Management Consultants Raking in £3,000 a Day from the NHS

One of the great commenters on this blog remarked a little while ago that they had seen or heard something to the effect that although Blair did give increased funding to the health service, much of this disappeared into the pockets of management consultants and administrators rather than actually reaching where it was needed – the medical professional on the front line, for example. The pro-democracy organisation Open Democracy has published a piece reporting that the NHS spends £3,000 per day on private management firms. The piece by Adam Bychawski begins

‘NHS England is paying management consultants day rates of up to £3,000, despite the government claiming it cannot afford to give nurses and junior doctors a real-terms pay rise.

Some executives from top consulting firms including Deloitte and PA Consulting are being paid the equivalent of an annual salary of more than £600,000 by NHS England for their services – more than double what its own CEO is reportedly paid.

Deloitte, which charged the most for its consultants last year at up to £3,000 a day, was ironically hired to help NHS England improve how it keeps track of its spending on private companies.

The findings come after a deal was struck between health unions and the government for a 5% pay rise for more than a million NHS workers. Ministers had dismissed demands for an above-inflation rise on the grounds that it would be unaffordable.

Unite and the Royal College of Nursing rejected the offer, with the former saying that it fell well short of the current rate of inflation. Both are planning to continue with strike action, while the British Medical Association (BMA), which represents junior doctors, is continuing negotiations. The BMA is looking for a 35% pay rise to make up for 15 years of below-inflation pay increases.

Unite’s national lead officer Onay Kasab called the figures “a damning indictment of a government that seems intent on destroying the NHS and has learnt nothing from the pandemic, when it allowed the health service to be plundered by private sector profiteers”. He added: “The money would be much better spent providing a proper pay rise for NHS staff to end the recruitment and retention crisis that is crippling health services.”

The day rates were disclosed to openDemocracy through a Freedom of Information request only after the Information Commissioner’s Office warned NHS England that it could be taken to court if it continued delaying its response.

The figures also show consultants from PA Consulting were paid up to £2,500 a day to provide NHS England with support for its Covid vaccination programme between December 2022 and March 2023.

More than a dozen consultants from Ernst and Young were paid up to £2,343 a day last year to give NHS England recommendations for a system that would make it possible to share patient health records electronically between trusts.

The health service also forked out up to £2,350 a day on consultants from KPMG to support improvements to its digital services.

NHS England told openDemocracy that the rates are negotiated centrally by the government.

“It is absolutely appalling to see huge sums of money syphoned off into consultancy firms in this manner,” Julia Patterson, chief executive of NHS campaign group EveryDoctor, told openDemocracy. “At the very least, there should be published reports annually demonstrating the added value provided by contracting strategic advice.

“Local healthcare experts – such as the NHS clinicians, who are woefully underpaid – would be much better placed to offer advice about the planning and processes within their respective areas.”

The sums raise questions about whether the government has learnt from its disastrous NHS Test and Trace scheme, which was criticised for relying too heavily on private sector consultants. Deloitte staff were paid up to £6,000 a day to work on the programme despite an inquiry later finding that it failed to slow the pandemic.’

For further information see: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/nhs-england-consultants-deloitte-kpmg-pa-consulting-ernst-young/

Get the privatisers and profiteers out of the NHS, and the Tories out of government.

Refugees Who Have Done National Service Are Not an Invading Army

More nuttery from the anti-immigrant right. I’ve blogged about how Correct, Not Political and some of the rest of them believe in paranoid conspiracy theories in which the Channel migrants are really undercover UN soldiers sent in by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum to overthrow British democracy, subdue its people, and bring about the rule here of the global communist superstate. Correct, Not Political’s main man, Jim Boobeh, has even claimed that people have seen them being trained by the British army. Tonight I found another video by someone else who bought into that myth. Clown World YT put up a video reporting how they’d put in freedom of information requests for the numbers of migrants who had a military record or experience. He was complaining that he had been turned down because of the cost involved in looking for the information. He was afraid that because of this penny-pinching, we are being left vulnerable to real invaders.

This is quite an assumption. My guess is that many of the asylum seekers probably have served in their countries’ military, but only because many countries around the world still have national service. Russia still had it even before they invaded Ukraine. I have friends from foreign countries, who are here precisely because of their opposition to the regimes in their home countries. They have served in their countries armed forces, but only because they had to do national service.

This conspiracy theory is rubbish, and dangerous rubbish because, by seeing the Channel migrants as real, potentially armed invaders, it creates a dangerous attitude of suspicion and fear that could lead to real violence against them.

FOIA Documents Show Governments and Scientists Conspired to Discredit Lab Leak Theory of Coronavirus Origins

This is another very interesting video from History Debunked’s Simon Webb. He’s not talking about race and fake history this time, but about the release of documents in America under the Freedom of Information Act that confirm that the government and leading scientists believed that it was certainly not unlikely that Covid had escaped from a Chinese lab, and deliberately lied to the public to discredit the idea. Webb states that he found it suspicious that Coronavirus emerged in bats in Wuhan, which housed the Wuhan Centre of Virology. This carried out research into both bat and the SARS virus, the family of diseases that includes Covid. He was persuaded, however, that this was nonsense by the various respectable scientific magazines such as the Lancet and New Scientist, that told the public that this was, in fact, extremely unlikable. This gave rise to a conspiracy theory that held that the disease did in fact come from a lab, and that these scientists and magazines were lying. This was attacked in turn as completely false, and coming from anti-Chinese racism.

