Reply from Local MP Karin Smyth to Letter Against Tory NHS Privatisation

Firstly, sorry for my silence the past few days. The TV company we’re with were upgrading the network in our area and we lost internet and TV reception. The TV came back on as expected, but we still couldn’t get the internet. We had to call an engineer out and the first opportunity for one to come was today. Well, he did indeed come and fix it, so all should be up and running as usual. We hope.

Last week I put up a piece about the pro-NHS group, We Own Out, encouraging people to write to their MPs asking them to vote against the Tories’ latest wretched health bill, introducing more privatisation into the NHS. I wrote to my local MP, Karin Smyth, as requested, and got an excellent reply from her last week. Here it is.

“Thank you for your email regarding the new Health and Care Bill which was debated for the first time in the House of Commons yesterday. I voted against the Bill along with my Labour colleagues but it was passed with a large government majority. Jon Ashworth MP, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Health, made a very strong contribution and you can read the whole debate on the Hansard website here. There was not time for me, or more than 30 other MPs, to speak so I was unable to place on record yesterday why this legislation is such a missed opportunity which fails patients and their families in Bristol South.

Before I became your Member of Parliament I worked in the NHS and witnessed at first hand the wholesale chaos of the last reorganisation of the NHS in 2012 pursued by the then Conservative/Lib Dem coalition government. Up until that point there had been a general consensus about how to improve healthcare in our country: enhanced GP services, more care within communities to help support people closer to home and a stronger role for local government. Instead of listening to those of us within the NHS about the problems their plans would create the government simply ploughed ahead with a market and competition based system.

So now the government has accepted the almost complete failure of their last attempt and is having another go.

What they should be doing is giving new life to the NHS to enable it to fulfil the objectives set out by its founders in the pioneering post-war Labour government – high-quality healthcare, free at the point of use, fit for the modern world. But instead of a focus on improving care we have a proposals to create nothing more than a cronies charter, giving the Secretary of State huge unaccountable power to interfere in local NHS decision making with dozens of new, appointed, positions of responsibility. There is nothing to tackle the workforce crisis which means it is becoming harder and harder to recruit doctors, nurses and other staff. It is the fault of government, not hard pressed staff,  that people in south Bristol found it difficult to see a GP or were waiting for an operation even before the pandemic.  

In the coming months the Bill will be subject to line-by-line scrutiny and I expect to be part of the committee which undertakes that work. I will have a relentless focus on amending it to improve outcomes for patients and their families, through an integration of health and social care based on quality rather than cost saving or even cost cutting. I want to see effective, locally accountable and properly funded health services of which we can all be proud.

I will be updating you regularly on that work. We must all keep up the pressure on the government to make sure the National Health Service, on which we all rely, can meet our health and care needs in the 21st century.

Yours sincerely

Karin Smyth
Labour MP for Bristol South”

I’m very grateful for her reply. I’ve heard Karin speak before at local meetings of her disgust with the Tories’ privatisation of the NHS. She has said that she became an MP specifically because she felt so strongly about what they were doing to this most precious of British institutions.

I think she is a member of Labour’s right-wing, but am absolutely confident she will fight for the NHS and do exactly as she says she will about scrutinising and opposing this vile piece of legislation.

Boris’ Lockdown Delay Killed 30,000 People

Nonessential shops reopened on Monday, and the Beeb news was all about hordes of people queuing outside Primark. This will no doubt boost the spirits of Boris and the Tories, who care more about the economy than human lives. Boris’ lead in the polls has collapsed over his mishandling of the Coronavirus epidemic. The last time I heard anything about it, he was at -2 and Starmer was way ahead of him. And after the scandals of the government’s failure to provide adequate supplies of PPE, of deaths from the disease now having reached 40,000 and still climbing, of the massive increase in the deaths of the elderly and vulnerable in care homes there have been the additional scandals of Dominic Cummings breaking the lockdown rules to drive 240 miles to Durham and Robert Jenrick approving the development of Westferry in London after Richard Desmond sent the Tories a £12,000 donation. And then there’s the mass BLM anti-racism protests. BoJob is therefore going to be looking for some good news to distract attention away from the real problems his vile government is in. He’s no doubt hoping that people will be so delighted at the partial lifting of the lockdown and being able to get out and spend their cash again, that they’ll forget all about the deaths, misery and corruption.

