and the verdict was damning:
You're a laughing stock, @Keir_Starmer. Get a grip or get out!
"If this was a drinking game and you drank every time he said 'I support the government' you'd be like passed out by now, wouldn't yer?" #Gogglebox (1/2) pic.twitter.com/LGdky3tyGP
One doesn’t have to imagine how Starmer responded to this; in fact, one imagines this parody account has come close to the truth:
I've just spoken to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and we have agreed to class Gogglebox as a terrorist organisation. Anyone who supports Gogglebox will be thrown out of the Labour Party and reported to the police for practising socialism.
Result: well, party membership was haemorrhaging already but that flood hasn’t abated!
As a result, it seems Starmer’s cash is running out. How ironic that, now the party has been re-taken by the wing that reckons it’s better with money than the Left, it has spaffed all the extra cash accrued by the Left-wing leader up the wall.
So, in order to get money, it appears Starmer has copied the Tories again:
Exc: Labour under Keir Starmer is offering wealthy donors "invite-only strategy updates"
It comes as he seeks to woo those alienated by Corbyn
Per brochure those who "give at the highest level" go on a "journey" including a welcome party hosted by Angela Rayner at conference pic.twitter.com/CTafclI1jv
Think of the Conservative Party’s annual Black and White Ball fundraiser.
Of course, this information comes from Gabriel Pogrund*, who I wouldn’t normally trust to tell me what the weather’s like, but as there appears to be documentary evidence of this, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.
Starmer has also sent personalised letters to lapsed party donors:
Moreover: His version of New Labour is nowhere near as investible as Tony Blair’s; he has made too many public relations blunders (again, he’s like the Tories in that respect). The Andrew Marr/Gogglebox incident is only the latest.
And if the rich donors don’t come back, they won’t be able to give Starmer any more excuses to steer Labour even further into Toryism.
Then who will Starmer ask for help?
That’s why, while This Writer can’t go back there (at least, not at the moment), I tend to agree with the following:
Jeremy Corbyn ensured the Labour Party was ‘For The Many’.
Keir Starmer wants it to be influenced by ‘the few’.
Jeremy was right. Keir is wrong.
It’s OUR party- not the party of a privileged rich few- stay and fight for it and cause them every headache possible.
Monitor this situation closely. There may yet be a chance to bring democracy back to the UK.
*Pogrund wrote a story about This Writer in The Sunday Times that was riddled with falsehoods, for which that newspaper was forced to publish a lengthy “correction and clarification” almost a year later (it took me that long to go through the IPSO complaints process).
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Voter confusion: a survey has shown that voters’ policy preferences indicate they should have put Labour in power, not the Tories.
The Independent reckons Boris Johnson is facing a dilemma after a survey found voters who gave him his election landslide want him to raise taxes on the rich.
There’s just one problem:
That was never a Conservative manifesto promise so he’s under no obligation to do anything of the sort.
Did these people not realise that they were voting for the promises the Tories put in their manifesto?
Voters have never had the right to make demands on a government after putting it in power.
And I know it must seem unfair, considering governments very rarely act according to their manifestos. Theresa May’s 2017 manifesto was obsolete almost before it was published.
And in Johnson’s case, the dilemma isn’t even “Does he deliver for Conservative voters or business leaders?” as the news website claims.
Johnson will deliver for himself, as always. If anybody else profits, that’ll be their good fortune.
But the survey does make one thing very clear.
Voters who want government intervention in the economy, tax rises for the wealthy and spending on public services made a mistake voting Tory.
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The discrepancy between men in the richest and poorest areas has also widened by about three months, driven by a faster rise in life expectancy for the wealthy.
Alarmingly, decade-on-decade improvements in life expectancy began to tail off in 2011 – a shock change blamed by some experts on the government’s harsh austerity programme.
Alex Cunningham, the Labour MP who raised the issue, said: “The prime minister is renowned for making things up” – and there wasn’t much that BoJob could say in response.
And Ed Davey, the acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, said: “If the prime minister really wants to unite the country, he has to learn how to tell the truth.”
If we believe that, then the country will never be united because there’s no chance of Boris Johnson ever learning to tell the truth!
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How sympathetic of our tax guardians! And if I get caught evading my tax responsibilities, will I receive the same treatment?
No?
