Tag Archives: sell

Tory health minister promised to sell shares in health firm – but didn’t. Is this the reason?

Lord Markham: his word is about as much use as that of Rishi Sunak’s in-laws’ firm, Infosys, it seems.

This Writer has a certain amount of sympathy with Tory health minister Lord Markham.

He may have promised to sell his shares in private health screening firm Cignpost, that made a fortune from Covid testing, a year ago and failed to do so, but he’s not the first.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s wife’s dad’s firm Infosys promised to stop operating in Russia after that country invaded Ukraine – but was still there, picking up contracts, eight months later (to my knowledge).

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If that firm – and the prime ministerial in-laws who run it – can ignore its promises, why can’t Markham?

After all, they’re all in it together – right?

A Tory health minister still owns a major stake in a private health screening firm making money from the crisis in the NHS a year after promising to sell it, the Mirror can reveal.

Lord Markham annouced last January that he was “undertaking to sell my stake” in Cignpost, a private Covid testing firm which made a fortune from the pandemic. But Company House records for Cignpost Investments Limited still show Markham owning between 25% and 50% of the business.

Cignpost has filed accounts showing that revenue soared by 467% to £278m in 2022, thanks to booming business helping firms comply with covid rules. The company has £52m cash in the bank and shareholder funds are up 150% from last year. Cignpost also offers mobile health screening, including heart health assessments and skin screening, which can be done in “your board room, staff car park or a third-party venue”.

Source: Tory health minister still hasn’t sold stake in Covid testing firm a year after promise – Mirror Online


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Is your NHS information being set up for sale AGAIN?

Michelle Donelan: she says she won’t sell off your private NHS data without your consent. How would she go about getting that, then?

Every few years, this comes around.

It was suggested in 2016, and again in 2021, when the public made it very clear that we don’t want our NHS records to be sold to private companies.

Now, US artificial intelligence giant Palantir is saying it has developed systems that can use our data without anybody ever actually seeing it.

I’m not sure I understand how that works!

And that means I think we need more information about it.

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The BBC’s report is very vague:

Palantir is seeking to win a contract to provide AI software to bring NHS data together to improve services.

In what way? Like this, allegedly:

The Federated Data Platform (FDP) is software that will sit across NHS trusts and integrated care systems allowing them to connect data they already hold in a secure and safe environment. GP data will not be part of the national platform.

The software will be ‘federated’ across the NHS. This means that every hospital and integrated care board will have their own version of the platform which can connect and collaborate with other data platforms as a ‘federation’. This makes it easier for health and care organisations to work together, compare data, analyse it at different geographic, demographic and organisational levels and share and spread new effective digital solutions.

The federated data platform is not a data collection; it is software that will help to connect disparate sets of data and allow them to be used more effectively for care.

The NHS is made up of multiple organisations that use data every day to manage patient care and plan services. Historically, it has been held in different systems that do not speak to each other, creating burden for staff and delays to patient care. It also makes it difficult to work at scale and share information.

The Federated Data Platform will provide software to link these NHS trusts and regional systems and give us a consistent technical means of linking data that is already collected for patient care. Clinicians will easily have access to the information they need to do their job – in one place – freeing up time spent on administrative tasks and enabling them to deliver the most appropriate care for patients. GP data will not be part of the national platform.

So, what do you think?

Alex Karp, Palantir co-founder and chief executive, said:

“We’re the only company of our size and scale that doesn’t buy your data, doesn’t sell your data, doesn’t transfer it to any other company,” he said.

“That data belongs to the government of the United Kingdom.”

Mr Karp added: “The way our product is set up. I don’t have access to your data. Our product does not allow you to do that.”

Asked whether the data could be sold in the future. Mr Karp replied: “By the UK government, not by me. I don’t have the ability to do it.”

So, it could be sold, and this system makes it easier for that to happen.

Labour has said it won’t sell off people’s data. And Tory Science Secretary Michelle Donelan has said she won’t sell on people’s private data “without their consent”.

Do you feel reassured? Or do you think the Tories are planning a new way to trick you into giving away your information?


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Is the Bank of England trying to force the UK into austerity? Why?

The Bank of England: don’t believe its claims about inflation.

If the Bank is trying to force the government into austerity by selling government debt at a loss, isn’t that political interference?

And isn’t anyone – of any political organisation – going to ask the obvious questions about it?


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Boris Johnson and Donald Trump DID discuss selling the NHS – as Jeremy Corbyn said

Buddies: Boris Johnson and Donald Trump really were discussing the sale of a privatised NHS to firms in the United States, it seems – while dishonestly accusing Jeremy Corbyn of lying when he exposed the plan.