Documents released in America under the Freedom Of Information Act have shown that many leading scientists did believe that the disease may have come from a Chinese laboratory. Apparently it’s genetic structure shows evidence of human tinkering. The government’s chief scientific advisor, Sir Patrick Valance, was himself briefed on this possibility. However, the government and scientific establishment decided that, partly from diplomacy, this possibility should not be revealed to the public. Instead it was to be criticised and discredited. Webb states that we still do not know the origins of the virus, but it is certain that there was a real conspiracy by the authorities to cover up the real possibility that it came from a Chinese laboratory.

This may be a Friend Of A Friend story, but the other week I heard from someone, who claimed to have been told it by academic scientists that he knows, that the Coronavirus not only is artificial, but it probably escaped while being tested on humans. While western germ warfare and microbiological labs test diseases on animals, the Chinese apparently test it on their own peasants. They’re inject with diseases in return for a few bags of extra rice to plant. It’s very much like the infamous Tuskeegee experiment in America, in which a group of southern Black sharecroppers were deliberately infected with syphilis and left untreated in order to monitor the spread of the disease. In return their funerals were paid for by the state.

The Tuskeegee experiment is solid, established fact. I don’t know if the Chinese really test diseases on humans, nor if the Coronavirus really was a product of the lab in Wuhan. But it seems the idea cannot be discounted. Nor can we really trust the authorities and scientific establishment to tell us the truth about it.

Instead of convincing us that such ideas are conspiracy theories in the pejorative sense, these revelations have instead done much to confirm them.

If the Press Can Publish Harry and Megan’s Correspondence, then We Should See Murdoch and Co’s

Harry and Meghan and suing the Mail on Sunday for publishing a letter from Megan to her father. And today, that bastion on the British press – and as the late Terry Wogan used to say of the Beeb, ‘there are many basty ‘uns in there’  – the MoS set out its defence. It’s the old ‘public interest’ argument. They’re going to argue that Meghan and Harry don’t have the same right to privacy as the rest of us, because they’re private correspondence and activities are of interest to the public. Zelo Street has put up a piece demolishing it by showing how circular the argument is. The letter, and anything else the royal couple writes or does, is of interest to the public because the press tells them it is. Zelo Street states

‘What the MoS is setting out in its defence is that what it did is OK, because that is what the paper expects to be able to get away with. Hal and Meg should not expect to have any privacy because that would impact on the MoS’ business. Hence that paper and all the others kicking off like so many spoilt children at the prospect of the couple being out of reach very soon. How dare they stop the press scoring copy off of them?

In mounting this defence, then, the MoS has proved the Duchess’ point for her. But she and her family are not there merely to provide cheap copy. The press just doesn’t get it.’

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/01/mail-on-sunday-proves-meghans-point.htm

The public interest argument does, however, also justify the publication of the private correspondent of the newspaper magnates, who make their bloated fortunes exploiting the private correspondence not just of Harry and Meghan, but of anyone else in the public eye. Murdoch, Geordie Grieg, the weirdo Barclay twins and the rest of the whole unsavoury crew play a powerful role in modern politics. They have intimate connections to the Tory government, and not only shape public opinion in its favour, they also arrogantly assume that they have a right to dictate the political direction not just of the government but also of the opposition. Former cabinet members have reported that Rupert Murdoch was always an invisible presence at the meetings of Blair’s government, and the former Labour Prime Minister worried how his policies would go down with the owner of the Scum and the Times. That’s why the Mail, the Times and the Scum have been running pieces telling the Labour party what it should do to become electable – unsurprisingly this the expulsion of the Corbynites and the return to Blairism – and viciously attacking left-wing candidates for the Labour leadership, like Rebecca Long-Bailey.

The press barons are unelected, massively powerful, and have what amounts to a monopoly on news in this country. Murdoch’s empire should have been broken up under the Monopolies and Mergers’ Commission years ago, but it wasn’t because he was a supporter of the Tories. They also have huge business interests, that also dictate the views their papers take on various stories. Way back in the 1980s, for example, Tiny Rowlands, the owner the Absurder, wouldn’t publish pieces critical of Zimbabwe because he had interests in a mining corporation working there. But these same press magnates are absolutely unaccountable. Yet they arrogantly assume they have the right to dictate governmental policy, while zealously keeping their own affairs private. 

But if the Royals have no reasonable right to privacy, neither do Grieg, Murdoch et al. If they are shaping policy and public opinion, we should know their private business to judge for ourselves whether they are correct and acting in our interest. It’s only fair. And as they acted as the unofficial Tory propaganda office at the last election, it should all be accessible under the Freedom of Information Act.

How’s that for governmental transparency, Rupert?