So let’s remind them. Last Thursday Zelo Street posted a devastating piece about the news from Channel 4, the Financial Times and the Groaniad that Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College had estimated that if Johnson had imposed the lockdown a week earlier, the death toll from the disease could have been halved. This is the real death toll from the disease, which is believed to be above 60,000 instead of the government’s figure of 40,000. Prof. Ferguson believes that if this had been done, 30,000 lives could have been saved. Despite Matt Hancock appearing on Andrew Marr’s show telling everyone that he was sure that lives wouldn’t have been saved if this had happened, Newsnight’s Lewis Goodall considered otherwise. Zelo Street’s article quotes him thus:  “Neither Vallance nor Whitty directly demur from Neil Ferguson’s assertion that the death toll could have been halved if lockdown measures were introduced earlier. They both say, in various forms, that lessons will have to be learned. PM chooses not to answer”.

Paul Waugh on Twitter also noted that Whitty, one of Boris’ advisers, had said that we were not at the end of the epidemic, but in the middle of it. He also reminded everyone that Boris had also said, nearly 12 weeks ago, that in 112 weeks’ time Britain would have beaten the virus and sent it packing. Well, we haven’t. It’s still there and killing people. Then Channel 4 announced that it had seen a leaked paper from one of the government’s advisory committees calling for a lockdown two weeks earlier than when Boris finally bothered to do it. The paper was by Dr. Steven Riley, also at Imperial College London, who believed that the policy Boris was then following of mitigation would lead to 1.7 million deaths. He therefore called for the government to turn to the strategies adopted by Hong Kong, Japan and Italy of ‘successful ongoing control’ – in other words, lockdown. Prof. Ferguson said that the epidemic had been doubling every three to four days before the lockdown had been imposed. If it had been done a week early, the death toll could have been reduced by at least half. And on ITV’s Good Morning, the former government chief scientific adviser Sir David King said that if the country had gone into lockdown a week earlier, the final death toll would only have been less than 10,000.

Zelo Street quotes a Tweet by Tom Hatfield, who declared that the government didn’t impose the lockdown when it should because Boris and the Tories were more concerned about the economy than keeping people alive. They failed at both, because it’s ‘bollocks’ that any one country can come up with a trick in today’s globalised economy to prevent a global economic crisis. ‘They killed people for nothing’, he concluded.

The response of the Tory press was predictable. They poured scorn on the estimate, and carried on their personal attacks against Prof. Ferguson, despite the fact that he was supported in his beliefs by the other scientists Anthony Costello and David King.

Zelo Street concluded its article with

‘The deflection, pushback and whataboutery confirm this is news that cannot be merely swatted away. Alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson got it horribly wrong; he and his ministers misled the public deliberately and shamefully. And as a result, tens of thousands died needlessly. That is the reality of the situation.

The families of the 30,000 should get an explanation. But they probably won’t.’

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/06/boris-legacy-30000-more-deaths.html

Absolutely. And governments, the WHO and other international health organisations have known that something like Coronavirus was coming for a very long time. Meera Senthilingam in her book Outbreaks and Epidemics: Battling Infection from Measles to Coronavirus (London: Icon Books 2020) quotes Mike Ryan, executive director of the Health Emergencies Programme at the World Health Organisation, said that an airborne version of Ebola or a form of SARS that was even slightly more transmissible would be enough ‘to bring our society to a halt’. And she observes that this prediction has been confirmed with the emergence of the Coronavirus and the subsequent national lockdowns, the border and school closures and the cancellation of events and their disastrous consequences for business.