Here’s a revelation…

… except it isn’t; some of us have known about it for years…

(In fact, let’s have a bit of video of the moment we were told…)

… but for those who refused to accept the evidence then, let’s go over it again quickly now (from the Byline Times article:

Boris Johnson privately discussed privatising the NHS with Donald Trump, according to a new biography of the former Prime Minister.

The claim… suggests that the former PM asked Trump not to publicly mention their discussions as they could create “mischief” if they were to become widely known.

However, he suggested that they could privately discuss it together.

“Some people in my party and other parties might make mischief if you talk about doing that, Donald,” Johnson told him. “Let’s talk about it all you like in private when you’re here, but we can keep it to ourselves.”

Claims of secret talks between the two countries about privatising the NHS were denied at the time.

Johnson’s Government faced allegations in 2019 of secretly planning to privatise the National Health Service as part of a post-Brexit trade deal with the US. At the time, then Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn published official documents suggesting UK officials had been in secret trade talks with US firms about the NHS.

The documents suggested that America was seeking “total market access” to the UK’s health service after Brexit.

Johnson’s Government dismissed the claims at the time, insisting the NHS would always remain “off the table” in talks with the US.

So there you have it.

Jeremy Corbyn was right about plans to privatise the NHS and sell it off to the United States, and Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and the rest of the Tories were themselves lying when they called him a liar for mentioning it.

Or so the evidence states. I’d like to see any hard facts from Johnson, Truss, or indeed anyone else that can refute it.


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Rees-Mogg firm sold shares in Russian bank. Did it have insider knowledge?

Jacob Rees-Mogg: He doesn’t have a moustache to twirl villainously, so he had to adjust his glasses instead.

Isn’t this interesting? (And by “interesting” I mean deeply questionable and disturbing.)

Jacob Rees-Mogg is a partner in a company – Somerset Capital Management – that was criticised for investing £60 million in Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, after he called on then-UK prime minister Theresa May to impose tougher economic sanctions against Russia in the wake of the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, back in 2018.

Sberbank had been under European Union sanctions since the Russian invasion of the Crimea in 2014.

But the investment seemed a good one at the time. In March 2018 its London-listed shares were understood to be worth four times what they had been worth in May 2015.

But then, 23 days ago – as the Russia-Ukraine crisis started to gain heat – Rees-Mogg’s firm sold its last shares in the bank, netting £44.5 million:

Rees-Mogg himself is not involved in SCM investment decisions – but he does receive money that the company earns from its investments.

And he has been criticised for maintaining shares in the bank while being involved in UK government policy decisions about Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin.

The fact that he was involved in these debates makes the company’s decision to divest itself of these shares… questionable, if not downright suspicious.

The value of the bank’s shares, we’re told, has halved since SCM sold what it had.

It might all have been above-board. Rees-Mogg may have had nothing to do with the decision to sell.

But we will never know. And that’s what makes this suspicious.

There is a clear conflict of interest that has gone undeclared, unremarked, and ignored.

As part of the most corrupt UK government in living memory – if not in history – we all think he’s entirely capable of passing on information from policy meetings for the purpose of his own enrichment.

And that undermines trust in the UK government and its decisions – as a whole. We cannot safely assume that our leaders’ choices are made solely in the national interest because we have reason to believe that they are acting for themselves.

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Tory donors pay £3 million for a seat in the House of Lords? Bargain!

Tories will sell anything: or so it seems. This particular Tory seems to have been selling seats in the House of Lords for £3 million a time.

Boris Johnson does it again.

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, the country that was to become the United Kingdom was plagued with places known as Rotten Boroughs. These were Parliamentary constituencies with very few voters, whose choice in elections could be bought by corrupt politicians.

They were outlawed many years ago but the concept is explored very thoroughly in an episode of Blackadder The Third.

Now we have ‘Rotten Boris’ Johnson who, it seems, has been selling places in the House of Lords instead – at £3 million a pop!

A complaint has been lodged with the Metropolitan Police…

… but will officers investigate?

Some would say the Met, under its current commissioner, Cressida Dick, is as corrupt as Johnson; we have allowed our institutions to degrade to a point where it is impossible to find an honest person who will hold the criminals to account.

I wait to be proved wrong. But I won’t hold my breath.

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Millions opt out of NHS data grab, forcing it – temporarily? – to go ‘on hold’

Money-making scam: The idea was to make your confidential health information public knowledge, in order to make money for private health firms (some of which are from the United States).

This is a victory for people power.

You remember your Tory government’s plan to give away your personal – private – health records to marauding health companies so they can profit from them?

The plan that keeps surfacing every few years and keeps getting batted back by a UK public that wants this material to stay confidential?

Well, we’ve just succeeded in stopping it again. For the time being, at least.

The current attempt started in May, when NHS Digital announced that, if you lived in England, it would be putting the private details of your mental and sexual health, criminal records, smoking and drinking habits onto disc and handing them to “third parties”. Almost nobody noticed.

