Tag Archives: trust

Now organisations we should be able to trust seem to be twisting the Israel/Gaza facts

The Al Ahli Hospital after the airstrike against it: it seems evidence of what happened here was ignored by Human Rights Watch for no good reason, meaning its subsequent report has no value.

I hate to do this to you after telling you that you can’t trust the stories about Israel and Hamas, being published in the UK’s national newspapers – but you need to know.

Therefore, please read the following thread explaining why the organisation Human Rights Watch cannot be trusted, on the basis of its failure to support a full investigation of the airstrike on Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza.

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So, after failing to conduct an investigation that Hamas would have welcomed “100 per cent”, Human Rights Watch published a report that under-emphasised Israel’s alleged involvement and over-emphasised claims about Hamas, while ignoring evidence.

Still… look what happens when Human Rights Watch confirms a story that implicates Israel in the murder of babies:

It seems the media – like the authorities – have a problem called bias.


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Starmer reckons his new policies aren’t ‘very’ different to the pledges he abandoned. Liar?

We shouldn’t be surprised at Keir Starmer’s latest two-faced outburst: back in 2015 he campaigned against ‘Israeli racism’ and now he is a staunch ally of that country’s government.

Keir Starmer – what a… politician!

No, the comment is not well-meant.

He even lies about lying, as far as I can see.

In an interview, ITV political editor Robert Peston said voters may have difficulty trusting a party leader who has abandoned all the policy pledges he made in order to get elected as leader.

Starmer responded with a claim that his current policies are “not very different” but this is not true. The policies on which he was elected were a continuation of Jeremy Corbyn’s centre-left socialism, while his current plans mark a shift to right-wing neoliberalism.

Think about the NHS: where before he was preaching a return to a fully publicly-owned service, now he wants to infect it with even more corporate profiteering.

And he’s saying he wants to stimulate the economy with lower taxes. Firstly, we all know that cutting taxes didn’t work so well for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng – they crashed the economy; secondly, as ‘Marl Karx’ below points out…

So all Starmer achieved with his answer to Peston was to prove that he is not to be trusted – and neither can Labour, while he leads it.


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Latest row over Sunak’s wife shows his new declaration of interests is worthless

Akshata Murty and her husband, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak: he has taken extraordinary steps to hide any commercial interests either of them have from the electorate. We must therefore conclude that he may be dishonestly using his position to funnel public money into his bank accounts and hers.

The row over whether Rishi Sunak’s wife benefited from the work that went into an ’emergency alert’ test affecting mobile phones on Sunday (April 23) shows one thing: the public do not believe the prime minister’s latest declaration of interests.

Sunak published a new register of MPs’ financial interests last week, in response to anger over his failure to declare that a company part-owned by Akshata Murty will benefit from a new policy to attract people into child-minding.

It doesn’t include significant details, either of his own personal financial investments or his wife’s.

Some of us have drawn the obvious conclusion: that Sunak thinks he and his wife are above such declarations – even though he takes public money, the same as the lowliest Universal Credit claimant.

And UC claimants have to declare their partners’ financial interests:

He didn’t even bother to turn up to an Urgent Question demanding a statement on his entry in the register, on the day the stink over alleged interest in the “emergency alert” broke out across the social media:

Instead, one of his lieutenants piped up to say it’s unreasonable to demand of the prime minister what his government demands of every benefit claimant. This confirms that Sunak thinks he’s better than the rest of us and doesn’t need to give an account of himself.

Apparently Sunak’s entry on the register includes his local rotary club, brass band and community pub but not any business interests owned by him or his wife.

The Byline Times article states:

A spokesperson for Sunak insisted that only such declarations judged to be “relevant” had been added to the list.

This means that while, according to Sunak, the fact the he is a patron of his local brass band is judged to be a “relevant” interest relating to his role as Prime Minister, the fact that his wife is now set to potentially massively financially benefit from a Government policy, is not.

Also not included in the new register are any of the Prime Minister’s own personal financial interests, save from the fact that they are now contained within what Downing Street refer to as a “blind management trust”.

This arrangement is ostensibly designed to prevent the Prime Minister from personally being involved in any future investment decisions that may be affected by his own policies.

However, by placing his existing investments within this “blind” arrangement, the public are prevented from ever knowing which Government policies are directly enriching the Prime Minister and his family.

It is hard to think of a reasonable justification for this continued refusal to be fully open about his own financial interests and those of his wife.