Mike, Zelo Street and other left-wing bloggers and news sites have posted endless reports revealing how the Tories cut the preparations the Labour government had put in place to guard against an emergency like the Coronavirus. They’ve also revealed that Dominic Cummings and other senior Tories were so taken with the eugenicist doctrine of the survival of the fittest and the desire to protect the economy, that they were determined not to impose a lockdown. And if that meant a few old people dying, ‘too bad’.

Well old people have died, along with the disabled, children, and even those, who were in otherwise excellent health. It’s also carried off the dedicated, heroic doctors, nurses, carers and other vital workers, who have been doing their level best to treat the sick and keep the country running. We’ve all been impressed by their immense dedication and how they’ve worked long hours at great personal risk.

The opposite has been true of Johnson. Not only was he murderously complacent, he was personally idle. The Tories have been trying to portray him as a heroic leader, who has himself worked long hours to combat the disease. But this is a myth, a conscious piece of propaganda, like the way Mussolini put a light in his window at night to convince Italians that he never slept. Boris didn’t bother attending the first five Cobra meetings, and doesn’t like working weekends.

Deaths were unavoidable. But if Boris had acted sooner, if we hadn’t had ten years of Tory misgovernment, during which the NHS has been run down and privatised, poverty massively increased and government preparedness decimated, all in the name of austerity and giving tax cuts to the rich, 30,000 people would still be alive.

Boris Johnson and the Tories are definitely hoping that the reopening of the High Street will bring good news from now on, and that everyone will forget this horrendous death toll.

So let’s keep on reminding him and them.

Boris has killed 30,000 people. And that doesn’t count the hundreds of thousands already murdered by austerity.

Beeb Attempts to Refute Tory Sock Puppet Allegations

This morning I caught a brief item by the Beeb tackling what they called the ‘rumours’ of the Tories using fake Twitter accounts to post messages supporting Boris Johnson and pressing for a return to the herd immunity policy. When this became difficult for them to justify outright, they simply retreated into calling for the lockdown to be lifted. Which would pretty much be the same policy. It just wouldn’t describe itself as ‘herd immunity’.

The plot was uncovered on Monday by John O’Connell of Rightwing Watch, a site which I think tackles Fascism and right-wing extremism. Which would, judging by the Tories horrendous policies and long history of flirting and supporting extreme right-wing parties and ideologies, naturally include them, and particularly Boris Johnson. O’Connell believed he had found 128 fake Twitter accounts posing as NHS staff. These seemed to come from the DHSC through a marketing company that had only one client, the DHSC, four staff, all ex-DHSC. The accounts themselves had been posted by a single person, who was herself on secondment from government.

O’Connell presented as evidence a Tweet purporting to be from a deaf junior doctor, Susan, who said that she was transitioning this year. She said she was fighting Covid-19 with other LGBTQ+ people. ‘Susan’, however, didn’t exist, and the photo of her was an NHS paediatric nurse from Greece. O’Connell contacted the Department of Health and Social Care to get their response. There was absolutely none, and his offers to go through their data was refused. When he tried again, they told him it was also misinformation, and if you repeated it, you were harming our common attempt to battle the Coronavirus. And the messages themselves all mysteriously disappeared.

From the details O’Connell gave, it sounds like he has the government bang to rights, including the very identity of whoever posted the tweets. And it’s not like Boris hasn’t done it before. The Tories did, using Cambridge Analytica for Brexit, and Dominic Cummings was unmasked by the Absurder as the noxious personality behind the Twitter account @toryeducation, which abused the government’s critics and opponents. This was when Cummings was a mere spad at the department of education under Gove. And I think Boris has been using a bot army more recently too.