Medic Attacks Tory Claims to Have Built 18 New Hospitals as Misleading

This weekend’s edition of the I carried a report that a leading medic, Dr Susan Crossland, had said that the Tories were misleading the public by claiming that they had built 18 new hospitals. The report by Paul Gallagher, ‘Tory claim to have built 18 new hospitals ‘misleading” ran

A leading medic has accused the Government of misleading the public after it claimed 18 new hospitals had opened in the past 10 years.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) made the claim in documents released under an I Freedom of Information request, but the figure includes existing hospitals either refurbished or redeveloped.

At least 11 of the projects are redevelopments, refurbishments or changes to existing hospital sites, such as integration or relocation.

Dr Susan Crossland, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said “The conflation between new hospitals and refurbishment of existing hospitals is misleading to the public.

“Whilst investment in the crumbling infrastructure of the NHS property portfolio is welcome, at the time we are seeing unprecedented demand on hospital beds we call into question whether this will ease the current pressures we see. And we call on the Government to be honest and account to the tax-paying public. Are there going to be any more beds in the system, or are we going to continue to see further reductions?”

Pressed on how many of the 18 projects could be described as “whole new hospitals” the DHSC did not respond.

NHS staff union Unison said the lack of “whole new builds” was “shocking”. It said “at least half” of the projects are a legacy of the previous Labour government, so there has been “next to nothing” under the Tories.

The revelation calls into question the Government’s ability to honour its manifesto pledge to build 40 hospitals in the next 10 years. The Tory manifesto promised the NHS “its biggest ever cash boost, with 20 hospital upgrades and 40 new hospitals.”

According to FullFact.org the Government has committed the money to upgrade six hospitals by 2025. Up to 38 other hospitals have received money to plan for building work between 2025 and 2030, but not to actually begin any work.

Mr Johnson has been criticised for refusing to say how much the promised new hospitals will cost, where they would be, or where the money involved would come from. The only detail given in the six NHS trusts that would receive £2.7bn to rebuild existing acute hospitals in England by 2025, and £100m “seed money” to 21 other English trusts to work up plans for similar projects. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says that if most were new hospitals in city centres containing state-of-the-art equipment, the cost might be between £12bn and £24bn.

A DHSC spokesman said: “We’ve launched the largest hospital building programme in a generation which will deliver at least 40 new hospitals over the next decade.”

So the Tories have been caught lying again. They  haven’t built 18 new hospitals. If 11 of those they cite are just refurbishments, it means at most they’ve built just 7. And it seems most of those 18 hospitals were built by the Labour government. And the claim that they’re going to build 40 new hospitals over the next ten years is just specious promises.

The reality is that they’re going to run down the NHS while making token gestures towards building and renovation to disguise what they’re doing, read for privatisation.

Outrage as Iain Duncan Smith Given Knighthood

This is a really sick joke, and shows the absolute contempt the Tories have for the poor, the unemployed and the disabled. Iain Duncan Smith, the architect of the Tories welfare reforms, has been given a knighthood in the New Year’s honours. Smith is the pompous nonentity who was briefly the leader of the Tory party at the beginning of this century before David Cameron took over. It was a period of failure, in which the party utterly failed to challenge Blair’s Labour Party. He was, however, a close ally of his successor, and has also served Boris. He tried to stand up for Johnson when our farcical Prime Minister was denied the lectern in Luxembourg, claiming that the Luxembourgers should be grateful to us because we’d liberated them during the War. But we hadn’t. The Americans had. And under Tweezer he’d also peddled the line that there would be no legal divergence between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

But what Smith is most notorious for is mass murder. As head of the Department of Work and Pensions, he was responsible for the welfare reforms, including the Work Capability Assessments and the system of benefit sanctions, that have seen hundreds of thousands denied the welfare payments they need and deserve. He is also responsible for Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payments. UC is supposed to combine all the welfare payment into a single system. It has proven catastrophically flawed, with people waiting weeks or months for their payments, which have been significantly lower than the previous system. Mike in his article about it quotes statistics that some of those on UC are £1,000 a year worse off. But this jumped-up, odious little man boasted that Universal Credit would be as significant in lifting people out of poverty as the ending of slavery in the British Empire in 1837.

The result of IDS’ reforms is that at least 130,000 people have died. The true figures may well be higher, as the DWP has been extremely reluctant to release the true figures, as Mike and other disability campaigners have found. His attempts to get the Department to release them under the Freedom of Information Act were refused, then stonewalled. Finally Smith’s Department released some figures, but interpreted his requested so that they weren’t quite the figures Mike had requested.

As well as the financial hardship there is the feelings of despair and humiliation that his reforms have also inflicted on the poor. Doctors and mental health professionals have reported a rise in depression and suicide. The Tories, naturally, have repeatedly denied that their policies have any connection to people taking their own lives, even when the person left a note explicitly stating that this was why they were.

Some sense of the despair IDS’ wretched reforms has produced in young people is given by the quotes from them in Emma Bond and Simon Hallworth’s chapter, ‘The Degradation and Humiliation of Young People’ in Vickie Cooper’s and David Whyte’s The Violence of Austerity. ‘Julie’ said

The way that it feels walking into the JobCentre is that you are there to do what you are told to do and that’s it and then you leave. They are not there to actually help you it is just like, you have to do this and if you don’t do this or you won’t get no money. (p. 79).

