Latest from Open Britain: Farage and BoJob Have Spat Over Who Is Putin’s Greatest Fan Boy

This reminds me a little of a ‘La Squab’ cartoon in the British SF magazine The Edge. The ‘Squab’ was a little girl who unloosed her very forthright opinions on the state of British literature, and the state of British SF in particular. In one strip Will Self and Martin Amis are looking at each other and saying, ‘Which one of us is a (expletive deleted)?.’ The strip’s innocent heroine looks at them both and says, ‘Errrr’. I don’t really have any strong feelings one way or another about Self and Amis, having never been tempted to read their books. I’ve read some of Self’s journalism and listened to him on the radio, and he was certainly capable of saying some really interesting things. So, it could be a bit excessive to call either of these two British literary greats by such an obscenity. On the other hand, various obscene terms for scoundrels, villains and malignant characters certain fit Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson.

‘Only ten days to go – Here’s what you need to know.

Ten days out from a historic election, and Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are currently engaged in an online spat over who is the bigger Putin sympathiser.

Farage published a piece in the Telegraph this weekend, in which he argued that NATO had provoked Russia into invading Ukraine – a Kremlin talking point with little substantial basis. Johnson called the article “nauseating ahistorical drivel”, despite the fact that he himself had blamed “EU  expansionism” for provoking Putin in 2022.

It’s emblematic of the chaos currently building on the British right. Even Johnson, who never did publish that Russia report in full, represents a slightly more NATO-aligned strain of Conservatism than Farage. Battles over key issues like these between Reform and the dying Tories will determine the very future of the British right. It’s trending in a dark direction.

Out of that chaos, something new will arise. The Conservatives were, for nearly 200 years, the most successful political organisation in the Western world. Their fall from grace is opening all kinds of new doors, and what steps through is likely to be more dangerous than anything we’ve seen before.

In other news…

• The Conservatives are embroiled in another – yes, another – crony contracts scandal, this time related to management consultants working on the broken “40 new hospitals” promise. It’s hard to be surprised by this lot anymore.
• Starmer announced over the weekend plans to add dozens of peers to the House of Lords, reportedly to push his agenda through and achieve a better gender balance. Just over a year ago, he claimed the second chamber needed to be abolished to “restore trust in politics.”
• A new poll has suggested that the Conservatives could be left with just 53 seats, and indicate likelihood that Sunak, the PM himself, will lose his seat in a historical first.

All the very best, The Open Britain Team‘

Mark Pattie, one of the many great commenters here, demolished Farage’s allegation that NATO had somehow provoked Putin to invade Ukraine. There is a sense in which Farage does have a point, though it certainly doesn’t justify his invasion and the current war. After the Fall of Communism Russia wanted the former satellites to be neutral, with that neutrality guaranteed by both NATO and Russia. A sort of buffer zone between the two military blocs. I think an agreement may have been signed between the two about this. Which didn’t last long, as the former eastern bloc countries then went ahead and quickly joined NATO, expanding the latter until it bordered on Russia. This is supposed to have increased the Russians’ fear of encirclement, and so, it is argued, is no more acceptable to them than the reverse would be if the Warsaw pact were still around and included Canada on America’s border.

There is also the problem that it’s been alleged that the 2012 Maidan Revolution which toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russian president wasn’t a spontaneous uprising but a very carefully organised coup set up by Hillary Clinton and her pro-consul, Victoria Nuland, in the US state department and the National Endowment for Democracy, the institution which now has the task of organising regime change for the American state now that task has been taken away from the CIA. Jimmy Dore, the American comedian and political commenter, discussed this possibility a few years ago on his show, I believe, and there have been articles about it in the conspiracy/parapolitical magazine Lobster. I think Dore has also played on his show recordings of Clinton telling Nuland that she didn’t want the Ukrainian politico Klitschko serving in the country’s cabinet. Dore recently appeared on the James Whale Show on GB News, where he continued his own independent thinking so that Whale threw a strop and threw him off.