The Beeb, however, in their wisdom decided to give the story no credence. The government and Twitter had both denied that these fake accounts had been created, and O’Connell had not handed over his data. The only evidence was the Tweet from ‘Susan’ and the 128 deleted accounts. ‘Susan’ was, the Beeb’s correspondent explained, a genuine fake account. But the character with its LGBTQ+ identification looked like it was by someone trying to discredit Boris by posting a fake identity that looked like it came from him or his supporters. And so the Beeb decided that the claims were just rumours after all.

At no time was it mentioned that Boris, Cummings and the Tories have used such bot accounts. O’Connell wasn’t even named, let alone interviewed to present his side of the argument. Perhaps the Beeb contacted him and he was unavailable for comment. But somehow I doubt that. Another Tweeter had tried to get the Beeb in the form of Laura Kuenssberg, as well as Robert Peston and a number of websites and news organisations interested, including Zelo Street and Novara Media. Mike and Zelo Street put up articles about it, but the lamestream media had zero interest when Zelo Street put up their articles yesterday.

I don’t know, but it seems to me that O’Connell is correct, and the Tories and Twitter are lying. As for the Beeb, they now have such an extreme pro-Tory, anti-Labour bias that I don’t think they can be trusted on stories like this. O’Connell has said that he doesn’t want to be crucified like the people, who revealed Cambridge Analytica. He’s therefore waiting for the evidence to be ‘gold-plated’ before he reveals it in full. It’ll be very interesting if and when he does.

In the meantime, the Tory supporters were out on Twitter screaming that he was a crank, and, unsurprisingly, a left-wing anti-Semite. Yes, we’re back to the anti-Semitism smears again. The fact that the smear merchants were reduced to name calling and smearing once again to me acts as another factor in his favour.

O’Connell’s probably right, as the abuse directed against him shows that certain people are very, very worried.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/04/20/more-coronavirus-propaganda-hundreds-of-fake-nhs-social-media-accounts-set-up-by-health-dept/

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/nhs-fake-twitter-accounts-exposed.html

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/tory-twitter-dirty-tricks-warning-from.html

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/fake-tweeters-shoot-messenger.html

Tories Create Sock Puppet Twitter Accounts to Push Anti-Lockdown Propaganda

The Tories don’t get any better. The party that spent public money on the Institute for Statecraft and its wretched Democracy Initiative, or whatever the wretched organisation was called, to put out anti-Labour, anti-Corbyn propaganda from its army of sympathetic hacks on Twitter has once again been exposed using pretty much the same reprehensible tactics. The pretext for giving the Democracy Initiative our hard earned tax money was to defend democracy against Russian on-line influence. In reality this meant targeting any British or European politico that the right didn’t like. This time there seems to have been absolutely no excuse whatsoever. They did it simply to push propaganda. And when caught the sock accounts were deleted and the Department for Health and Social Care went on the attack, vehemently denying they had done any such thing, and shouting that it was all misinformation that would damage the common effort to combat Coronavirus. Rubbish. The Department was caught red-handed, and it’s got the weaselly paw-prints of the man Zelo Street calls ‘Polecat’ Dom all over it.

Mike put up the story last night. John O’Connell, of the awesome Rightwing Watch, had discovered 128 fake accounts, 9 probable fakes and a further 14, possibles, which had been created by someone at the Department. 43 of those fake accounts used photographs of real NHS staff. One of these was for a deaf NHS junior doctor, ‘Susan’, who was due to transition into someone of the opposite gender. ‘Susan’ gave a shout out to the LGBTQ+ community, and praised Boris Johnson. The photograph used for the Tweet was identified by John Scott as that of Mia Magklavani, a paediatric staff nurse from Greece. The fake accounts were trying to push for the ‘herd immunity’ solution to the crisis, although this changed and instead they were arguing that the lockdown should be lifted.

The DHSC created these sock accounts through a marketing company set up a few months ago. This company apparently only has one client – the DHSC, and a staff of three, all ex-DHSC. The posts were sent using the mass-posting tool Hootsuite, whose account was registered to one person with four assigned contributors. That person is a government employee on temporary secondment to the department.