And ‘Bridget’ described how she felt so low at one point she contemplated suicide.

I am ashamed to admit it but I did feel suicidal at one point. I felt so down after I was made redundant that I felt that there was no point. I had worked really hard at school and I got good grades but for what? I was happy when I got my job, it wasn’t that well paid but it had prospects and a career path – or so the recruitment agency told me – I had my flat and that and I thought I was OK. But when it [the redundancy] happened I felt like I had been hit by a brick wall. I got really down especially when I went to the JobCentre and they would not help me. I felt so depressed. I could not afford my rent. I lost my flat and the few things I had saved up for. I did not know where to turn. I took drugs for the first time in my life – I felt so wretched. I wanted to die. I was too ashamed to tell my parents that I had lost my job. (p. 80).

But IDS, as Zelo Street reminds us, is the man who laughed at a woman talking about her poverty in parliament. He’s also blubbed on television, describing how he met a young woman, who didn’t believe she’d ever have a job. ‘She could have been my daughter!’ he wailed. But this is just crocodile tears. He, like the rest of the Tory party, have no love whatsoever for their victims as the guffaws with Dodgy Dave Cameron in Parliament showed.

Mike in his piece about the wretched man’s ennoblement has put up a large number of Tweets by ordinary people expressing their outrage. One woman, Samanthab, states how rotten the honours system is when it rewards not just IDS, but other creeps and lowlifes, like the sex abusers Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall and Rolf Harris.

The outrage is so great that one NHS psychiatrist, Dr Mona Kamal Ahmad, has launched an online petition at Change.Org calling for the scumbag’s knighthood to be withdrawn. She describes him as responsible for some of the cruellest welfare reforms this country has ever seen and notes that Britain is the first country the United Nations has investigated for human rights abuses against the disabled. She states clearly that the suffering and impoverishment in Britain today is a direct result of Smith’s welfare reforms.

30,000 people, including myself, have already signed it. If you want to too, go to Mike’s article at: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/12/28/will-you-sign-nhs-doctors-petition-to-stop-iain-duncan-smith-receiving-knighthood/ and follow the links.

See also: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/12/27/chorus-of-derision-greets-announcement-that-iain-duncan-smith-is-to-be-knighted/

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/12/arise-sir-duncan-cough.html

Labour Promises Inquiry into Deaths Caused by Tory Benefit Cuts

Mike put up a very encouraging piece last Thursday reporting that, according to the Disability News Service, the Labour Party will, if elected

“set up an independent inquiry into the deaths of disabled benefit claimants linked to the actions of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and its private sector contractors.”

This is excellent news. So far, an estimated 130,000 people have died due to victimisation by the Department for Work and Pensions due to the reforms brought in by the Conservatives and their coalition partners, the Lib Dems. Mike, however, points out that this is probably the minimum number, and the real figures almost certainly are shockingly higher.

This is exactly what Mike and the other disability rights activists and campaigners have been fighting for. Mike says he’s been doing so almost since he set his blog up in 2011. And he had despaired of any such inquiry ever occurring. The Tories would definitely try to stop it, just as they did everything they could to prevent Mike getting hold of the information on the number of people, who had died after being declared ‘fit for work’. Mike requested this information under the Freedom Of Information Act, as his readers will recall, and the government did everything they could not to give this information to him. Even going so far as to challenge his appeals to the Information Commissioner. Eventually they released some information, though they interpreted his request in a manner so that they could avoid giving him the precise information he wanted.

Mike states that he felt Labour would also do its best to avoid confronting the problem, and points to the ‘dark days’ when Rachel Reeves was Work and Pensions Secretary. But Jeremy Corbyn’s accession to the leadership of the Labour party has given him hope. Hope that could be fulfilled if Labour gain power. He states that under Labour, we might just see the people responsible for those deaths brought to justice.

He concludes

So if you don’t have any other reason to support Labour, do it for this.

The families and friends of the dead need this.

Vote Labour for justice.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/11/28/labour-will-hold-an-inquiry-into-all-the-benefit-related-deaths-overseen-by-tories-vote-labour/

And Trev, one of the great commenters on this blog, has pointed me in the direction of a piece by the Disability News Service reporting that a five year long investigation by them into the deaths of five people found ‘fit for work’ – Mark Woods, David Barr, Michael O’Sullivan,  Paul Donnachie and a woman known as ‘Ms DE – has provided them with ‘strong and clear evidence’ for the prosecution of the two ministers responsible for the Tory policies – Iain Duncan Smith and Chris Grayling – and the senior civil servants who share that responsibility – for misconduct in public office.

It’s a lengthy report, going into the circumstances of the deaths of these five people, four of whom killed themselves due to mental health problems and the first, Ms DE, starved to death. I’ve done no more than skim it and am not a legal expert by any means. But it does seem to be a substantial piece of research.

https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/dwp-the-case-for-the-prosecution/

If this was possible, and actually went ahead, so that IDS and Grayling found themselves in the dock it would be utterly fantastic. I’ve made several comments expressing my utter disgust at their culpability, exacerbated by their flagrant lying and denials, that they should face prosecution for murder. They won’t, but this is clearly the next best thing, and perhaps the best we can hope for.