I’ve also come across another video posted by the wretched broadcaster in which he did the same to the Oxbridge academic Avi Shlaim. Shlaim is professor emeritus of Middle Eastern history at one of those two august universities and is, I believe, a critic of Israel’s barbarous ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. He appeared in Peter Oborne’s documentary on the Israel lobby on Channel 4’s Dispatches. There he defended the Beeb’s reporting of the massacre of Palestinians in refuge camps in Lebanon by Israel’s allies, the Lebanese Christian Phalange against accusations of anti-Semitic bias by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Whale seems to have been arguing that all the opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza was just anti-Semitic and then lost of his temper when this highly respected scholar wouldn’t accept it. This effectively tells you all you need to know about Whales as a broadcaster – back in the ’90s he was trying to be the British counterpart to right-wing American ‘shock-jocks’ like Howard Stern – and GB News’ political bias in the international sphere.

As for Starmer’s U-turn on reforming the House of Lords, and instead of cutting down the number of peers or turning it into a democratically elected second chamber, filling it with even more members, who is honestly surprised at this? It’s just another broken promise, like so many others. And it is Blairite. I can remember the Labour party discussing reforming it in the 1980s and the possibility of turning it into an elected senate. Then Tony Blair won the election and promptly stuffed it full of ‘people’s peers’. Now we can see Starmer doing the same, though this time he’s using feminism as an excuse and claiming it’s all about gender balance.

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.

Get the Big Accountancy Firms Out of My Government

Mike yesterday put up a piece reporting and commenting on the news that the Tories have squandered £100 million on the usual ratbag assortment of management consultants and big accountancy firms. You know – the usual offenders – PwC, Deloitte and McKinsey since March. This is work that should properly be done by the civil service. They were trained and required to adhere to high standards of impartiality. Unfortunately, too many of them didn’t. I heard much of Thatcher’s and Major’s privatisations, especially of British rail, was strongly supported by one particular senior servants. But the ideal of genuine public service was there. It was why the Sidney and Beatrice Webb, civil servants themselves, had such respect for their profession that their socialist views were strongly bureaucratic. They honestly believed that enlightened servants, guided by an involved public kept informed by honest reporting and the public of official statistics, would make a better job of running the country than the current political class.

The management consultants don’t. They’re in there for their own private profit, and they’ve made one stupid, incompetent decision after another. Mike’s article mentions several which were so bad they had to be reversed almost immediately. But they still keep getting contracts.

This is another piece of corporatist corruption that began with Thatcher and Major. I remember how they’ve royally screwed up the civil service. This started with the former Anderson Consulting, who were called in to reform the Department for Health and Social Security, turning it into the Benefits Agency as a form of half-way house to privatisation. They then went on to do something similar to the Inland Revenue. All this could have changed with the election of Blair. He had the popular mandate. But after the Tories rejected one of Anderson Consulting’s little schemes, Blair fished it out of the dustbin and made it his official policy.

Mike argues that Johnson has called them in because he can’t think for himself. That’s part of it, but not all of it. There’s a piece by Tony Benn in the book ‘The Best of Benn’ where the great socialist criticises the way industry uses management consultants to make conditions in firms worse and start laying off their workers. He states that, in practice, the firms have already decided on this course of action. They’ve called in the management consultants to present their decision as the result of object research into present working conditions. I think much the same is going on here. The Tories and New Labour stand for privatisation. And this is what they’re given by the management consultants and accountancy firms. Plus, I think some of the politicians may well have staff recruited from them and in return are expecting positions on their boards after their political career ends. It’s the constantly swinging open door between politicians, senior civil servants and industry. And its corrupt.

I’ve come to despise the big accountancy firms and look on them the same way the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation are described in Douglas Adams’ The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This is a fictional robotics company that is so incompetent, its complaints division now covers the major landmasses of three planets in its home system. They are so bad that the Guide itself describes them as ‘A bunch of mindless jerks who will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes’.

Well, I wouldn’t go that far. But I do want them out of politics and out of government. I’ve started to wish there were demonstrations against them, and the other big businesses that have wormed their way into politics through the sponsorship of the political parties, in return for which they’ve been given positions in government. I wish people were marching against PwC, Deloitte, McKinsey and the rest, parading caricatures of their chief executives and burning them in effigy. Because I think this corporatist corruption will only stop if we show that we aren’t tolerating their interference, for their own profit, in our public affairs.