The plan provided an opportunity for patients to opt out – if they did so by a deadline of June 23, which was ridiculously fast. It seems clear that the intention was to pass your information over before you even knew it was happening.

And then organisations like This Site became involved.

I published my first article about this on June 2.

The result was uproar.

Now we see that, after 107,429 people opted out in May, when nobody knew about it, 1,275,153 did so in June – around 12 times as many people.

Questions were asked in the House of Commons and the opt-out deadline was extended to September – and now the scheme is being withdrawn altogether, albeit temporarily, according to NHS Digital.

May we conclude that even more millions of people opted out during July and the first weeks of August?

But NHS Digital is not abandoning the scheme altogether – just pausing it, with no new launch date. Here’s The Observer:

It will soon start a “listening exercise” and consultation process before launching a public information campaign.

Who will be told about it?

In a major concession to critics, patients will now be allowed to opt out at any stage, with their data deleted even if it has already been uploaded.

Am I the only one with doubts about that? If it has already been provided to private firms, there’s nothing to stop them from taking that information off the database and keeping it in a form of their own. If they know it may be altered, they probably will.

NHS Digital is also pledging to increase the security and privacy of the data, even while researchers are working with it.

I do not believe this.

There is a fundamental dishonesty that goes to the heart of this scheme, and it is the lie that private firms care about your health more than their profits.

Private firms were allowed to run NHS services for profit soon after the David Cameron coalition government came into office, in a change supported by many Tory MPs who had shares in those firms.

The plan to give your confidential information to those private firms was first tried very soon after that, in 2013. To me, this was evidence that the Tory plan all along had been to make money for profit-grubbers and not to improve healthcare.

The public has batted it away time and time again since then, but time and time again the Tories have brought it back.

Their latest claim is that

“Patient data is vital to healthcare planning and research. It is being used to develop treatments for cancer, diabetes, long Covid and heart disease, and to plan how NHS services recover from Covid.”

That’s why they want to take away our right to privacy and confidentiality and I don’t believe a word of it. How can it be used to develop these treatments when we haven’t handed it over? And how have these treatments been developed in the past?

The simple fact is that it is our information – not theirs. And if we don’t want it to be shared, there’s nothing they can do about it.

Source: NHS data grab on hold as millions opt out | NHS | The Guardian

GP practice opts ALL patients out of NHS data giveaway. Ask yours to do the same

Here’s an interesting message, publicised by a civil servant at the Department of Health:

You’ll be aware that the Tories had been planning to pass private details of your mental and sexual health, criminal records, smoking and drinking habits to profiteers without telling you.

They had created a scam scheme in which they would hand over the medical histories of more than 55 million NHS England patients to profit-making organisations – unless the patients opted out.

But they never actually bothered to tell anybody what they were doing.

Instead, people found out through sites like this one – and kicked up such an outcry that the government announced it was delaying the data upload from the beginning of July to the beginning of September.

Announcing the delay, Health Minister Jo Churchill said ministers would use the extra time to “talk to doctors, patients and charities to strengthen the plan… and ensure data is accessed securely”.

I have no idea whether any of this has actually happened.

The message to Mr Thomas makes it clear that the government hasn’t been talking to patients, despite the assurance that it would.

It also suggests very strongly that whatever the government has been doing, it has made a liar of Ms Churchill.

So the action taken by his GP practice to opt all patients out seems entirely appropriate and I would urge anybody in England who has not received any communication about the plan from the government to contact your own GP practice and ask for it to do the same.

It’s what I’d be doing if I lived in England.

Friendly advice: This is important. Do it now – and don’t rely on anyone else to do it for you.

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Victory for grassroots campaign as Tories ‘delay’ giving away your private NHS patient data

This is a victory for social media campaigners like This Site.

The Tories had been planning to pass private details of your mental and sexual health, criminal records, smoking and drinking habits to profiteers without telling you.

They had created a scam scheme in which they would hand over the medical histories of more than 55 million NHS England patients to profit-making organisations – unless the patients opted out.

But they never actually bothered to tell anybody what they were doing.

I mean: if you’re in England, did you see the national advertising campaign on TV, the social media and in the newspapers? Did you catch the news spots with NHS and government representatives debating it with some of the many organisations who oppose it?

I didn’t think so.

Yet Health Minister Jo Churchill, announcing the “delay” in Parliament, had the bare-faced cheek to say the government was “absolutely determined to take people with us”.

The impression I get is that hardly anybody knew a single thing about it until Vox Political – along with a few other social media organisations – publicised it on June 2.

By then, less than three weeks were left before the original June 23 deadline for opting out.

So it was risible when Churchill told Parliament “patients own their own data”.

If that’s an admission that the Tories don’t own patient data, then why have they been trying to sell it ever since they formed their government in 2010? Isn’t that, you know, theft?