Then this is unfair and must end.
It also seems contradictory. Look:
A senior HMRC official admitted that the UK tax authority panders to the rich and powerful when chasing them for tax evasion so they can avoid “reputational damage“.
If you ever had any doubt that in Britain there really is “one rule for them, and another for the rest of us“, this utterly astonishing admission by the UK’s tax authority proves it.
Richard Las, a deputy director of HMRC, said that criminal prosecutions are not the “default option” for cases of tax evasion, money laundering or fraud. He went on to say:
“When deciding whether to deploy our resources, we try to understand what motivates different types of offenders. For example some tax offenders are very wealthy, prominent members of the community. We know that these types of people do not want the reputational damage of custodial sentences, and we can use that to our advantage.”
I could understand this strategy if it resulted in a larger repayment to the Treasury, but the evidence indicates that it does not.
Can HMRC point to anyone who has paid more back to the state as a result of the organisation using the threat of reputational damage “to our advantage”? No – because that would make the whole exercise pointless.
And consider this: Is HMRC admitting it blackmails the rich?
The more one thinks about the HMRC statement, the less credible it seems.
This government department is apparently admitting blackmailing rich people with the threat of reputational damage if they don’t pay up – but we have no evidence to show that they have paid everything they owe.
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A new report says inequality is costing the NHS millions of pounds a year [Image: Daniel Atkin/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo].
The evidence is conclusive, wouldn’t you say?
We know that Conservative policies have caused a regression in the nation’s health, generally.
People have less cash, which means they are less able to feed themselves properly, leading to malnutrition.
This, in turn, has led to the return of the so-called ‘Victorian’ diseases – gout, TB, measles, scurvy, rickets and whooping cough. The Conservatives are undoubtedly delighted by this, as they have long desired a return to Victorian-era values.
Employment policies mean people are finding it extremely hard to earn more cash, meaning not only are they unable to feed themselves properly, but they also increased levels of stress due to the odds being stacked against them.
And the increasingly unreasonable demands of employers – emboldened by the government – mean people are running themselves ragged simply trying to keep their jobs.
I have elaborated on the ways this is harmful to the economy in several articles over the past few years.
Those of us who are unemployed, in low-paying or in part-time employment are placed under increasing pressure to get work or increase our working hours and pay, by the benefit system. This also attacks our mental and physical health.
And those of us who are physically unable to get a job because of long-term illness, or who need particular aids to keep a job, because of disability, are also placed under huge pressures that adversely affect our health.
These are all consequences of Conservative government policy that affect the poor, rather than the rich – and all impact on our health in a hugely harmful way.
Yet the Conservative government insists it wants to improve our health. Clearly, that is a lie.
If it wasn’t, the Conservatives would not have opened up our National Health Service to private, profit-making corporations who take public money and put it straight into their bank accounts as profit, without it being used to improve the health of a single person.
They would not have deprived the health service of the funding it really needs, making it vulnerable to crisis after crisis that actually harms its ability to help people. We’re currently enduring the latest winter crisis, with a huge strain being placed on hospital accident and emergency departments.
There is a better way.
It’s simple: Encourage employers to provide secure, well-paid jobs that allow people to buy healthy, nutritious food. Happy employees produce better products and more profits, making it possible to hire more employees at superior rates.
The increase in high-quality jobs would mean an increase in tax revenue, easing the pressure on the benefit system, meaning there would be no reason for the extra pressures under which the current system places them and halting the relentless grind that is so harmful to their health.
The end result is less pressure on the health service, meaning it would no longer be over-stretched and may be more able to cope – not only with normal running issues but even with the crises that arise from time to time.
Everybody wins – even the profiteers, because they’ll be making more money.
Of course, every plan is fine until it is put into action and runs into the unexpected, but that’s why the government has so many clever employees in the civil service, along with so many clever advisors in think tanks and Universities.
So you see: The problems here are entirely manufactured by and on behalf of the Conservative Government of the United Kingdom – deliberately.
The Tories want you to be ill-fed, stressed, sick, mentally ill, and unable to access adequate healthcare.
It is a deliberate policy of theirs, although probably not one that you’ll ever see headlined in their manifesto.
But we must judge people on their actions, and the results of those actions, rather than on their words.
