‘BREAKING: Amazon paid no corporation tax from their main UK division for the second year in a row – despite profits of £222 million. In fact, the government even gave the company £7.7m in tax credits! [1]
David, that’s cash that could go towards our NHS or helping families with the cost of living. [2] So we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again. How? Chancellor Jeremy Hunt needs to scrap the tax credit for companies making these kinds of profits right now!
But we need to move fast. If thousands of us join forces today, while Amazon’s tax bill is all over the news, we’ll show the Government we simply will not stand for massive companies not paying their fair share.
So David, will you take 30 seconds to sign the petition calling on Jeremy Hunt to close tax loopholes for massive companies like Amazon?
The Government runs a special tax break scheme to encourage investment in infrastructure. [4]
But Amazon used it as a loophole to claim credits for investments they probably would have made anyway, to boost their profits. [5]
Meanwhile, they’re also downsizing in the UK and slashing jobs! [6]
It’s completely outrageous and needs to stop. So David, can you sign the petition calling on the Government to stop tech giants like Amazon ripping us off?
Here’s another report on the massive failings and sheer contempt for democracy and proper political conduct by the Tories. It focuses particularly on Rishi Sunak, a multi-millionaire from the hedge funds, who’s married to a tech millionaire. He therefore has absolutely no clue about how his policies are harming ordinary, working Brits.
‘Dear David,
Rishi Sunak has now been PM for nearly six months. Hardly the fresh start we were promised, his premiership has been stained by the same non-stop cycle of scandals, investigations, and inquiries that embarrassed the country under Truss and Johnson.
The Raab inquiry; Scott Benton’s cash-for-favours scandal; Sunak paying Johnson’s legal fees; Richard Sharp and the BBC; Matt Hancock’s leaked texts; Keeping the illegal Rwanda flights plans alive. Sunak is not just trapped by the ineptitude and corruption of his predecessors – he’s completely embroiled in their insular and out of touch world.
This week, a new scandal dropped that once again calls into question Sunak’s now infamous promises for “integrity, accountability and professionalism at every level”.
The PM failed to declare shares held by his wife, Akshata Murty, in a childcare agency that will receive a big boost from the government. Sunak and his wife stand to benefit from Jeremy Hunt’s budget, which offers payments to childminders of £1200 when they sign-on to childcare agencies like Murty’s Koru Kids (mentioned by name on the UK government website).
Following on from outrage about Mrs Murty’s non-dom tax status, her financial connections to Shell and Goldman Sachs, and Sunak family ties to tax havens in the Cayman and British Virgin islands – this simply reinforces Sunak’s image as a PM completely detached from the reality most people live in. Sunak is the first PM ever to come from the world of hedge-funds and venture capital – and (probably) the first to be married to the heiress of a global tech-giant.
Sunak never fails to display how out of touch he is. Whether he’s talking about his lack of “working class friends” or admitting that he’s taken money from deprived parts of the UK, he comes across as someone that lives in an entirely different reality.
This week, we saw it again with his “Maths to 18” plans. Downing Street reportedly had to ditch their social media campaign after the only spokesperson they could find for it later claimed Sunak’s maths education plan was “short-sighted, out of touch and grossly unfair on students.”
Westminster in 2023 is like a remote islet, growing more and more distant from our real lives and instead cuddling up to oligarchs, aristocrats, and billionaires. It’s a systemic problem that can only be resolved with serious reform. Merely voting in another party without a mandate to fix it is not enough.
It’s why I’m committed to ending FPTP, enforcing a strong and binding ministerial code, seeing off Tufton Street think-tanks, fixing campaign finance law, and bringing back our human rights in full force – and Open Britain is too. It’s the only way to bring this Westminster club back down to Earth.