O’Connell contacted the DHSC about this, naturally making some inquiries. They refused to comment. He also offered to provide all his data to them to help them with an internal inquiry, which they declined. He also asked to deal directly with their Soc Med and Comms teams to work through their data. They refused that offer too. When he asked for further comment, he got this reply from the Department:

These claims are categorically false.

To share disinformation of this kind undermines the national effort against coronavirus.

Before anyone shares unsubstantiated claims online, use the SHARE checklist to help stop the spread of harmful content:
https://sharechecklist.gov.uk/ 

O’Connell makes it very clear that no-one should be surprised by these tactics. They’re what the Tories did when they were pushing Brexit with Cambridge Analytica. And at the general election First Draft, a monitoring body, found that they issued 5,952 political ads on Facebook that they called ‘indecent, dishonest and untruthful.’ The Labour Party didn’t issue any deceitful advertising.

Mike in his article on this squalid little tactic advises people not to use the ‘sharechecklist’ link, as the Tories at the changed their publicity department’s monicker to ‘FactCheckUK’ at the election. This purported to be an independent fact-checking organisation, and calmly reassured anyone who used it that the Tories were telling the truth, and Labour were lying. Which was more lies, of course.

John O’Connell further states that the DHSC and various NHS trusts have shown no interest in the welfare of the 43 NHS staff whose photos were used. He naturally wonders if this runs contrary to their duty of care. And Mike concludes his article about this by asking rhetorically

And why would anybody use a government website to check whether content is harmful, when it’s the government that is accused of creating it?

The danger is that the Tory government is undermining trust in the institutions we need to be able to trust. It is deadly dangerous – but the Tories are playing the fool.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/04/20/more-coronavirus-propaganda-hundreds-of-fake-nhs-social-media-accounts-set-up-by-health-dept/

Zelo Street added further information, noting that another Tweeter had tried to alert various media figures to the scandal, like Laura Kuenssberg, Robert Peston, Peter Jukes of Byline media, and Novara Media, The Skwawkbox, Zelo Street itself, and Carole Cadwalladr. Unfortunately, although Peter Jukes responded stating that it looked very much like Cambridge Analytica/ Russian bot farm tactics, the other major media figures appear to be uninterested. Zelo Street suggested that it might be because they’re afraid of Polecat Dom.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/nhs-fake-twitter-accounts-exposed.html

Zelo Street followed up their piece with a further article arguing that Dominic Cummings was very likely behind this torrent of sock puppetry and falsehoods, as the Polecat has previous. He was rumoured to be the man behind an abusive account, @toryeducation, when he was but a lowly Spad working for Michael Gove in the education department. This Twitter account poured scorn and abuse on politicos like Margaret Hodge, Chris Patten, Tristram Hunt, Hannah Richardson, Robert Peston, the Beeb, as well as Zelo Street and Tom Barry of Boris Watch.

Cummings denied he was behind these tweets, but Toby Helm, at that time a hack at the Observer, revealed that the Department had taken steps to stop the Twitter feed issuing any more abuse against its opponents. He also stated that the Observer had said that two contributors to it were Dominic Cummings and Henry de Zoete. Under the code governing spads, disseminating party political material and personal abuse were sackable offences. Cummings and de Zoete had not denied they contributed to the feed, merely saying that they were not @toryeducation.

And, like the 128 sock puppets John O’Connell discovered, @toryeducation also mysteriously vanished. It was registered as an official Tory account on Twitter until the day after the Observer told the world who was behind it. And a year after this all occurred, bloated badger-haired Libertarian Fascist Guido Fawkes revealed that it was indeed Cummings who had been the Twitter account while discussing a spat between Gove and Clegg over free school meals.

Zelo Street concludes

‘Cummings is not, it seems, subject to the controlling hand of his current boss right now, and restored to health following his brush with Covid-19. And by complete coincidence you understand, the Twitter fakery is firing up again. As Private Eye magazine might have put it, I wonder if the two are in any way related? I think we should be told.’

