Damian Green: he described the claims against him as ‘untrue and deeply hurtful’, when they were made.
Let’s get this straight: the chairman of the committee overseeing the Online Safety Bill has recused himself because of serious sexual assault claims – to be replaced by an MP who lost his cabinet post for having porn on his Parliamentary computers.
Is Damian Green (for it is he) really the best person to see this legislation onto the Statute Book?
He has replaced Julian Knight, who is being investigated by police.
Green lost his Cabinet job in 2017 after breaching the Ministerial Code by making “inaccurate and misleading statements” suggesting he was unaware of indecent material on his parliamentary computer.
In his resignation letter Green said that while he “did not download or view pornography on my parliamentary computers” he “should have been clear in my press statements that police lawyers talked to my lawyers” about it in 2008 and then raised it in a subsequent phone call in 2013.
Wouldn’t it be better if the Culture, Media and Sport committee was chaired by somebody who didn’t have any allegations of dodgy sexual behaviour in their past – either online or in real life?
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Social media demon: it seems the new Online Safety Bill won’t protect anybody from abusive other users. So what good will it do?
Parts of a planned law to protect people using the Internet from seeing illegal material have been watered down – to protect free speech, it seems.
The government has removed a section of the Online Safety Bill that refers to “legal but harmful material”.
This means the largest, high-risk online platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, that would have been tasked with preventing adults from being exposed to content like self-harm, eating disorder and misogynistic posts will no longer have to.
Children will still be protected from such material, if the Bill is passed into law as planned before Parliament dissolves for the summer recess next year.
The change has been prompted by critics like Tory Kemi Badenoch who said the section on legal but harmful material was “legislating for hurt feelings” by demanding a crackdown on free speech.
In July, nine senior Conservatives, including former ministers Lord Frost, David Davis and Steve Baker, who has since returned to the government, wrote a letter to then Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, saying provision could be used to clamp down on free speech by a future Labour government.
Mr Davis has gone on to urge the government to axe other measures that could “undermine end-to-end encryption” that he said we all rely on to keep safe online.
He said measures permitting the government to direct firms to use technology to examine private messages were a threat to privacy and freedom of expression.
Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan said the revised Bill still offers “a triple shield of protection – so it’s certainly not weaker in any sense”.
This requires platforms to:
remove illegal content
remove material that violates their terms and conditions
give users controls to help them avoid seeing certain types of content to be specified by the bill
This could include content promoting eating disorders or inciting hate on the basis of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender reassignment- although there will be exemptions to allow legitimate debate.
But Labour’s Lucy Powell said removing obligations over “legal but harmful” material gives a “free pass to abusers and takes the public for a ride”.
This Writer tends to agree – to a certain extent.
It seems the changes mean users would be able to control what they see, rather than tech companies being given active duties to tackle “bad actors and dangerous content”.
So – it seems to me – abusers will still have carte blanche to use social media platforms to attack anybody they like, with the onus on the abused to put measures in place to stop themselves seeing such material.
Won’t that mean other users – on platforms like Twitter, for example – will still be able to see the abusive material and form their own conclusions about the people for whom it is intended?
The problem is partially that the UK’s legal system simply doesn’t understand how online abuse works. I tried to explain it to a High Court judge in July but her recent judgment shows that my words flew over her head.
Either she did not understand how abusive techniques are employed on social media platforms, or she didn’t care. That’s how it seemed to me.
We need legislation to prevent online abuse and harassment by criminalising the abusers – or we risk huge harm, both psychological and physical – being inflicted on our children, in spite of what this Bill pretends to be.
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Mick Lynch: he’s frustrated because the rail companies and Network Rail say they don’t have the power to negotiate meaningfully with him over pay and safety conditions for RMT Union members.
Transport Secretary Mark Harper reckons rail unions need to accept “reforms” that would free up money for pay rises.
Why?
On the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show, he said: “It is the reforms that free up the savings that then unlock the ability for the companies to make an offer to the trade unions on pay.”
But that is to assume no more money could be brought in – and that is a political choice by the Tory government.
He also said: “I do not have a bottomless pit of taxpayers’ money to throw at this problem.”