All the best,
Matt Gallagher Open Britain’
Robin Ramsay of the conspiracy/ parapolitics magazine Lobster has repeatedly stated that the concentration on the financial sector by Thatcher and successive governments, including Tony Blair, has seriously harmed British manufacturing. And it’s not just the working class that are being harmed by the Conservatives. I came across a video today about how Britain’s small businessmen and women were also being harmed by the Tories’ promotion of big business above everything else. I’m not surprised. Margaret Thatcher always made much of her background as the daughter of a shopkeeper, while Ted Heath had the nickname ‘the grocer’. But for a long time now small businesses have been suffering from Thatcherite policies. Blair favoured the big supermarkets over small community shops, and that has also damaged communities. Small, local shops employ more people, and so when the big supermarkets moved into an area, when these shops closed down due to the competition, unemployment in the area also rose. Big businesses are also slow to pay their suppliers, and as these may be small businesses, they’re particularly in danger of going bust. There were demands on John Major’s government, I recall, to pass legislation requiring the big companies to pay their small suppliers promptly, but this disappeared. The statement that voting in another party without a mandate for reform won’t solve the problem is quite right. Starmer seems to me to be all too ready just to carry on Blair and the Tories’ policy of benefiting the financial sector at the expense of everyone else, just as Blair did.
For ordinary working and lower middle class Brits to benefit instead, this policy has to be attacked and discarded.
‘David, leaked documents have revealed massive shortages of NHS staff. [1] Without urgent intervention, experts are warning our NHS could be left on its knees, with over HALF A MILLION unfilled vacancies for doctors, nurses, porters, ambulance workers and others we desperately need. [2]
The good news? There’s a plan on the table that sets out how to fix this impending staffing crisis – and it’s being backed by campaigners, experts and even the Health Secretary, Steve Barclay. [3] It could secure the future of our NHS. The bad news? Reports suggest, the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt believes it’s too ambitious and expensive and he wants it to be watered down. [4]
That’s where we come in David. Right now the public’s voice hasn’t been heard. Together, we can show Jeremy Hunt, that we – the British public – expect him to stump up the money to fix the biggest crisis in our NHS, get it back on its feet and recruit the doctors, nurses and dentists we need. A huge petition signed by hundreds of thousands of us could pile on enough pressure to force him to fund this plan. Every 50 of us who add our names, an email notification will be delivered to the Chancellor’s inbox. If 10,000 of us do so in the next few hours, that’s 200 emails. Our messages will flood his inbox!
So, David will you add your name right now and call on Jeremy Hunt to fund the plan to give us the NHS staff we so desperately need?
For years the NHS has struggled with staff shortages, often having to look to expensive agency staff to fill the gaps. [5] Having enough qualified staff in our NHS is crucial to protecting patient safety. That’s why this plan is so important – it finally tackles one of the biggest problems facing our NHS head-on.
Not so long ago, Jeremy Hunt was Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee. At that time he blasted plans “to cut back on doctor training” and he criticised the lack of a plan to tackle “the greatest workforce crisis in their (NHS) history”. [6] Now, as Chancellor, it’s time he puts our money where his mouth was.
So, David will you add your name to the petition calling on Jeremy Hunt to back the plan and protect the future of our NHS?
I’ve signed it, but I’m not sure how much good it will do. After all, Jeremy Hunt wrote a book not so long ago demanding the Health Service’s privatisation. But I hope this petition helps to make a difference.
The Tories really are slave-driving sadists. Apart from the unemployed, there’s a real hatred of the sick and disabled, who they also consider to be workshy scroungers. I got this message the other day from the internet petitioning organisation 38 Degrees, asking me to sign a petition against their latest wheeze. There’s a bill going through parliament at the moment that’s gone under the radar, but if passed would force doctors to find suitable work to do for sick people rather than signing them off. I think they’ve tried something like that ages ago. I remember them trying to pass some kind of law to prevent doctors signing people off work. Anyway, it seems they’re going back to it with a vengeance. However, this mentality is actually crippling industry as well as workers. Presenteeism is the state where unwell employees nevertheless have to, or feel they have to come into work. This obviously spreads the disease and doesn’t contribute to efficiency. I can remember reading a piece about it a few years ago, which demolished the Tory policy of forcing people to work even so unwell that they really need time off. But the Tory party is so thick and vindictive that this has obviously gone way over their Eton-educated bonces. Here’s the message
‘David, this new plan from the Government to interfere when we’re sick is unbelievable. GPs would be told not to sign people off sick from work, and instead tell them to find ways to work through illness. [1]
The Government says it’s to help boost the economy, but targeting sick people – instead of corporations like BP and Centrica that have made billions in profit – is cruel and short-sighted. [2]
Luckily we have a chance to stop it. It’s one of many ideas being considered ahead of next month’s budget. And the Government will be watching closely to see how people react. So we have a chance to shoot it down before it becomes anything worse than a bad idea thrown around in a cabinet meeting.