Children from poor families are far more likely to end up in hospital A&E departments or need emergency treatment for conditions such as asthma and diabetes, according to shocking figures revealing the consequences of poverty in Britain.
In findings that senior doctors said showed the “devastating impact” of deprivation on child health, the nation’s poorest teenagers were found to be almost 70 per cent more likely to appear in A&E than their less deprived counterparts.
A comprehensive study that examined hundreds of thousands of patient records found inequalities between children from the poorest and richest families were costing the NHS hundreds of millions a year and contributing to pressures on the health system.
Across the 10 most common conditions leading to unplanned hospital visits, the rates of admission were consistently highest among children and young people from the most deprived areas. The study, by the Nuffield Trust, found inequalities in some areas of child health had increased over the last decade in England, despite advances in care.
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Many of the donors dined secretly with Theresa May [Image: Rex Features].
The Tories can protest innocence all they like; what do YOU think these millionaires and billionaires discuss at these meals with ministers that they have bought with their hefty donations?
Call This Writer a cynic if you want, but I simply don’t think they discuss the weather.
Common sense suggests that, having spent a pretty penny propping up the Tories financially, these people will want a say in what those Tories do.
Sir Michael Hintze, the Brexiteer hedge fund billionaire is a regular at these lavish meals. He's handed out £4m to the Tories including more than £250,000 just 3 weeks after the election. Access to democracy is based on your bank balance.
Of course, this would conflict with the principle of democracy, in which the Tories would be expected to do in government what they promised in the manifesto that was supported by a large proportion of the voting public.
(That’s the manifesto that seems to have been whitewashed out of history, as you’ll remember.)
The suggestion of corruption is heightened by the fact that the Tories had to be pushed into complying with their promise to name Leaders Group meal guests, the fact that all of these guests are spectacularly rich Tory donors and none of them are poor, and the fact that the Tories refuse to disclose what was discussed and whether it had any effect on their policies.
What are we to conclude – if not that the only qualification needed, to have a say in the way the Tories run the country, is to be filthy rich?
Matters such as conscience and responsibility have no bearing on it.
Humiliated Tory chiefs have finally named dozens of super-rich donors who dined with Theresa May.
Guest lists were slipped out without fanfare on the Conservative Party’s website.
The new list names 64 donors who attended a Leader’s Group meal with Theresa May or a top minister between January and June 2017.
Billionaires who attended meals in that period include Bestway cash and carry chief executive Zameer Choudrey, JCB boss Lord Anthony Bamford and hedge fund tycoon Sir Michael Hintze.
The latest dinner was believed to have seen billionaires and tycoons dine on lobster and beef with the Tory leader just weeks ago.
The meal came just hours after the government confirmed millions of people’s benefits would be frozen for another year.
Despite the newly-published list the Tory party refuses to say what is discussed at the dinners, even if it touches on government policy.
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The obvious solution: The government should be helping build new social housing – not forcing up the prices of what little there is.
It is astonishing that we have the Daily Mail to thank for this revelation (although This Writer had a feeling this is what was happening; I couldn’t find the information, though).
Not only is ‘Help to Buy’ pushing up house prices as the supply of homes diminishes, it is also helping the rich buy houses, rather than those who don’t have the funds to buy a first home – the people for whom the scheme was said to be intended.
That’s why Philip Hammond is pumping another £10 billion into the scheme. It will push prices up well beyond your ability to buy, making it more accessible by the rich.
The rest of us will be at the mercy of private landlords, facing up to the forthcoming huge increase in social rents, or on the street – as intended.
Wealthy families are exploiting a £7billion government scheme aimed at first-time buyers.
Help to Buy doles out taxpayers’ money so househunters can secure a mortgage.
Almost 135,000 families have taken advantage since its launch in 2013. But four in ten recipients were earning more than £50,000 a year and one in ten was on at least £80,000.
More than 5,000 purchasers had six-figure incomes. Help to Buy has also been highly lucrative for builders and their bosses, accounting for a third of private sales of new homes.
Profits, share prices and executive bonuses have soared at firms including Barratt, Bellway and Taylor Wimpey. Jeff Fairburn, chief executive of Persimmon, where around half of sales are through Help to Buy, is in line for a £130million payout.
Academics said the scheme – given a £10billion further boost by Theresa May this week – was driving up house prices.
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