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/tory-twitter-dirty-tricks-warning-from.html

It seems O’Connell has got the Tories bang to rights, right down to the personal identity of the woman behind all these fake accounts. And it really does look like Dominic Cummings is also behind it, although given their record of flagrant, gross mendacity, he doesn’t seem to have broken any established Tory patterns of conduct whatsoever. It would be rather more surprising if they told the truth instead.

But it also shows the Tories are afraid. Very afraid. According to polls, 65 per cent of the public think that Johnson is doing a good job, which shows how effective media spin and propaganda is. But with the death toll increasing and medical staff running out of PPE, that spin appears to be wearing very thin.

And so they’ve started lying again, to cover up their massive failures and the deaths for which they’re responsible.

The sock puppets’ support for the discredited ‘herd immunity’ policy and an end to the lockdown also shows how worried they are about their donors’ interests. The party’s backers clearly want the lockdown ended so that they can continue making big bucks.

Even though this policy could lead to 40,000 deaths, or even as many as 200 – 250,000.

But still, Murdoch and those hedge fund managers must have their billions.

 

 

 

Despite the Fullsome Praise, BoJob Still Wants to Privatise the NHS

Yesterday the news reported that Boris had finally been discharged from hospital. He will not be starting work immediately, but has gone to Checkers to recuperate after his battle with Coronavirus. But before he did so, he gave fulsome to praise the hospital staff, including two nurses, who cared for him. The NHS, he made clear, had saved his life, and we would beat the Coronavirus because it was the beating heart of Britain.

I’m very glad Johnson has recovered. I don’t wish, or anyone else’s death, and I’m very glad that he is showing his sincere, genuine gratitude to the nursing staff and the great institution that has saved his life. He’s not the only Tory politico to owe his life to the NHS. Back in the 1980s the Fabian Society published a pamphlet arguing very forcefully against privatisation of the NHS, and made very telling comparisons about the US system, which is funded by individual insurance. The pamphlet quoted a Tory politician, who stated that the NHS had very definitely saved his life when he had suffered heart problems, and that there is no way he could have afforded such treatment in America.

But you’ll forgive me if I say that I found such praise coming from Boris a tad hypocritical and hollow. Right-wing governments since Thatcher – and that includes Tony Blair’s – have been doing their level best to privatise the NHS piecemeal by stealth. And the series of Tory governmental trainwrecks since Labour lost the 2010 election are no different. Cameron went on with the privatisation, passing Andrew Lansley’s wretched Health and Social Care Bill, which absolves the Health Secretary from his or her historic role of having to make sure that everyone has health care free at the point of use. NHS trusts and doctor’s surgeries, organised in Community Care Groups, are enabled and required to consider commissioning services from private healthcare companies. More and more contracts – it is now more than half – have been awarded to private healthcare companies. Despite the lies and smooth assurances to the opposite, this privatisation is for the private sector’s benefit, not ours. On its own, private healthcare can’t compete with that provided by the state. Private hospitals are smaller, and don’t offer the range of services the NHS provides. Private health insurance works well for the affluent, young and largely well, who don’t require long term or complicated treatment. It does not work for the old, the poor, the disabled or the long term sick. Which is why Lyndon Johnson had to introduce Medicare and Medicaid for those groups in the US. Despite this, 40,000 people still die through lack of affordable healthcare in the US, and the top cause of bankruptcies over there is medical costs.