And he doesn’t, because taxpayers’ money doesn’t pay for any public services at all. Public money – created by the government – does. It’s time our politicians stopped trying to hoodwink us with this lazy lie.
The government can very easily create as much money as is needed to provide a “proper seven-day rail network” – also Harper’s words, and why doesn’t the UK have that network any more since privatisation anyway?
Taxation relieves inflationary pressures that may be created by investing money into public services – and may be used by progressive governments to re-balance the gap between the richest and the poorest citizens in the country, by taking money from those who can most easily bear it. Of course the UK’s Tory government is as far from progressive as one can get.
And Harper said any money saved through reforms would have to be split “fairly between the taxpayer and the people who work in the industry”. Why give savings back to taxpayers when so much needs to be done to improve the rail service? Is he looking for another tax cut for the rich?
The whole spiel strikes This Writer as self-serving claptrap.
If Harper really wanted to do some good, wouldn’t it be better for him to offer to give the private rail operators and Network Rail the mandate for meaningful negotiations with the RMT union that its general secretary, Mick Lynch, has been told they don’t have?
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Big ugly party bore: rather than act on the criticisms implicit in his double by-election defeat, Johnson is trying to tell us that people who voted his Tories out were letting off a “safety valve” and really want him to carry on as if nothing has happened. WRONG! We’re sick of him and the endless torrent of nonsense that flows from his mouth.
Boris Johnson isn’t going to win back voters by trying to tell us all what we think.
After being defeated in two by-elections last Thursday (June 23), Johnson tried to play down their significance by claiming voters are fed up of hearing about things he had “stuffed up”:
Mr Johnson said: “For a long time people were hearing not enough about the things that really matter to them.
“People were absolutely fed up hearing about things I stuffed up, this endless churn of stuff, when they wanted to hear what is this guy doing.”
No – we were fed up of having a prime minister who continually “stuffed” things up, and angry that everything he ever did was wrong, or corrupt, or outright illegal.
“Politics is about allowing people to have the democratic safety valve of letting off at governments, such as in by-elections.
No – politics is about doing what the people tell you to do, not about trying to tell them what they think.
“But then the job of a leader is to say, well, what is the criticism that really matters here?”
No – well, only partially.
And from this evidence, Johnson has drawn the wrong conclusion and is doing the wrong thing yet again.
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Grenfell: this is what happens when inflammable cladding on tower blocks catches fire. Tenants in many more blocks have had this stuff inflicted on them, and the Tories want to force them to pay to get rid of it.
Isn’t it typical of the Tories that they’re happy to nod through possibly corrupt funding of Boris Johnson’s flat redecoration, but won’t protect people in blocks of flats from fires like that at Grenfell Tower?
They have just been knocked back – yet again – by the House of Lords, who have voted to shield residents of tower blocks from fire safety costs.
MPs had rejected the Lords amendment but, after their fourth defeat on this subject, it will now be reinserted into the bill.
The bill modifies a previous law to clarify that building owners must manage and reduce the risk of fire in their properties.
However, last week the House of Lords added an amendment which sought to ensure building owners do not pass on the costs to leaseholders and tenants until a support scheme is in place.
Housing minister Chris Pincher described the amendment as “ineffective and defective”, claiming that it would prevent any remediation costs from being passed to the leaseholder, even in instances where the cost was very minor – such as replacing a smoke alarm.
As a tenant in a rented property myself, I can inform Mr Pincher that my landlord pays for the cost of replacing the smoke alarm here as a matter of course.
It should not be used as an excuse to continue denying tower block tenants improvements that could save their lives.
And it could – because there are only hours left before the end of the current Parliamentary session, when the Bill will be dropped – unless the Tories decide to carry it over to the next session (which seems unlikely to This Writer).
All of this takes place in the shadow of the row over prime minister Boris Johnson’s own flat. Who pays to replace the smoke alarm there?
Tory MPs would have been happy to let £200,000 be paid, just to redecorate the rooms above 11 Downing Street, with no questions asked.
But members of the public have pointed out that this means they are happier for huge amounts to be paid on a single person’s flat – if that person happens to be one of them – than for cash to be spent on potentially life-saving work for many people.
Boris Johnson and #CarrieAntoinette should pay back every penny into a highly flammable cladding removal fund.