Johnson’s government has spent £100 million on consultants because he can’t think for himself

Shirley Williams on the Growth of Bureaucracy under Thatcher

The great boast of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives is that private enterprise, unfetter by state control, somehow magically reduces bureaucracy. Apart from ignoring the fact that firms also necessarily have their own bureaucracies, the economic and social importance of many of the industries taken into state control means that even after these industries were privatised, there still had to be a state bureaucracy to make sure these industries continued to act in a fair and responsible manner. So there are a plethora of regulatory bodies supervising telecommunications, electricity, water and the environment. And one effect of privatisation was to make these regulatory authorities and the state supervisory bureaucracy bigger than they were under state ownership. Private Eye in the 1990s during John Major’s administration ran story after story noting the massive increase in such bureaucracy in the electricity, water and environment agencies. The Eye also noted how Thatcher’s successors attempted to cut down this bureaucracy by increasingly depriving them of their statutory powers and limiting their remit. Bureaucracy was reduced not be being more efficient, but by being deliberately cut down to prevent it interfering. And thus was public protection against the predation and mismanagement by the newly privatised companies removed.

Shirley Williams, the former Labour MP, who became one of the founders of the SDP also noted the growth of bureaucracy under the Conservatives before Thatcher in her book, Politics Is For People. She wrote

Another paradox can be seen in Britain, and no doubt in many other countries as well: the growth of administration. In 1970, the then Conservative government brought in the American industrial consultant, McKinsey & Co., to advise them on the reorganisation of the National Health Service. the reorganisation, in which professional interests were extensively consulted, led to a substantial increase in the number of administrative and clerical posts, and a higher proportion of administrators and clerical employees to doctors and nurses, the front line of the service. Local government reorganisation, under the same Conservative government, had similar consequences: more highly paid administrative posts, no evidence of improvement in local government services. Big government has its own impetus which is hard to stop, whatever the philosophy of the executive in charge. But opposition to it rubs off most on political parties identified with a substantial role for it. (Pp. 29-30).

Labour has suffered because, as the party most identified with big government and state expenditure, it has also been criticised by its Right-wing opponents as the party of waste. Yet the Tories have vastly inflated the bureaucracy involved in the remaining areas left under state control. Private Eye noted that the creation of the internal market in the NHS, and the PFI financing of hospitals, vastly increased bureaucracy in the Health Service. Successive governments have carried on the marketization of the NHS, with a further increase in bureaucracy. Within the BBC, the Eye also noted that John Birt’s administrative reorganisation of that once-great and respected institution resulted in the expansion of the upper management grades on vastly bloated salaries coupled with a damaging reduction in the production staff, who actually made the programmes people watch.

Britain’s public services and industries have been made increasingly inefficient through the creation of a corrupt and parasitic class of managers, who seem to serve only to perpetuate themselves at the expense of their own companies and their workers. Indeed, Ha-Joon Chang in his book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism in one of the very first chapters describes the cases of several companies that actually went to the wall because their managers cut investment and wages, and sold of the companies’ assets, in order to increase their share price and their own salaries.

The Conservatives are the party of parasitic, useless bureaucracy. And the management consultants they have called in to advise them on how to reform British state administration have done nothing but wreck it. Arthur Anderson, later Anderson Consulting, destroyed the Benefits Agency and the Inland Revenue in the 1980s and 1990s. Their successors in PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the rest of the accountancy firms sending their senior staff to help both Tories and Labour draft their policies on tax and so on are part of the same poisonous trend. The Tories should be thrown out of government, and the management consultants and accountancy firms firmly excluded from the business of government.

MPs and NHS Privatisers: Lord Darzi

I’ve blogged recently about right-wing entryism into the Labour party through Demos and other thinktanks set up by Tony Blair’s New Labour. New Labour also carried on and expanded the Tories’ policy of the gradual privatisation of the NHS. Readers and commenters at Mike’s blog over at Vox Political have repeated questioned the failure of many Labour MPs to attack the Tories properly on their manifestly cruel and unjust policies towards the poor. Well, they’re manifestly cruel and unjust, unless you’re a reader of the Sun, Telegraph and Daily Mail. Then they’re exactly what this country needs, and anyone who doesn’t have an income of £50,000 a year is a scrounger, who deserves all they get. Part of the problem is that under Blair, the Labour party became ‘Labour Plc’, as the title of one book on the subject declared. MPs developed very close links with the companies hoping to profit from the privatisation programme, and provided cosy directorships and other lucrative posts for MPs when they left government.

