Tag Archives: surcharge

Lower than sewage: liar Johnson is still making poorest NHS workers pay ‘immigrant surcharge’

Cleaning up: people who can least afford it are being charged for NHS treatment, despite being the ones who keep hospital beds clean and equipment available.

Could there be a better demonstration of what a detestable liar Boris Johnson is?

He said his government would end a £624 “surcharge” it demanded from immigrant NHS workers for their own healthcare treatment. He lied.

In fact, the charge has continued to be applied – to the poorest workers; those least able to afford it.

The fee is still levied on staff who take a different job within six months – lower-paid cleaners, porters and carers, especially those on the zero-hours contracts the Tories have been keen to force into the workplace.

Perhaps most damning of all is the fact that ministers have had to cheek to suggest that these staff – who are on the lowest pay possible – need an “incentive” to continue working.

Typical Tory thinking – Johnson reckons everybody is as lazy as he is!

In fact, people on low incomes – especially those on zero-hours contracts – already have an incentive to work. It’s called “survival”.

Apart from a tiny minority for whom a zero-hours contract works because it fits into their own lifestyle – people who already have enough money to live on – nobody would take up such a job if it wasn’t the best they could get.

Zero-hours jobs offer no sick pay or holiday pay; and the wages are the lowest employers can get away with offering.

And, of course, they are designed to facilitate termination on short notice.

So we see a situation in which Boris Johnson claimed he was ending an unfair charge on people who have worked tirelessly to save us all from Covid-19…

… when instead he was continuing to inflict it on the people who most deserved to have it lifted.

Remember when Nye Bevan said Tories were lower than vermin?

If he were around today, no doubt he would admit that he overpraised them.

I feel sure he would agree with me that Johnson is lower than sewage.

Source: Boris Johnson accused of ‘cynical broken promise’ as some foreign NHS and care staff still pay surcharge | The Independent

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Osborne rebuked over EU surcharge reduction claim

It’s official – George Osborne lied when he said he had halved the £1.7 billion EU budget surcharge, and his claim that he had achieved a “real result for Britain” was nonsense.

This is how George Osborne probably looked after the fire in his pants caused by his incessant lying about the EU’s £1.7bn bill burned away the rest of his suit. Note that his briefcase is still empty of policies and all he has to offer us is the carrot of false promises [Image: Kaya Mar www.kayamarart.com].

This is how George Osborne probably looked after the fire in his pants caused by his incessant lying about the EU’s £1.7bn bill burned away the rest of his suit. Note that his briefcase is still empty of policies and all he has to offer us is the carrot of false promises [Image: Kaya Mar www.kayamarart.com].

Even more stinging must be the fact that this rebuke comes from a fellow Conservative – Andrew Tyrie, chairman of the House of Commons Treasury Committee.

“The suggestion that the £1.7 billion bill demanded by the European Union was halved is not supported by published information,” he said in a report by the committee.

“The terms of the UK’s rebate calculation are set out in EU law. It should, therefore, have been clear that the rebate would apply.”

The Treasury Committee’s report confirms what Vox Political stated the day after Osborne made his ill-advised claim.

Its report did, however, recognise the government’s “achievement” in extending the payment period and avoiding interest charges – although this was managed in conjunction with every other EU member state that found itself facing the prospect of extra payments, and was not an achievement of the UK government alone.

What does Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition have to say about this? At the time, Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls told us, “David Cameron and George Osborne are trying to take the British people for fools.”

Has Labour’s attitude softened? No.

“This damning cross-party report exposes George Osborne’s claim to have halved the EU budget surcharge to be totally untrue,” said Chris Leslie, Labour’s Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

“He must now apologise to taxpayers for making this completely false claim.

“Too many times this Chancellor has desperately tried to use smoke and mirrors to fool the British people. He has been caught out again and his credibility is further undermined.

“People will now treat the false claims he makes in the coming weeks with the contempt they deserve.”

And that is the problem for our part-time Chancellor.

He has undermined his own credibility and that of his party.

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The UK’s EU surcharge (another blow for Osborne) – Second Reading

[Image: Left Futures.]

[Image: Left Futures.]

At first glance, this article from the House of Commons Library blog didn’t look as though it was going to contribute anything new.

We know why the UK had to pay a surcharge to the EU based on its economy performance from 2002 until 2013 (according to this article; 2009 according to some others). We know that it relates to the EU budget because member states pay a proportion of their gross national income into the EU’s coffers in return for membership. We know that the revision goes back to 2002 because the EU disagreed with the way some member states had worked out their figures. We know that the question of whether the rebate would always apply to this payment is hotly debated.

But then the article states:

“Concessions have been reached on the timing and staging of payments. Member States will be able to pay in stages with payment completed by 1 September 2015. The original amending budget required a single payment to be made by 1 December 2014.

Member States paying later will not incur interest charges for doing so. Regulations would have allowed for interest payments of 2 percentage points above the base rate, increasing by a 0.25 percentage point for each month of delay.” [Boldings mine.]

Didn’t Osborne come back from Europe saying he had negotiated concessions for the UK? What’s all this “member states” business?

For example, on Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday (November 9), he said: “This is a real win for British taxpayers… It’s another sign this government can get a good deal for Britain in Europe.” [Bolding, again, mine.]