It is clear that Rishi Sunak is doing everything he can to prevent the rest of us from knowing how many commercial pies he and his wife have stuck their grubby fingers into.

It is dishonesty at the top level of government. No wonder he is currently being investigated over whether he has approved a policy that funnels money to a company part-owned by his wife. Other government contracts with companies owned by her should also be investigated.

The dishonesty implied by any investigation is exactly the opposite of what Sunak himself promised when he became prime minister.

By his own standards, he does not deserve to remain in office. There’s a local election next week in England and Northern Ireland; I hope voters there use it to drive that point home.


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Why are NHS trusts being told to cancel treatment on the day of the Queen’s funeral?

Party girl: this is how Therese Coffey commemorated the removal of £1,040 per year from Universal Credit payments. As Health Secretary, is she partying in similar manner while appointments are cancelled because they are scheduled for the same day as the State Funeral of Queen Elizabeth II?

Vital hospital appointments and treatments are being cancelled by NHS trusts because they were due to take place on the day now scheduled for the funeral of the late Queen Elizabeth II.

This is hugely dangerous for the patients involved. Waiting lists are at record lengths. How long will it take for the appointments to be rescheduled?

(To give you a clue – and I know this is slightly different: Mrs Mike badly needed to have a tooth filled and the dentists offered her an appointment the following week, which required rescheduling of other events… or in December. Who knows how badly her tooth would have deteriorated by then?)

Here’s Maximilien Robespierre with a video clip:

And here‘s the Open Democracy article to which it refers. I’ve excerpted the following:

Some NHS trusts have said that all non-urgent procedures and clinic appointments will be postponed, including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery, maternity checks and some cancer treatments.

Many patients had been waiting months for surgery – only to have it cancelled a week beforehand. In a letter to one patient, the NHS blamed “unforeseen circumstances”.

Doctors at one central London hospital trust were told: “The day of the State Funeral will be treated as a bank holiday so please go ahead and start rescheduling patients.”

It follows the announcement that the UK will have a bank holiday on September 19 to mark the Queen’s funeral. But government guidelines says: “There is no statutory entitlement to time off,” adding that this is “a matter for discussion between individuals and their employer”.

So it is clear that the decision has been made unilaterally by the NHS trusts involved and there is no reason at all for the treatments to have been cancelled and rescheduled.

This Writer looks forward to hearing the rationale from party-girl Health Secretary Therese Coffey. Is she still having the time of her life?

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Brexit: Northern Ireland protocol has made UK untrustworthy to other nations

He WAS lying (allegedly): I know this image was about Covid-19 but it turns out to have applied for Brexit as well. Who knew? (Pretty soon we’ll be able to apply it to everything he says.)

Look how the Brexiteer right-wingers close ranks when their Holy Grail comes under criticism:

Dan Hodges, who claims to be a columnist for a national newspaper, reckons that Remainers are terrified that the UK’s Tory government and the European Union could come to an agreement over the now-thoroughly-unworkable Northern Ireland Protocol.

Jonathan Lis tells it like it is:

You see, it seems Boris Johnson – who works part-time as the UK’s prime minister, let’s remember, told a Northern Irish politician that he did not intend the NI Protocol to be workable, before his Brexit was voted through by Parliament, protocol and all, with his (public) blessing:

It seems the PM’s former right-hand-goblin, Dominic Cummings, has confirmed this:

What are representatives of other nations supposed to think?

I would say they’d think exactly what the former Taoiseach of the Irish Republic – now its deputy prime minister – Leo Varadkar has said:

Mr Varadkar said:

“Surely the message must go out to all countries around the world that this is a British government that doesn’t necessarily keep its word and doesn’t necessarily honour the agreements it makes.

“And you shouldn’t make any agreements with them until such time as you’re confident that they keep their promises, and honour things, for example, like the protocol.”

Meanwhile negotiations on a new NI Protocol have commenced – and already the commentaries suggest that Mr Varadkar’s is the prevailing view:

Aren’t those last comments interesting? In fact, the Brexit we ended up with – that Boris Johnson negotiated – turns out to be almost exactly the same as the “no deal” Brexit that his own government’s Operation Yellowhammer documents predicted in 2019 – and Jeremy Corbyn publicised in September that year:

He was ridiculed at the time. But he was right.

Two and a half months later, the UK elected the liar opposite him. And now nobody else in the world will believe us again.

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This former Commons speaker can still put a prime minister firmly in his place

This clip speaks for itself.