— Northern Independence Party 🟨🟥 (@FreeNorthNow) April 29, 2021
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Michael Gove: This Site has better pictures but the Spitting Image dummy reflects his shifty personality so well that it is hard to find an excuse not to use it.
Michael Gove is living evidence that you can get further by talking nonsense constantly than by rational behaviour.
He has just said that talks on implementing the EU withdrawal agreement are at a “healthy stage”.
That’s odd, when the EU side is that the UK’s negotiating position is still “far apart from what the EU can accept”.
The issue is the Internal Markets Bill – or at least those parts of it that override the EU withdrawal agreement where it concerns customs borders in Northern Ireland.
The European Commission’s Maros Sefcovic… said there was a “window of opportunity” to come to an agreement on the Northern Ireland protocol, but added that was “rapidly closing”.
And that’s what Gove calls a “healthy stage”!
Mr Sefcovic says the EU wants the UK to remove the “contentious parts” of the bill by the end of September – that’s Wednesday.
He said the EU would “not be shy” in using “legal remedies” written into the withdrawal agreement to address any “violations”.
What do you reckon the chances are that the EU will have to use those remedies – and that when it happens, Gove and the other Tories will say the EU is to blame for the failure of the Withdrawal Agreement?
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Robert ‘bent as a nine-bob note’ Jenrick: He broke housing rules to save his mate Richard Desmond £50 million; he broke lockdown rules to visit his spare homes and see his family; he voted against safety procedures for tower blocks in the wake of the Grenfell Tragedy; but he thinks young people should be blamed for increased Covid-19 infections and wants them to wash their hands.
Robert Jenrick, who is still the Conservative housing secretary despite a strong of corrupt misuses of the role, appeared on the TV news programmes today (September 8) to patronise the public about Covid-19 safety.
Reading from a script set out by Matt Hancock yesterday, he tried to claim that young people need to stick to the Tory governments rules for not spreading the virus. There is still no evidence to show that people aged 20-29 are spreading it in the same way their counterparts in Europe were found to be.
The “Tory Clown of the Day” Robert Jenrick tells us to “Wash our Hands” can we all just agree to “Wash our Hands of this useless Tory Leadership”. https://t.co/aKYWPJBd4F
The Cabinet keep saying that people should obey the rules. But Boris Pinocchio Johnson, Robert Jenrick and Dominic Cummings all broke the rules. So what they mean is YOU follow the rules but we will do what we like.
— Neville Robert Gregory nil satis nisi optimum. (@nev101101) September 8, 2020
Jenrick’s own claim to be acting in the name of public safety has been hotly disputed, partly because he is more interested in getting parents back to work and reviving the economy than in the safety of children at school –
Dan Walker “ Have we gone too far too soon with schools & work, do we need to apply the brakes?”
– and especially after the man who is, remember, housing secretary helped vote down an attempt to make housing safer in the wake of the Grenfell Tragedy.
The Labour Party tried to amend the Fire Safety Bill currently going through Parliament to include recommendations of the Grenfell Inquiry’s phase one report, published last October – including the removal of flammable cladding from buildings where people live.
Shockingly, despite a government undertaking to remove this potentially fatal substance, the latest government figures released in August showed that Grenfell-style cladding had not been removed from more than 80 per cent of private sector buildings and nearly 50 per cent of social sector buildings.
If any more fires happen due to this cladding, then the Tories who took part in that vote should be held responsible for any deaths.
To add hypocrisy to this injury, let’s all remember that Jenrick had the cheek to lay a wreath at the memorial wall beside Grenfell Tower for the first anniversary of the tragedy:
June 2020. Today, Robert Jenrick voted against making buildings safe for people whose lives are at risk from inflammable cladding… https://t.co/15hAgddj0w
Of course he won’t face justice for any of his corrupt choices.
As a Tory minister, Robert Jenrick remains well above the law and the police absolutely refuse to investigate any crimes alleged against him.
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Suppose a disaster happens and people die. The authorities in charge say they failed to anticipate it, take responsibility, someone resigns and we all say: fair enough – they made a mistake and they admitted it.
Right?
Now suppose people die but the authorities pretend they had taken precautions to prevent it – and we find out that they were lying.
That looks far more serious, doesn’t it?