But over here the Tory drive for privatisation continues. I noticed a Torygraph headline reproduced on one the blogs, which very graphically showed this. This proclaimed that it was due to the NHS’ cumbrous bureaucracy that PPE equipment weren’t getting to NHS staff. The Tories have been very keen to tell everyone that introducing the private sector is going to cut bureaucracy. And this is another example of the truth being the direct opposite of anything Johnson, Cummings and any other Tory will tell you. The Tories’ privatisation has actually increased the bureaucracy through setting up organs within the NHS to ensure competition and value for money. Also private healthcare firms have larger management bureaucracies that the NHS. In extreme cases, these can account for 40 per cent of the companies operating costs. But there were over 100 MPs in Cameron’s government, who had connections to private healthcare firms. And so, despite rising costs and inefficiencies, it’s immensely profitable to them and the heads of those companies.

Treatment by the NHS is supposed to be free at the point of use, but the Tories have been introducing charges, or expanding the range of services for which charges may be made. One of those supporting this move is Jacob Rees-Mogg.

But despite their determination to sell it off, the Tories give their unstinting praise to it. One recent Tory health secretary even declared that they ‘treasured it’. This was after the fact it was revealed that he, or one of the other Tory MPs, had written a book advocating the incorporation of private healthcare into the NHS to such an extent that the NHS would cease to exist. Which is privatisation.

With this in mind, I see absolutely no reason to take Johnson’s praise at anything like face value. No, I don’t deny he’s grateful – now. But this gratitude will wear off a soon as he steps back through the doors of No.10 and starts listening once again to his Tory friends and fellows, and although the advisers that have trooped into government from private industry.

Then, whatever Johnson said yesterday, he’ll go back to privatising the NHS.

So no one else will be able to get treatment for a disease like Coronavirus without paying for it. And heaven help the poor if they can’t.

Virus Death Toll Mounting, But Scum Still Demanding Lockdown Lifted – Because Murdoch Needs His Profits £££

The Scum provided further evidence yesterday of Rupert Murdoch’s utterly loathsome attitude to the Coronavirus crisis. The death toll in Britain was continuing to rise, we had lost young people as well as the disabled and elderly to the disease. I’m sure many of you will have been particularly upset by the fact that one of the new victims was a child of five, who had an underlying condition. We have also lost some of our dedicated healthcare professionals – doctors, surgeons and nurses – who carried on doing their duty despite an appalling lack of proper protective equipment. And yesterday Boris Johnson himself was hurried to hospital. This was supposed to be nothing special. It’s just that Boris’ cough had carried on longer than usual. He was just going to have a check-up. Zelo Street, as perceptive as always, smelled more Tory lies, and said that looking at the situation rather than listening to the flannel, Johnson was in a far more serious condition than the Tories were telling us. He was. It’s now been reported that Johnson had to be given oxygen, and is now in intensive care. There have been more reassurances from the Tories that Boris isn’t in that serious a condition, but the Mirror, and Zelo Street, disagree. It looks like he’s got pneumonia. And Matt Hancock, the odious Health Secretary, has said that he has also lost two people to the disease.

It’s serious, and Johnson’s current condition in intensive care should show this to anyone. It demonstrates how anybody can get the disease, no matter how rich and powerful they are. It also shows how you also have to take it seriously. Johnson, like everyone else, was told not to shake hands as this could allow him to catch the disease. He ignored the advice, and carried on shaking mitts, blithely telling the world that this wasn’t a problem, as all you needed to do was wash your hands afterwards. That didn’t help. Johnson has been hospitalised through his own failure to take the virus seriously, just as the same attitude stopped him from introducing the lockdown weeks earlier and making preparations for the disease, which would have saved hundreds of unnecessary deaths.

But that didn’t prevent Scum hack Trevor Kavanagh yesterday publishing another piece demanding that the lockdown should be lifted. Because the disease isn’t that serious, according to some other modelling by a different group of scientists, and the damage it’s doing to the economy. Similar arguments have been used before against measures to combat climate change and global warming and other hazards. These have been refuted in turn. One of the best arguments was put forward a few years ago in an article in New Scientist. This was the principle that even if something wasn’t as dangerous or harmful as suggested, it was still better to err on the side of caution. Hence harmful substances or processes still shouldn’t be used, and measures should still be taken to stop global warming. But obviously Kavanagh disagrees.