The good news is that This Site’s article – and those of the other social media sites that took an interest – caught the public interest and the government had to step back.

The Tories wouldn’t have announced this delay if they had not received significant resistance to their plan.

And the really good news is that the delay means more people can opt out of the scheme.

You can do this by providing this online form to your GP – or by using this website. I strongly urge you to do so.

Be sure to enjoy the “mythbusting” section of the website in which the Tories say it’s all perfectly innocent. And then ignore it.

Source: New NHS patient data store delayed by two months – BBC News

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If you’re in England, the government is planning to hand your private health records to people you don’t know – again

Readers in England: are you happy that the Tory government is about to pass private details of your mental and sexual health, criminal records, smoking and drinking habits to profiteers?

Tory-run NHS Digital will hand over the medical histories of more than 55 million patients to “third parties” to “support the planning and commissioning of health and care services, the development of health and care policy, public health monitoring and interventions (including COVID-19) and enable many different areas of research.”

The announcement is carefully worded to avoid suggesting that your details are going to people who plan to make money out of them, but the simple fact is that, before privatisation was introduced in 2012, nobody but the NHS would have needed your records for the reasons given.

You can opt out of the scheme before June 23 by providing this online form to your GP – or by using this website. I strongly urge you to do so – and to ignore the “mythbusting” section of the website in which the Tories say it’s all perfectly innocent. They would, wouldn’t they?

If you think the Tories can be trusted on this, bear in mind that NHS Digital said the data could not be used “solely for commercial purposes”, which means that it will be used partly for commercial purposes.

Digital rights campaign group Foxglove has written to health secretary Matt Hancock suggesting that this plan is illegal.

And campaigners have also raised concerns that the scheme has not been sufficiently publicised. Did you know about it before reading this?

Healthcare IT News quoted Phil Booth of privacy organisation MedConfidential as follows:

“For the Government to rush out a data grab like this, with only a few weeks’ notice for patients and for GPs, is not only corrosive of trust – it’s deeply irresponsible. GPs are the busiest they’ve ever been and dumping this on them without time to prepare and the resources to handle patients’ opt-outs is the very worst sort of digital disruption.”

Absolutely.

NHS Digital is desperate to convince us that the data could only be used by “organisations which can show they have an appropriate legal basis and a legitimate need to use it”.

But recent experiences of health secretary Matt Hancock’s dealings with the private sector suggest that the database will go to anybody who has bunged the Tory Party a few quid over the last 10 or 20 years.

And, let’s face it, the Tories have a very poor record of trying to sell off your NHS records for a quick buck.

It’s one of the stories that has kept repeating over the last (nearly) 10 years, and This Site has reported on its progress:

The Tories tried to put GP records in a central database in 2013 under the Care.data programme, but it was abandoned in 2016 after confidentiality complaints.

My report of the time shows that the Tories are still using the same weak excuse for exploiting your private data, that failed to convince anyone eight years ago:

[Then-Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt] thinks this gross abuse of patient confidentiality is a good idea. But then, he’s a Tory and therefore thinks he has a God-given right to take anything, from anyone, if they have less filthy lucre than himself.

According to the Daily Mail – and you know the Tories have lost the plot when even the Heil weighs in against them – the *unt wants us to believe that the information will be valuable for medical research and screening for common diseases.

Doctors say Mr *unt and NHS England have failed in their duty to publicise the plan in a proper and reasonable way, that patients are not getting an “informed” choice about the matter, and that patients could be identified from the data with any information other than that on common conditions – which, we’ve already established, becomes public knowledge anyway.

Same excuses, same failure to publicise the plan… so we have all the same reasons to withdraw our permission. Don’t we?

I reported on it again in 2014.

And in 2016, after a review into care.data recommended that the scheme be scrapped, the Tories tried to sell your information anyway, but just without telling you.

Again, This Site reported on it:

The government’s review proposes to allow medical records from your family doctor, (possibly including NHS Numbers, diagnoses, referrals, prescriptions along with postcodes and dates of birth) to be uploaded to a giant national database – but this time without telling us or asking for our consent.

One of the schemes to replace care.data is called the “Single GP dataset”. The government’s review into care.data proposes to send all patient records from family GPs to the central database without the express consent of patients. Once in the system, it can be “sold” to any customers of the ‘Health and Social Care Information centre”, including private companies.

The government buried this announcement on the day of the report into the Iraq War. It is hoping no one will notice this new land grab on our medical records.

But people did notice.

And now I’m reporting on it again, so you will notice it again. I hope you will put a stop to it again, too.

And then I’ll look forward to reporting on another Tory bid to sell this information.

Judging by experience, we’ll be back here again in 2025.

Source: Privacy fears over NHS plans to share GP medical records with third parties | Healthcare IT News

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