It makes it seem that the authorities concerned intended that the disaster would happen.
Why else would they lie?
Now let’s consider the fact that more than 9,000 people have died in care homes, with a further more-than-10,000 deaths unaccounted-for.
Boris Johnson told the nation in Prime Minister’s Questions that the government imposed safety procedures on homes, the day before they were imposed on the rest of the country – and then he tried to tell us Keir Starmer was lying when he said that wasn’t true.
Starmer then quoted the government’s own guidance back to him in a letter…
…and you know what Johnson did?
He sent Starmer a note warning him to get back in line – because he’s supposed to be supporting the government.
Very revealing, that.
It doesn’t matter, though – because Starmer has already let the cat out of the bag, so Johnson’s attempt to bring him down means nothing.
Oh, and we’ve also got more evidence from first-party sources:
From a care home manager: “What a lot of rubbish. I didn’t get any support until March 23rd and they were just feeble emails. Then the local authority got their act together 2nd week in April. And the advice is still conflicting even today from CQC, CCG and PHE.” https://t.co/GRy3TFarAl
Okay “a care home manager” might not seem convincing to you.
Try this, from talk radio channel LBC:
LBC’s Ben Kentish pointed to tonight’s press conference which saw deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries state care home advice issued on 25 February stayed in place until 12 March because “they had the view that there was no sustained community transmission in the UK.”
“It is a realistic probability that there is already sustained transmission in the UK, or that it will be become established in the coming weeks.”
Ben reiterated that this was dated 10 February – two weeks before the official care home guidance was issued and more than a month before it was withdrawn.
So SAGE advice on February 10 was that “there is already sustained transmission in the UK” but from February 25 to March 12 the government’s line was that “there is currently no transmission of COVID-19 in the community. It is therefore very unlikely that anyone receiving care in a care home or the community will become infected”. But Matt Hancock said the Tories were protecting care home residents from February. Clearly that is not true.
And what happened? Here’s the Office for National Statistics:
73,180 deaths of care home residents occurred (provisional figures) from 28 Dec 2019 to 1 May 2020 (registered up to 9 May).
— Office for National Statistics (ONS) (@ONS) May 15, 2020
And look – all those excess deaths started happening right when the Tories said they were protecting care home residents. How about that?
In fact, the Tories didn’t lift a finger to stop deaths in care homes until April 15, when the epidemic there was well advanced:
Matt Hancock just said “we put extra infection control procedures in place & prioritised testing in care homes. We test any resident returning to a care home from hospital”
— Peter Stefanovic (@PeterStefanovi2) May 15, 2020
So, doesn’t it seem that Matt Hancock has been telling untruths but Owen Jones is right? See for yourself:
This is an disgraceful rewriting of history. The government sent vulnerable patients out of hospitals and back into care homes without testing them, seeding the virus in the sector with a resulting estimated 22,000 deaths, with potentially many more to come. https://t.co/EIACRobmt6
— Kerry-Anne Mendoza 🏳️🌈🏴 (@TheMendozaWoman) May 15, 2020
Kerry-Anne is right. It is a massacre.
And all the information suggests that’s exactly what Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock intended it to be. Otherwise, why lie?
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Boris Johnson and Donald Trump: Enemies of the UK?
The Tory minister who once complained that the UK imports too much cheese is set to abolish the UK’s environmental safeguards – to get a food import deal with Donald Trump.
Theresa May promised that the UK would keep within EU rules on the environment, safety standards and human rights after Brexit.
But Boris Johnson will get rid of all these rules – that protect you – so he can sign a grubby deal with Donald Trump, to import genetically modified, inferior US food products at a high cost to the UK.
He describes this a way of gaining “flexibility”.
It seems responsibility for scrapping our protections will fall to cheese-loving international trade secretary Liz Truss.
This will require a huge admission of hypocrisy on her part – the woman who said importing two-thirds of our cheese was a “disgrace” –
– now seems perfectly happy to lower standards across the country in order to import all kinds of junk.
EU officials say that British negotiators are particularly keen to jettison EU restrictions on genetically modified foods – a key demand of American trade negotiators.
One EU official with knowledge of the Brexit talks suggested US trade officials appeared to have been in contact with British negotiators and told them standards would need to be slashed if there was any chance of a US trade deal.