Lord Darzi: Health Minister under Gordon Brown, subsequently joined GE Healthcare.

Lord Darzi, Gordon Brown’s health minister, is a case in point. Private Eye ran two stories about him in 2009 and 2010. The first marked his departure from government by describing his meetings and links with a number of commercial firms, including banks and private healthcare companies. The second story the following year was on how he had joined one of these private healthcare companies, GE Healthcare. Together these stories illustrate how privatisation can provide a lucrative career for MPs seeking to profit from the privatisation of the NHS, whether they are Labour or Tory.

The first story comes from Private Eye’s edition for 24th July – 6th August 2009.

NHS PLC
Buy-Buy from Him

Lord Darzi’s departure as health minister in Gordon Brown’s “government of all the talents” is a blow for the prime minister, but it’s also a pain for the bankers, private health firms and consultancies who have spent so many hours talking to him.

No doubt they hoped his Next Stage Review of the NHS would lead to the creation of lots more privately funded and run clinics, all set up with loads of management consultancy help. But their gains have been modest so far.

Following freedom of information requests, it emerged that in 2008 and 2009 so far, Darzi had meetings with bankers NM Rothschild & Sons, Apax Capital, UBS Investment Bank and Cinven; with private medical companies Humana Care UK, Humana Europe, United Medical Enterprises, GE Healthcare and the MCCI Medical Group; and with computing and management consultants from IMS Health, IBM, Capita, Dr Foster Intelligence and Serco Solutions.

The minister also had a couple of meetings with Boots the Chemist (which employs former health minister Patricia Hewitt). But now all these executives and lobbyists are going to have to go through the whole process again with another minister (who will probably only be in the job until the election in the first half of next year).

The second story about Darzi was published in the Eye’s edition for 25th June – 8th July 2010.

Revolving Doors
Healthy Appetite

Lord Darzi, the former Labour health minister who has taken a job with GE Healthcare, the medical corporation, was just the first through the revolving door as ex-Labour ministers snap up jobs in the private sector.

The US firm has multiple contracts with the NHS for scanning and IT work – and Darzi had official meetings with GE Healthcare shortly before he stood down last year. He has joined GE’s “healthymagination” board, an initiative that the records show he discussed with the firm when he was a minister.

Darzi says he will only take expenses for joining the US board and will put the rest of the cash into his research fund at Imperial College, London. GE, however, hopes to profit from “healthymagination”, which is a branding and marketing exercise. The company recently ran into controversy when it tried to sue Danish academic Henrik Thomsen for libel in the London courts after he raised safety concern over one of its drugs. The firm dropped the case after a public outcry earlier this year.

The Labour party did not invent the ‘revolving doors’ between government, the civil service and private industry, by which the officials and ministers involved in privatisation took up lucrative posts afterwards with the very private companies either created from or purchasing the former nationalised industries. It began in the 1990s under John Major, where it was a large part of the ‘sleaze’ marking his administration. The French, however, have legislation against it. According to the Financial Times, when a French official was asked about Major’s privatisations and the sleaze, they replied, ‘You call it ‘sleaze’. In France we simply call it ‘corruption’.’ Which is something to think about the next time the Mail goes berserk at the cheek of Johnny Foreigner, and particular the French, to criticise fine upstanding British institutions.

Unfortunately this corruption didn’t end with Gordon Brown and New Labour. It has continued with the Cameron’s and Osborne’s renewed campaign to privatise the NHS. There are at least 92 coalition MPs, who stand to profit from this. One of them is Iain Duncan Smith, the Minister for Incompetence and Killing the Disabled.

This cannot be allowed to continue.

Ed Miliband has promised to reverse the Tories’ plans to privatise the NHS. He deserves our full support.