Former Commons Speaker Lady (Betty Boothroyd), speaking in today’s (October 19) Lords debate on how badly Boris Johnson has cocked up the UK’s departure from the European Union, said the following:

“Never in my Parliamentary experience have I witnessed such a collapse in the people’s trust.”

That is a warning.

Johnson will be too stupid – or too selfish – to take it.

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Former PM rips into Internal Market Bill: ‘So much for global Britain’

What a face: Theresa May’s expression shows exactly how she feels about Boris Johnson’s idiotic, selfish and destructive Internal Markets Bill.

Former Prime Minister Theresa May has made a devastating intervention on her successor’s Internal Market Bill, attacking the reasons it has been drafted and its effect on the integrity of the United Kingdom, and questioning whether any other country will trust the UK again.

In a debate on the Bill on Monday afternoon (September 21), she raised several important questions, starting with this:

Clauses 41-45 of the Bill refer to customs arrangements in Northern Ireland. Boris Johnson signed the EU Withdrawal Agreement in January, accepting that NI would remain under EU tariffs and effectively placing a customs border in the middle of the Irish Sea. Now he wants to renege on that.

Mrs May was critical:

And she makes an excellent point.

Her final point was better still – that the circumstances in which the UK chooses to break international law won’t matter to people in other countries; they’ll only see that the UK has broken international law and won’t want anything to do with a rogue state of that kind:

Her conclusion was a devastating blow – not only to the Internal Markets Bill but to her successor, Boris Johnson: “This is a country that upholds the rule of law. That is one of the things that makes us great; it is one of our characteristics… yet we are being asked to tear up that principle and throw away that value. Why? I can only see, on the face of it, that it is because the Government did not really understand what they were signing up to when they signed the withdrawal agreement.

“Frankly, I find it difficult to understand how any Minister can go through the Lobby to support these clauses.

“I consider that… the Government are acting recklessly and irresponsibly, with no thought to the long-term impact on the United Kingdom’s standing in the world. It will lead to untold damage to the United Kingdom’s reputation and puts its future at risk.”

Wow.

It won’t make any difference, of course.

If Boris Johnson was able to gull more than 300 Tory MPs into voting for his Withdrawal Agreement in January, and then to vote against it in September, then the word of a former prime minister won’t stop them doing whatever he wants.

They would probably shoot themselves through the lung if he told them to.

Effectively, that is exactly what they are doing – and the rest of us, too.

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#Whitty and #Vallance to appeal to the public over #Covid19 – because nobody trusts the Tories any more

Whitty takes over: the chief medical officer – with chief scientific officer Patrick Vallance – will be making a televised address to the nation because nobody trusts the Tories any more. From the state of this image, not even Whitty.

Trust in Conservative ministers has eroded so badly that they have been forced to hand over a televised update to the UK’s chief scientific and medical officers.

Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty – who was last seen shouting at performing monkey prime minister Boris Johnson and his boss Dominic Cummings in a photograph published in The Spectator – will make an appeal to the public to stick to new rules on Monday (September 21).

Whitty and Vallance are likely to compare the UK with other European countries such as France and Spain, which have seen a sharp rise in cases translate – after a lag – into increasing hospitalisations and then deaths. The UK saw 3,899 new cases and 18 deaths on Sunday.

The scientists will set out the latest data on the spread of the disease, and urge people to exercise caution. Whitty is expected to warn: “We are looking at the data to see how to manage the spread of the virus ahead of a very challenging winter period.”

Their intervention comes after ministers were accused of eroding trust, from failings and broken pledges on testing and tracing to scandals such as Dominic Cummings’ lockdown journeys.

Covid-19 is now on the rise across the UK, among people in all age groups. Cases are doubling each week.

The Tory ministers – like Johnson and Matt Hancock (also seen recoiling from Whitty in that Spectator shot) – are said to be hoping the scientists’ broadcast will help bring home the message that tough new restrictions will be unavoidable if the situation fails to improve.

So it is the Tory mailed fist behind the velvet glove: comply with restrictions, including the “rule of six” limit on social gatherings, or see stricter measures imposed.

Source: UK at ‘critical point’ over Covid-19, top scientists to tell public | World news | The Guardian

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Distraction tactics: why pay attention to all this right-wing fiddling while your country burns?

Jeremy Corbyn: it’s nice that a Twitter poll has rated him the best prime minister the UK never had, but the PM that we’ve got is turning the UK into a major disaster and this stuff is nothing more than an attempt to distract you. Did it work?