Liz Truss, the international trade secretary, said scrapping the protections was “vital for giving us the freedom and flexibility to strike new trade deals and become more competitive”.
And of course rejecting EU standards means there can be no free trade deal with the bloc after the UK leaves it.
The intention seems to be to put the entire country at Donald Trump’s mercy – and he doesn’t seem to have much of that.
It seems clear that this plan is in the interests of nobody in the UK – apart from, possibly, Boris Johnson.
He certainly seems not to be interested in his duty to act in the interests of the people of this nation.
Of course, none of this can happen while the UK remains in the EU – and without an exit deal that MPs and MEPs can support, the UK will do just that.
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It isn’t often I disagree with John Pring of the Disability News Service, but I think he’s being far too charitable to the Department for Work and Pensions.
A report on the DNS website has suggested that the DWP destroyed a report on failures by Job Centre staff to have proper regard for the safety of benefit claimants because the government doesn’t want the facts to get out.
I have a simpler suggestion: The Conservatives simply don’t want benefit claimants to benefit from important information that could save them from serious harm or even death.
Failure to provide this information indicates a serious breach of the government’s duty of care to people claiming benefits.
The DNS report shows that the DWP illegally delayed its response to a Freedom of Information request demanding copies of all reports written by “Community Partners” in London in 2017 and 2018.
The report in question had been created by three disabled people who had joined the “Community Partners” initiative that had been set up to improve relations between the DWP and local communities.
They wrote it only weeks after joining, after becoming increasingly alarmed by the failure of 18 Job Centres to take basic actions that would protect people claiming benefits such as universal credit, employment and support allowance and jobseeker’s allowance.
DNS described some of the incidents, as recorded by one of the “Community Partners” going under the pseudonym “Rachel”:
On one occasion, Rachel heard a member of staff explain that a claimant with cancer of the spine, who needed his dressing changed every day, should be found fit for work “so he’s looking forward to the future”.
She also remembers sitting in on an interview with a universal credit claimant, who was 55 and not disabled and had just been made redundant.
He had been hit by the bedroom tax and said repeatedly that he was hungry because he was so short of money, but the DWP civil servant failed to tell him that he could request foodbank vouchers.
When Rachel asked the civil servant after the interview why she had not told him he could ask for vouchers, she was told: “Because he didn’t ask.”
Rachel said: “He said four times that he was hungry and couldn’t afford to go shopping and didn’t have enough money for food.
“That is just dangerous. That person is going to end up with malnutrition and depression.
“It was just a regular guy who was doing his best and did not know how the system worked, let alone that the magic word was ‘foodbank’.”
On another occasion, a man in extreme mental distress who had previously self-harmed in the Brixton jobcentre after being found fit for work, returned to the jobcentre and again began self-harming by banging his head against a window.
Staff were standing around watching, said Rachel, who had to take control, find a manager and tell them to contact the council’s social services department.
Despite her intervention, no report on the incident was written, despite her repeatedly asking for an incident report form.
She believes her insistence that the incident needed to be written up was one of the reasons she was eventually sacked, although DWP claimed it was because she had retweeted a social media post criticising Iain Duncan Smith, even though she believes the tweet was sent before she started working for DWP.
She said: “They all know they are putting people at risk but all they are concerned about is ticking boxes.”
Note the claim that “Rachel” was sacked for criticising Iain Duncan Smith – tacit confirmation that the Conservatives coerce employees into silence about their harmful policies and practices.
According to DNS, the DWP illegally delayed releasing the documents that had been requested, then said the report by “Rachel” and the other two “Community Partners” had been destroyed under a rule that such documents should not be kept longer than 12 months.
This is an unconvincing argument because the DNS Freedom of Information request had been made four months before that period had expired.
The evidence is clear: The Department for Work and Pensions will never willingly help benefit claimants whose safety is in danger.
There are moves to force the department support its own safeguarding rules: The Justice for Jodey Whiting petition demands an independent inquiry into deaths linked to the DWP.
The petition was set up because the department failed five times to follow its own safeguarding rules in the weeks leading up to her suicide in February 2017.
It has been signed 25,000 times in three weeks. If it reaches 100,000 signatures, it may be debated in Parliament.
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