There’s no mention of the other member states in his renegotiation story at all! Osborne makes it look as though he negotiated a deal for the UK that the other states agreed…

… In fact, it seems all member states agreed on a deal that would affect all member states.

For all we know, Osborne could have sat at the back of the room and twiddled his thumbs. The more we learn about this deal, the less significant his role seems to be.

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Balls blasts Osborne’s EU surcharge ‘fog and bluster’

Not impressed: Members of the Labour front bench display their incredulity at George Osborne's claims during today's debate.

Not impressed: Members of the Labour front bench display their incredulity at George Osborne’s claims during today’s debate.

It’s always fun to see George Osborne being put on the back foot, and today’s attempt at justifying his over-extravagant claims (or indeed lies) about gaining a concession from Europe over its £1.7 billion surcharge was a classic of its kind – even more so because he allowd himself to be flattered into lying to Parliament.

This blog was one of many who challenged his claim within minutes of it having been made, so it was a joy to see Osborne dragged to the House of Commons to answer Ed Balls’ urgent question – a demand for a statement on the matter in which Osborne repeated the claims we’ve heard before: He’d halved the bill, he’d delayed the bill, he’ll pay no interest on the bill.

We know he hasn’t halved it; all that happened was the EU took pity on him and agreed to bring forward a rebate that was coming to the UK in any event, meaning that – instead of receiving some money back from the Union – we’re just paying less in.

It is likely that pity also applied in the decision to delay payment of the bill until the next financial year – one can picture the scene: Osborne imploring, “Please don’t make me pay! The deficit is already out of control this year and you’re asking me to add another billion to it!” – and the decision not to demand interest for every day’s non-payment after December 1. In fact, with an agreement to defer payment until the 2015-16 financial year, it would be unfair to demand such interest.

Having won those concessions from a position of weakness, Osborne’s mistake was to come back and pretend that he was in a position of strength. Nobody believed him.

Today, in the House of Commons chamber, even his own backbenchers seemed to find it hard to put up the pretence. Meanwhile, Mr Balls had the floor:

He began: “Talk about smoke and mirrors, Mr Speaker—I can barely see you through the Chancellor’s fog and bluster!”

He quoted the Austrian, Dutch and Irish finance ministers, saying: “They are queuing up to contradict the Chancellor.

“Is it not now clear that the Chancellor totally failed to get a better deal for the taxpayer?” he asked. “He did not reduce Britain’s backdated bill by a single penny. The British people don’t like being taken for fools, and his attempts to fool them have totally unravelled.”

Labour backbencher Geoffrey Robinson had to withdraw his words after claiming Osborne had committed “a gross act of deception worthy more of Goebbels than the British Chancellor of the Exchequer.” Clearly he is a long-term reader of this blog.

Paul Flynn called Osborne’s “result” – as the Chance(llo)r described it – as “a confidence trick”.

Osborne and his pals were deep in their own narrative by then, whining about details of the rebate and the interest rate on the surcharge, and trying to score points with questions about Labour MPs’ loyalty to their leader. Somebody should have told them that a couple of Labour MPs complaining about Ed Miliband is as nothing, compared to the defection of two Tory MPs to UKIP and calls by a further – 22, was it? – for David Cameron’s resignation or removal.

Oh yes… and a Mr James Arbuthnot seemed to think that the surcharge, which came about because the UK economy had performed better than expected over a period of time, was “because of the stunningly impressive handling of the economy by my right hon. Friend”.

To this, Osborne responded: “One of the reasons why this surcharge, as he puts it, has arisen is because of the strong UK economic performance relative to the continent of Europe.” If he had left it there, we would not be able to call this statement what it was. He didn’t; he added: “We should not be happy about the poor performance of the European continent. We want the European continent to be performing better.”

The second part of his statement makes it clear that he is referring to the recent performance of the continental EU countries, meaning that he was applying comments about the UK’s “strong economic performance” to the period when he was Chancellor.

He was lying to Parliament. We all know that the surcharge has arisen because of the UK’s strong economic performance between 2002 and 2009, when Labour was in office, under chancellors named Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. It had nothing to do with anyone called Osborne.

Having established that lie, there really isn’t any need to go further into the debate. There is no reason to believe anything Osborne says. The Goebbels reference – not permitted in the Commons chamber – is entirely apt; he was trying to feed us The Big Lie.

He failed.

Never mind, George – you’ve succeeded in halving wage growth!

What a shame that it isn’t likely to be a vote-winner for you.

Postscript: Ed Balls is also to be congratulated for his handling of Martha Kearney on the BBC’s The World At One today (Monday). Ms Kearney was in belligerent mood, keen to interrupt Mr Balls before he could make any meaningful points about Labour’s economic plans. He was trying to make the perfectly reasonable point that the UK can clear its debts by building up the economy, but she dismissed this as a project that would take many years to pay off (thanks for the vote of confidence, Martha!) and pressed him to tell her what cuts he would make when he had already clarified what he would rather do instead.

Then she asked why he had not supported the #WeBackEd campaign on Twitter. He pointed out that he had made his support for Mr Miliband perfectly clear in a radio interview at the end of last week, before that campaign had started. “I think that was a silly question,” he concluded – and she had to admit defeat.

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