We all know bank holiday Mondays are where the news goes to die but August 2020 was particularly bad.

Judging by Twitter, the event that caught everybody’s imagination was a poll by right-wing Times Radio that resulted in a nobody presenter – This Writer has never heard of him – having to declare that Jeremy Corbyn is the best prime minister the UK never had.

(It means he would have been a better choice, not only than Boris Johnson or Theresa May, but better than many others as well – according to those who took part in the poll.)

Certain right-whingers immediately took it upon themselves to alleged – without any factual basis – that Corbynista Twitter users had ganged up to rig the poll.

Who cares?

It doesn’t matter. We didn’t get Corbyn. We got Theresa May in 2017 and Boris Johnson now – partly because Labour apparatchiks conspired to bugger up Corbyn’s campaigns on one or both occasions, if you believe a certain report (I do).

And it diverts attention from the failures of the government we have – especially at a time when Parliament is about to resume sitting after the summer recess.

The Guardian‘s editorial has identified a few of the political crises from which the poll has diverted our attention. For example:

Rishi Sunak is determined to end his Job Retention Scheme – the furlough to you and me – at the end of October, triggering a huge wave of unemployment. That’s right, even more people are about to learn what Universal Credit is all about – and they’re not going to like it.

He’s facing an annual national deficit that will have grown to twice the amount faced by Gordon Brown’s Labour government during the so-called “great recession” of 2008 or thereabouts. His party made a lot of mileage out of criticising Labour’s handling of that recession, slithering back into office by claiming it would end deficit spending and cut the national debt as well (instead the Tories more than doubled the debt to £2 trillion).

And in November Sunak has to produce a budget that will boost the economy and return the national finances to some semblance of balance (fat chance! He’s already facing a backbench rebellion on his mooted plans for tax rises).

Nobody’s going back to work because they don’t trust the government’s proclamations that it is safe from Covid-19. Nobody is likely to go back to universities for the same reason. The only people likely to want to go back to school are the kids – and that’s because they’re probably a bit bored by now and want to see their buddies again.

The Johnson government’s determination to push through Brexit as planned by December 31 means the party that pledged to end the scourge of “red tape” is more likely to throttle us with it, as businesses have to deal with an avalanche of pointless bureaucracy.

These are all problems that the Tories have created for the rest of us, either by incompetence or by design, since they first came back into power in 2010 – and most particularly since Boris Johnson became prime minister last year.

You need to be thinking about that, but instead you’re being seduced into thinking about a dopey Twitter poll that doesn’t mean anything at all.

You’re watching the right-wingers fiddling around while your country burns around you.

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Medical experts warn that government Covid-19 antibody tests are probably duff

How typical of the Tory strategy on Covid-19 that the blood antibody tests that cost them £16 million might not work:

Senior medical specialists have raised concerns about the accuracy of the antibody tests being carried out on NHS staff across the country.

The blood tests – which can tell whether someone has had Covid-19 – were previously described by prime minister Boris Johnson as “game-changing”.

The government has spent £16m buying some 10 million test kits from pharmaceutical giant Abbott and Roche with the first phase of the testing programme assessing NHS and care staff, before being rolled out to the public.

But a letter from academics and clinicians, published in The BMJ, raises concerns about the performance of the tests, the clinical reasoning for them and the cost.

“We have three concerns… Firstly, there is no specific clinical indication for the test on an individual basis. Secondly, the performance of these assays has not yet been assessed to the standard typically required of a novel test. And thirdly, the resource implications are not considered.”

“The assay is being rolled out at an unprecedented pace and scale without adequate assessment, potentially compromising public trust in pathology services in the future.”

The letter adds: “NHS England requires the result to be available in 24 hours. Given that routine testing of patients is neither clinically urgent nor meets a clear public health need, this push to introduce a non-evidence based test for uncertain gains risks inefficient use of scarce resources.”

The experts also warned that a positive or negative test result would not alter how a patient is managed either way and added that a positive result “does not indicate immunity”.

It seems the government has admitted the scientists may have a point.

The Department of Health and Social Care made a statement saying: “We do not currently know how long an antibody response to the virus lasts, nor whether having antibodies means a person cannot transmit it to others.”

Nevertheless, antibody testing “will play an increasingly important role as we move into the next phase of our response to this pandemic”.

Looks like another pointless waste of cash to This Writer. How typical.

Source: Coronavirus: Medical Experts Issue Warning Over Government’s Antibody Tests | HuffPost UK

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