So far it’s not made many headlines or gotten much attention so the Government might think they can get away with it. A huge petition signed by over 49,000 people, is calling out this terrible idea to be dropped before the budget. But we’ll need more people to add their name if we are going to get them to listen.
So David, if you think doctors, not ministers, should make decisions about what happens when we’re sick, sign the petition today. It takes just 30 seconds and we’ll make sure it gets on the radar of Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt:
I’ve just got this email from 38 Degrees requesting people to writer to Chancellor Jeremy Hunt asking him to abandon his opposition to the NHS workers’ demands for a pay rise. I’ve written an email as they’ve requested. If you also feel that our great medical professionals and the other staff deserve their rise, please feel free to do so as well.
David, today and tomorrow, nurses in England will be striking. [1] We know they don’t want to do this – but government inaction, pushing our NHS to breaking point, has left them with little choice.
The good news? Things might be swinging our way! Reports are emerging that the Health Secretary, Steve Barclay, is working with NHS unions to try and get more money for NHS staff. [2] But it’s also claimed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt are refusing to budge. [3]
The Chancellor holds a HUGE amount of power over the purse strings. If we want him to stop dragging his heels, thousands of us need to speak up now.
David, you are one of 75,000 of us who signed the open letter in support of striking NHS workers. [4] If all of us bombard the Chancellor with messages telling him to listen to his colleagues, and invest in our nurses and NHS staff, we’ll be impossible to ignore. David, will you email the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, today to demand he ends his holdout and offers NHS workers a proper pay rise? It only takes a couple of minutes and there are some pointers to help you write your message.
Thanks to pressure from hundreds of thousands of 38 Degrees supporters, in 2021 we helped force the Government to triple its pay offer to NHS staff. [5] We can do it again, but only if thousands of us speak up together in support of striking NHS workers.
If you’ve never sent an email to an MP before, don’t worry, it’s easy and even a short message could make all the difference. Here are some tips for what you could say:
Share your story if you are an NHS patient: if you’re waiting for treatment and are happy to talk about this, it will be even more powerful.
If you work in the NHS, you could mention it – personalised stories will go a long away
Talk about why you back our NHS heroes: even if it’s a line or two, the Chancellor needs to know why the public are backing NHS staff
Remember to be polite: There’s a real person at the other end reading your email!
So, David, will you join in and send one of the thousands of emails landing in Jeremy Hunt’s inbox on the day NHS nurses go on strike? It only takes a couple of minutes and there are some pointers one the page to help you write your message
I got this message yesterday from the internet petitioning organisation objecting to Jeremy Hunt’s apparent refusal to provide free school meals to four-firths of a million children on Universal Credit, but who currently don’t qualify for free school meals. I’ve signed it, and if you feel as strongly about it as I do, I hope you’ll do the same. Because this is obscene. Britain is one of the richest countries in the world, and millions of working people and children are going hungry. They have to use food banks to stave off starvation, and now there are warm banks to make sure they don’t die of hypothermia because they can’t afford to heat their homes. Marcus Rashford, God bless ‘im, managed to shame them into providing fee school meals to deprived kids during the holidays. And they hate him for it. They published hit pieces afterwards lambasting him for being rich and having more than one house. Guess what? That’s irrelevant. The Fabian Society rejected class war, and so, I think, did the Labour party in general. They fought for the working class but saw socialism as such an eminently reasonable social system of society that everyone would benefit. This is where Labour differs from Communism. The only people who are fighting a class war, and exploiting class resentment, are the Tories in order to keep the workers firmly in their place.