I’m not sure such a prosecution will ever get off the ground, for the same reason that attempts to prosecute Blair and George ‘Dubya’ Bush for war crimes for the illegal invasion of Iraq were frustrated. But I hope I’ll be surprised. Even if they aren’t convicted, the trial should be very interesting and extremely revealing.

In the meantime, if you want to stop the Tories killing more disabled people, who could be your friends, relatives or even you yourself, then I urge you:

Vote Labour.

Because Tory policies have killed over a hundred thousand victims. And will kill a hundred thousand more.

But your vote for Labour will help stop them.

The Beeb’s Reply to Zelo Street Commenter’s FOIA Request for Information on the Selection of the Panel for Question Time

An anonymous commenter to Zelo Street posted this very interesting piece about the reply they got when they sent the BBC a request under the Freedom of Information Act for information on the way the BBC selects the guests for the panel on Question Time, its flagship current affairs programme. This has been the subject of controversy and serious criticism for its blatant right-wing bias. The members of the Panel are drawn almost exclusively from the Right, with the exception of a single individual to represent the Left. As for the host, there was always a right-wing bias under David Dimbleby, but this has increased and become even more pronounced and objectionable under Fiona Bruce. Many people have complained to the Beeb about its bias, and got the standard bland replies and brush-offs. This commenter, unfortunately, was treated no differently. Here’s their post.

The BBC?

A few weeks ago I sent a FOI request to said propaganda organisation. Here’s the reply I got:

“Thank you for your request to the BBC of 05 July 2019 seeking the following information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (‘the Act’):

“Selection of panel members on TV Question Time. Can you kindly confirm which individuals (by name) and department(s) are responsible for selection of the above, plus all criteria used during selection.”

The information you have requested is excluded from the Act because it is held for the purposes of ‘journalism, art or literature.’ The BBC is therefore not obliged to provide this information to you and will not be doing so on this occasion. Part VI of Schedule 1 to FOIA provides that information held by the BBC and the other public service broadcasters is only covered by the Act if it is held for ‘purposes other than those of journalism, art or literature”. The BBC is not required to supply information held for the purposes of creating the BBC’s output or information that supports and is closely associated with these creative activities1 . The limited application of the Act to public service broadcasters was to protect freedom of expression and the rights of the media under Article 10 European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR”). The BBC, as a media organisation, is under a duty to impart information and ideas on all matters of public interest and the importance of this function has been recognised by the European Court of Human Rights. Maintaining our editorial independence is a crucial factor in enabling the media to fulfil this function. However, the BBC makes a huge range of information available about our programmes and content on bbc.co.uk.”

The BBC is about as trustworthy as a barrel load of snails covered in excrement. London-based right wind propaganda clerks, nothing more.

The comment is posted at: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/07/boris-appoints-lawbreaker.html

To find it, scroll down past the article.

In short, the BBC responds to the request by saying that FOIA doesn’t cover them, and so they aren’t going to release it. I can appreciate why the Beeb and other public service broadcasters have been exempted from the legislation because of human rights issues. However, this means that the Beeb’s news editors remain unaccountable, and the Corporation is determined to protect those responsible for its grossly biased news and current affairs coverage, at least as regards Question Time.

In many ways, it really is a Tory propaganda machine, which corporately has the same sense of arrogant superiority that it’s overpaid chiefs have individually and personally.

UN Calls for Inquiry into Torture by British Troops in Iraq

Saturday’s issue of the I had this article, ‘UN calls for inquiry into torture by Army’ on page 2, which runs

A United Nations body has called for an inquiry into allegations of unlawful killings, torture and ill-treatment by British troops in Iraq. The Committee against Torture, which monitors the implementation of the convention against torture, said the UK should “refrain from enacting legislation that would grant amnesty or pardon where torture is concerned”.

This reminds me very strongly of Abu Ghraib, the US interrogation and detention centre where it was revealed US squaddies were abusing Iraqi prisoners. As much as I’d like to believe that British troops are different and morally superior to the rest of the world, it strikes me as all too possible that some of our troops were also doing the same. Britain was involved in the secret renditions of terrorists or terrorist suspects to countries, where they could be tortured. Furthermore, it has also been revealed that the American troops and mercenaries in Iraq ran amok in a reign of terror, according to shocked American diplomats. The mercenaries ran prostitution rings and shot innocent Iraqi civilians for sport as they drove past them. It was also revealed that American troops also collaborated with Shi’a gangs in running death squads.

I don’t know, but unfortunately it wouldn’t surprise me if British troops were involved in similar atrocities. But I wonder if we will ever find out about it, considering how unwilling the mainstream media were in promoting the War in Iraq, at least in America, and the way the British state still has very strong powers to block Freedom of Information requests and any inquiries into its dodgy activities.

Two Books By Tony Benn

I hope everyone’s had a great Christmas and their New Year is off to a good start. May the shadow of Theresa May and her wretched Brexit be very far from you!