‘Dear David,
800,000 vulnerable children are going to school hungry and missing out on free school meals – yet Chancellor Jeremy Hunt had nothing to say about it in last week’s budget. [1] He’s happy to leave hundreds of thousands of families, on Universal Credit but not eligible for free school meals, to struggle to feed their kids. [2]
David – we won’t let the Government get away with this. Our petition to expand free school meals is over 90% of the way to 100,000 signatures – but your name is missing. [3]
We MUST push this up the Government’s agenda if we’re to protect families struggling this winter. [4] That’s why we have BIG plans to expand this campaign – and it all starts with ramping up names on this petition and handing it in to Rishi Sunak to put child hunger firmly on his radar. As for the next stage of the campaign… watch this space!
So David, will you add your name to show Rishi Sunak he can’t get away with letting kids go hungry?It only takes a few seconds to sign!
It feels like we’re getting close to a breakthrough, David. Supermarkets, local councils, and celebrities are piling on the pressure to expand free school meals. [4] But time and again, the Government has failed to give critical support to families most in need – which is why we need your name, and your support.
So David, will you sign today to urge this Government to expand free school meals and keep this country’s children fed?If each of us reading this signs, we’ll smash the 100,000 target!
According to the news, the NHS nurses are going on strike on the 15th and 20th of December. I don’t want the nurses to strike, but I don’t blame and absolutely support them. Or rather, what I should say is that I don’t want the nurses to have to strike. Because I don’t believe they have a choice. I went to one of the fringe Labour meetings online a few weeks ago. I can’t remember whether it was organised by Arise or the Labour Assembly Against Austerity. Not that it really matters. One of the speakers was a medical professional or activist with the NHS. And what she said was really chilling. One quarter of the country’s NHS trusts – I don’t know whether this is Britain as a whole or just England – were running food banks for their nursing staff. For the nurses! And we have student nurses considering dropping out, because they can’t afford to feed themselves and study! And that obese abomination Therese Coffey wanted the NHS budget cut further. Like all the other right-wing Tories, including Farage, who boast about they’re going to cut waste. The Irish vlogger, Maximilien Robespierre, asked in one of his videos whether she was the most odious Tory politician. She had responded to an interviewer’s question by saying that if nurses didn’t like it, they should look for work elsewhere. It’s the standard Tory answer that you hear trotted out whenever there’s a strike. Presumably Coffey thinks we could get more poor immigrants to work for cheap wages to replace them, as one of these horrors suggested we could do to plug the labour shortage in other industries. I’m sick of Coffey, sick of Hunt, and sick of the Tories full stop.
I got this message on Thursday. I’m glad that the Labour party are preparing to confront the Tories, but I am concerned by the serious lack of detail about policies. I think Labour’s already been challenged about that in parliament this week, and it looks like Starmer is just playing the game of letting the Tories hang themselves rather than present any real concrete alternatives. If he’s anything like Blair, he’ll just pick up their old policies and carry on as they did. Or go even further and complete his betrayal of Labour’s real activists and supporters.
‘Dear David,
As we approach the end of 2022, we find ourselves in a worse place than where we started.The mess we are in is not just a result of 12 weeks of Conservative chaos, but 12 years of Conservative economic failure.
Inflation is spiralling. Growth is plunging. Living standards are falling.
And today, Jeremy Hunt delivered a fiscal statement with less for public services and more tax rises for working people.
Yet again with this Tory Government, it is working people who will foot the bill.
David, Britain is a great country, with fantastic strengths. But the Tories are holding us back.
They have pick-pocketed the purses and wallets of the entire country.
A double whammy of frozen tax thresholds and inflation eroding people’s wages.
The stealth taxes, excuses and unfair choices announced by Jeremy Hunt make one thing very clear: the Tories do not deliver for working people.
No plan to deliver economic growth, no plan to fix our crumbling public services and crucially, no plan for the future.
What we need is a serious, long-term plan to get our economy growing again – powered by the talent and effort of millions of working people and thousands of businesses.
We need a greener, more dynamic economy, creating jobs across every part of the country, with a modern industrial strategy where government works hand in hand with business.
That is what Labour will deliver.
David, after 12 years of failure, Britain can no longer afford the Tories. It’s time for a fairer, greener future with Labour.