Yesterday I got through the post two secondhand books I’d ordered from Amazon by that redoubtable warrior for socialism and working people, Tony Benn. These were Arguments for Socialism, edited by Chris Mullin (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1979) and Fighting Back: Speaking Out For Socialism in the Eighties (London: Hutchinson 1988).

The two books differ slightly in that one is written from Benn’s perspective at the end of the ’70s, while the other was written nine years later at the end of the 1980s. In both Benn tackles the problems of the day, and lays out his radical, democratic socialist plans to revitalise the British economy and industry, strengthen and broaden democracy, and empower working people.

The blurb of Arguments for Socialism simply runs

Tony Benn, the most controversial figure in British politics, outlines a strong democratic-socialist approach to the most crucial issues in our political life over the next decade.

It has an introduction, and the following chapters, subdivided into smaller sections on particularly topics. These are

Section 1., ‘The Inheritance’, is composed of the following
The Inheritance of the Labour Movement
Christianity and Socialism
The Bridge between Christianity and Socialism
The Levellers and the English Democratic Tradition
Marxism and the Labour Party
Clause IV
The Labour Movement.

Section 2. ‘Issues of the 1970s’
Labour’s Industrial Programme
The Case for Change
Opening the Books
Planning Agreements and the NEB
Public Ownership
Industrial Democracy
The Upper Clyde Work-In
The Worker’s Co-ops
The Lessons of the Workers’ Co-ops
Democracy in the Public Sector

3. ‘Energy’
North Sea Oil
The Debate over Nuclear Energy
Windscale
The Fast Breeder
A Future for Coal
Alternative Sources of Energy
Conclusion

4 ‘The EEC’
Loss of Political Self-Determination
Loss of Control over the United Kingdom’s Industry and Trade
Unemployment and the EEC
After the Referendum

5. ‘Democracy’
Technology and Democracy
The Case for Open Government
How Secrecy Is Maintained at Present
Leaks and How They Occur
Conclusion

6. ‘Issues for the 1980s’
The Arguments
The Argument in Outline
The Present Crisis of Unemployment
Adam Smith and the Birth Capitalism
Lessons from the Pre-War Slump
Three Remedies on Offer
1. Monetarism
2. Corporatism
3. Democratic Socialism

7. ‘Jobs’
The Pension Funds
New Technology
Growth
The Trade Union Role in Planning
Workers’ Co-ops
A New Relationship between Labour and Capital

8. ‘The Common Market’
Three Criticisms of the EEC

9. Democracy
Open Government
The Unions
The Armed Forces
The Media
A New Role for Political Leaders.

Fighting Back’s blurb runs

With crisis after crisis rocking the country throughout the Eighties, the formation of new parties, divisions with in the old, mergers, reconciliations – British political life is at a watershed.

Tony Benn, in speeches on picket lines, at Conferences at home and abroad, in broadcasts, in the House of Commons, has been a consistently radical campaigning voice: for equal rights, for democracy and for peace against the increasingly brutal politics of monetarism, militarism and self-interest.

Fighting Back brings together for the first time in one volume the best of Tony Benn’s speeches from 1980 to 1988. Few poeple will have heard more than brief snippets of proceedings in the House of Commons given by television, radio and the press, so the most important debates are included here – the Falklands War, Westland helicopters, Fortress Wapping, Zircon and Spycatcher – as well as some lesser known concerns, from the ordination of women, to the politics of singer Paul Robeson.

Throughout the difficult years in Opposition, Tony Benn has played a leading role in defending and regenerating the socialist tradition. But Fighting Back is more than simply a personal testament: it is also an exciting and accessible handbook to the turbulent Eighties, whatever one’s political convictions.

After the introduction, it has the following chapters and subsections:

1. The Stalemate in British Politics
-Fifty Years of Consensus Rule
-The Party and the Government
-From Defeat to Victory
-Parliamentary Democracy and the Labour Movement

2. Prophetic Voices
-Positive Dissent
-Thomas Paine
-Karl Marx
-Paul Robeson
-R.H. Tawney
In Defence of British Dissidents

3. Fighting Back
-The Falklands War (April 1982)
-The Falklands War (April 1982)
-The Falklands War (May 1982)
-The Falklands War (December 1982)
-The Miners’ Strike (June 1984)
-The Miners’ Strike (September 1984)
-The Miners’ Strike (February 1985)
-Gay Rights
-Fortress Wapping (May 1986)
-Fortress Wapping (January 1987)
-The Irish Struggle for Freedom
-After Eniskillen
-Privatisation of Gas
-Legal Reform

4. British Foreign and Defence Policy
-The Case for Non-Alignment
-Who is Our Enemy?
-A New Agenda for the International Labour and Socialist Movements
-Some Facts about Defence
-Towards a Permanent New Forum
-Paying for Apartheid

5. Work and Health in a Green and Pleasant Land
-The Unemployment Tragedy
-Trade Unionism in the Eighties
-Full Employment: the Priority
-The Common Ownership of Land
-The Case Against Nuclear Power
-Nuclear Accidents
-The Nuclear Lobby
-Evidence Against Sizewell B

6. The Arrogance of Power
-The Case of Sir Anthony Blunt
-The Belgrano-Ponting Debate
-Westland Helicopters
-Surcharge and Disqualification of Councillors
-The Ordination of Women
-The Zircon Affair
-Spycatcher
-Protection of Official Information

7. Disestablishing the Establishment
-Power, Parliament and the People
-The Civil Service
-The Crown, the Church and Democratic Politics
-A Moral Crisis
-The Disestablishment of the Church of England
-Television in a Democracy
-Televising the House

8. Light at the End of the Tunnel
-The Radical Tradition: Past, Present and Future
-Staying True to the Workers
-Aims and Objectives of the Labour Party.