Thank you,
Rachel Reeves MP Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer’
JOE is another YouTube channel that cuts the speeches and pronouncements of politicians and celebrities to make them appear to say stupid things as satire. It was Hallowe’en yesterday, so they’ve created this suitably seasonal musical parody. In this clip, they send up the Tory government by having Jacob Rees-Mogg intone a twisted version of Vincent Price’s spoken words in the 1980s Michael Jackson hit, ‘Thriller’. This shows the Tories rising from the graves as a true Zombie government, who have trashed the economy, jacked up mortgages, devastated people’s pensions. Jeremy Hunt is once again a psycho who will make more cuts to the NHS than Norman Bates. And Liz Truss is Chucky, the killer doll.
The pro-nationalisation, pro-NHS movement ‘We Own It’ held a Zoom meeting yesterday about the need to defend the health service from the Tory’s pernicious ongoing privatisation and discuss the demonstrations and protests they were organisations. It was hosted by the very well-informed and genial John Bosco and had a range of excellent speakers. It was to last from 6 pm to 7. 30, but I left after 50 minutes. This review thus necessarily does not cover the full event and all its speakers. Those I heard were Kate Osborne MP, Ben Goodair, the scientist behind the research showing that privatisation and outsourcing is actively killing people, Ron Mendel, an activist from my home city of Bristol and Zack Palansky, the deputy leader of the Green Party and member of the London assembly. And what they had to say was chilling.
Kate Osborne reminded us that a few years ago, Jeremy Hunt sold off the blood department of the NHS to the investment company, Bane, which then sold it on for a tidy sum. As a result, there’s a crisis in the blood section of the NHS, which has been forced to issue an ember alert. As for present health secretary, Therese Coffey, she is actively campaigning for the cash-starved NHS to get less money. She urged people to expose the false narrative that private industry is aiding the NHS. It isn’t. And to show how desperate conditions are for workers in the health service, one quarter of NHS trusts are running food banks for their own staff.
Ben Goodair’s work showing that outsourcing has actively produced excess deaths was published in the Lancet. Much of his talk was about the methodology they used to research this. He stated that one in ten patients in the health service is now being treated by a private healthcare company. He and his colleagues looked at the impact of privatisation by examining the use of private companies hired by the CCGs, the collections of doctors that Blair set up to control doctors’ spending. Not all CCGs used private healthcare companies. Many don’t, or only use to them to a small extent. But the study found that where they were used extensively by the CCGs, deaths rose significantly the next year.
Ron Mendel is an American, now living in my fair, home city. He has personal experience of the immense cost to the patient of private healthcare. He was speaking from Israel and Palestine, where he has been trying to work for peace between the two communities. He revealed that in Bristol, the Integrated Care Trust is currently running at a £36 million deficit. According to research by the University of Glasgow, between 2012 and 2019 there were 344,000 excess deaths.
Zack Palansky made it very clear that he and his party were fully behind the principles of the NHS: that it should be universal, publicly funded and free at the point of use. He stated that dental care needed to be defended as well as health – an important point now that, thanks to Thatcher’s privatisation and its consequences, millions of people don’t have an NHS dentist. He also pointed out that in 2015 Catherine Lucas, their leader, had launched an NHS reinstatement bill in the Commons to reverse the privatisation of the NHS. The Green Party, he declared, would reverse the 2012 Health and Social Care Bill. This is the pernicious bit of legislation that exempts the government from providing healthcare, the fundamental duty of the health secretary when it was founded by Nye Bevan. And he also stated that party leaders and MPs should join workers on picket lines.
We Own It as a whole stressed, they were not party-political and stated that many Tory voters wanted the privatisation stopped and the health service properly funded. But they recognised that most of the people campaigning were on the left. As well as urging their supporters to sign their petition against privatisation, they are also planning to set up a mass demonstration against it in Parliament Square on 25th February next year. They want at least 557 people there, to represent the 557 people who have needlessly died due to NHS privatisation.
The meeting was extremely well attended. There were 315 people there, from all over the country, and part of the organisers’ message was that these should be active in small groups in their local areas. If people are able to do this, it means that the organisation’s impact may be greater than those numbers suggest.
We Own It are doing great, important work as the NHS comes under attack from the Tories. We need the lie that outsourcing and privatisation is helping the health service to be absolutely refuted and political leaders who are willing to stop and reverse it.
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