The Books and their Times

Arguments for Socialism comes from a time when this country had nationalised industries, strong trade unions and an efficient and effective planning apparatus. It was also when unemployment and discontent were rising, and the country was facing the threat of Thatcher and her monetarist agenda. The speeches and articles in Fighting Back come from when Thatcher had seized power, was busy privatising everything not nailed down, smashing the unions and trying to silence any dissent. This included attempts to prosecute civil servant Clive Ponting for leaking documents showing that the Argentinian warship, the General Belgrano, was actually leaving the Falklands warzone when it was attacked and sunk. Thatcher also banned the publication of Peter Wright’s Spycatcher over here, because of the embarrassing things it had to say about MI5. This turned into a massive farce as the book was widely published elsewhere, like New Zealand, meaning that foreign readers had a better understanding of the British secret state than we Brits did. It was such a ridiculous situation that Private Eye’s Willie Rushton sent it up in a book, Spythatcher.

Benn’s Beliefs on Socialism and Democracy

Benn was genuinely radical. He believed that British socialism was in danger not because it had been too radical, but because it had not been radical enough. He wished to extend nationalisation beyond the utilities that had been taken into public ownership by Attlee, and give working people a real voice in their management through the trade unions. He also fully supported the workers of three firms, who had taken over the running of their companies when management wanted to close them down, and run them as co-ops. On matters of the constitution, he wished to expand democracy by bringing in a Freedom of Information Act, strip the Crown of its remaining constitutional powers and have them invested in parliament instead, and disestablish the Church of England. He also wanted to strip the office of Prime Minister of its powers of patronage and give more to MPs. He was also firmly against the EEC and for CND. Socially, he was on the side of grassroots movements outside parliament, fully embraced gay rights and the ordination of women within the Anglican Church.

Not the Maniac He was Portrayed by the Press

He was and still is vilified for these radical views. The press, including Ian Hislop’s mighty organ, Private Eye, presented him as a ‘swivel-eyed loon’, at best a mad visionary of hopelessly unrealistic ideals. At worst he was a Communist agent of Moscow ready to destroy this country’s ability to defend itself and hand it over to rule by the Soviets.

He was, it won’t surprise you to learn, anything like that.

He was very well respected by his constituents in my part of Bristol as a very good MP and brilliant orator, and was respected even by his opponents in the city. One of the leaders of Bristol’s chamber of commerce said that he was always rational and his opinions clearly thought out. I’m a monarchist and a member of the Anglican church, and so don’t share his views on the disestablishment of the Church of England. But his arguments there are interesting.

Disestablishment of the Anglican Church

Recent calls for disestablishment have come from atheists and secularists, and Benn does use the secularist argument that privileged position of various Anglican bishops to sit in the House of Lords is unfair to those of other faiths, Roman Catholics, Protestant Nonconformists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists. But this argument actually comes at the end of the main body of his pieces. His main points are that the bishops shouldn’t be there, because they’re unelected, and that parliament and the prime minister, who may not be Anglicans or even Christians, have no business appointing the denomination’s clergy or deciding doctrine. It’s an argument primarily from within the Anglican church, not from someone outside, jealous of its position.

The Prime Minister against the Church and Its Members

One example of how the Prime Minister abused their position to override or impose their views against the wishes of the Church itself was when Thatcher got stroppy with the-then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Robert Runcie. After the Falklands War, Runcie had preached a sermon saying that we should now meet the Argentinians in a spirit of reconciliation. This is what a Christian leader should say. It comes from the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are the peacemakers, and all that. We’ve heard it several times since by great leaders like Nelson Mandela and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But Thatcher didn’t like it because she wanted something a bit more triumphalist. This section is also interesting because it has an interesting snippet you and I south of the Border have never heard of, except if you’re a member of the Church of Scotland. That august body at its synod overwhelmingly voted in favour of nuclear disarmament. I hadn’t heard anything about that before, and I doubt many other people outside Scotland had. And it obviously wasn’t an accident. The Tory media really didn’t want anyone else in Britain to know about it, in case they thought it might be a good idea.

It wasn’t just the Church of Scotland that were against nuclear weapons. So was a leading Roman Catholic prelate, Monsigner Bruce Kent, now, I believe, no longer a member of the priesthood. One of my aunts was a very Roman Catholic lady, who was also a member of CND. She found herself on one march next to a group of Franciscan friars. So kudos and respect to all the churches for their Christian witness on this issue.

CND, the Unions and Media Bias

On the subject of CND, Benn talks about the blatant bias of the press. All kinds of people were members of the Campaign, but when it was covered on television, what you got were a few shots of clergy like Monsignor Kent, before the camera zoomed in on the banner of the Revolutionary Communist party. CND were part of Russkie commie subversion! Except as I remember, they weren’t. The Russians didn’t like them either after they criticised their maneoevres in eastern Europe.

Benn states that the media’s bias is peculiar – its somewhere to the right of the Guardian, but slightly to the left of Thatcher. This was the attitude of the establishment generally. And it was extremely biased against the trade unions. He cites the work of Glasgow Media Studies unit, who looked at the language they used to describe industrial disputes. The language used of the trade unions always presented them as the aggressor. They ‘demanded’ and ‘threatened’, while management ‘offered’ and ‘pleaded’. He then asked hsi readers to turn the rhetoric around, so that a union asking for a pay rise of 8 per cent when inflation in 10 per cent is ‘pleading’.

The Ordination of Women

His stance on the ordination of women is equally interesting. He was obviously for it, but his arguments as you might expect were very well informed. He pointed out that women had been campaigning to be ordained in the Church since the 1920s, and that other Christian denominations, like the Congregationalists, already had women ministers. As did other Anglican churches abroad, like the Episcopalians in America. It was blocked here by the Anglo-Catholics, who fear it would stop re-union with Rome. But even here, he noted, this may not be an obstacle, citing movements for the ordination of women within Catholicism. Again, it’s an argument from within the Church, or from someone genuinely sympathetic to it, than from an outsider frustrated with the Church’s stubborn refusal to abide by secular social values, although that is also in there.

Government Secrecy

And back on the subject of government secrecy, the Zircon Affair was when Thatcher banned the transmission of an edition of the documentary programme, Secret State. I’ve put up that documentary series a few years ago on this blog, because it showed the extent to which Thatcher and others had been using the Official Secrets Act to suppress information that was embarrassing or uncomfortable. Like the fact that in a nuclear war, this country would suffer massive casualties and the obliteration of its major population centres.

The book actually contains any number of interesting snippets that definitely weren’t reported, or else were only given very tiny coverage, in the mainstream press. Like details of various incidents at nuclear plants that could have led to serious accidents. He also talks about the ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme. In this international project, we sent our nuclear material over to America, where, we were told, it would be used for peaceful purposes generating power in American reactors. Well, it was used in American reactors. They refined it into the plutonium, that was then put in American nuclear warheads and sent back over here to the US nuclear bases on British soil. He also pointed out that the agreements covering the use of Britain as a base by US forces in the event of a nuclear war also contravened our sovereignty.

Ted Heath and the EU

Loss of sovereignty was also a major part of his opposition to the EU. But he also makes the point that our entry into the Common Market was also undemocratic. Ted Heath simply decided the country was going in. Parliament was not consulted and did not vote on the issue. I do remember that there was a referendum afterwards, however.

Intelligence Agencies Smearing Labour MPs

The intelligence agencies are another threat to British democracy. He cites Peter Wright’s Spycatcher memoir on how MI5 was spreading rumours smearing the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, as a KGB spy. This, like much of the rest of the material in the books, has not dated. The problem of the security services smearing left-wing politicians is still very much with us, as we’ve seen from the Integrity Initiative. They’ve smeared Jeremy Corbyn as a Russian spy.

Books Still Relevant in 21st Century

I’ve only really skimmed the books so far, just reading the odd chapter, but so much of it is directly relevant now. I think if he were alive today, Benn probably would have voted ‘Leave’, but his arrangements for leaving the EU would have been far more sensible and beneficial to this country’s ordinary folk than that of Tweezer and her band of profiteers. And he is absolutely right when he writes about expanding democracy in industry. He states that the workers’ co-ops on the Clydeside and elsewhere were attacked in the press, because suddenly the British capitalist establishment were terrified because it showed that there was a genuine alternative to capitalism, and that workers could run companies.

The individual sections in these books chapters are short, and the arguments clear. He also gives point by point party programmes on particular issues, such as making this country more democratic.

Benn Democrat, Not Authoritarian Communist

And it’s this concern for democracy that most definitely marks Benn out as being a democratic socialist, not a Trotskyite or Communist. Those parties and their various sects were run according to Lenin’s principle of ‘democratic centralism’. Put simply, this meant that the party would hold some kind of open debate on issues until a decision was made. After that, the issue was closed. Anybody still holding or promoting their own opinions faced official censure or expulsion. And the Communist parties of eastern Europe would have been as frightened of Benn’s championing of democracy as the British establishment.

Conclusion

As I said, I take issue with Benn on certain issues. But his reasoning is always clear and rational, his points well argued and based in fact. Furthermore, he is impressed with the British radical tradition and how much British socialism is squarely based within it. We lost one of our greatest parliamentarians with his death.

His ideas, however, are still very relevant, and have been vindicated with time. He was right about monetarism and corporatism, about unemployment, about the need for unions, about media bias. His support of women priests and gay rights were ahead of their time, and have now become almost a commonplace, accepted by all except a few die-hard reactionaries. And he’s right about nationalisation and worker empowerment.

These are books I intend to use for my blog and its attack on Tweezer and the Tories. And I won’t be short of useful material.