Or rather his master, Rupert Murdoch. When Kavanagh first published this nonsense, Zelo Street suggested that his motives probably weren’t as pure and altruistic as he made out. He wasn’t worried about the bankruptcies, mass unemployment and poverty that have resulted from the lockdown, or the way the country will still be paying for it in the years to come. No, he was rather more worried about the effect the lockdown was having on the fortunes of the Fourth Estate, and particularly the titles of his employer, Murdoch. Print editions of newspapers are down by five million. All of the press is taking a hit, including Murdoch’s. And so Zelo Street concluded that Kavanagh was demanding an end to the lockdown for the simple reason that Murdoch wanted his empire of lies, smears and filth back on track and making money. Or rather, less of a massive loss than it’s made in previous years.

There are other warning signs about Murdoch’s self-interest in this. A few days ago Zelo Street also reported that Fox News and Murdoch were being sued by a group in Washington State. They contended that the network had broken the Consumer Protection Act by denying the virus presented a threat. At the same time, according to other hacks, Murdoch himself and his family had been taking personal steps to protect themselves. Joanna, one of the great commenters on this blog, has pointed out that WASHLITE’s suit has been thrown out of court on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment. That is the right to free speech and publication. That still doesn’t stop the plaintiffs from being morally correct.

If Murdoch really took precautions against the virus, while telling everyone that a lockdown was unnecessary, then it means that he really isn’t worried about the public’s health. It strengthens the argument that Murdoch is really only interested in having the lockdown raised for his own selfish interests, no matter how many people die, including his readers and the country’s own political leaders.

Murdoch doesn’t care about the British public, or the people of any of the other countries in which he has his grotty tentacles. He doesn’t care about their leaders, even if he supports their right-wing programme of destroying the welfare state, privatising healthcare and education, and destroying workers’ rights. He just cares about profit.

By printing Kavanagh’s nonsense at the same time Johnson was taken into hospital, Murdoch has shown that he is absolutely no friend of the Tories. They should treat his rags in that light, and stop reading them.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/sun-pundit-volunteers-for-euthanasia.html

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/boris-illness-and-giveaways.html

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/boris-johnson-is-unwell.html

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/murdoch-facing-covid-19-lawsuit.html

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/03/sun-pundit-lies-about-covid-19-deaths.html

Cartoon: Borice KKKooper – Dead Babies

Hi, and welcome to another of my cartoons expressing my outrage and disgust at the Tory party and the clown, who currently leads it and, unfortunately, our great nation. I’ve used as the basis for these drawings SF/Horror films and pop songs. This one’s based on another pop star, the Rock legend Alice Cooper. And it is to express my utter disgust at the scandalously high infant mortality rate in Britain.

Cooper became notorious in the ’70s for his weird and disturbing stage act, in which he’d behead dolls and even hang himself. He said in an interview on British television some time ago that some people tried to psychoanalyse his attack, and read a bit too much into it. It was claimed that his destruction of the dolls were a metaphorical attack on babies. Cooper denied that it was any such thing. He just hated dolls. It was, he said, possibly something to do with his sister.

But one of his songs at the time was ‘Dead Babies’, about a mother, who neglects her child so that it dies. It has the line ‘Dead babies don’t need looking after’, and includes the sound of a baby crying. It’s a really disturbing track and I’m really not surprised that Cooper drew criticism. He’s a major figure in Rock, of course, but it has also been claimed that he has also been one of the influences on Goth music through his horrific stage act and equally horrific and bleak songs.

And so it seems to me entirely appropriate to attack BoJob and his wretched party for their part in giving Britain one of the highest infant mortality rates in Europe by showing him as an Alice Cooper figure, with a hanged doll and the title of Cooper’s song. As always, I want to point out that I’m not sneering at Cooper, his music or his fans. Certainly not! But I am sneering and mocking BoJob and the Tories. And the idea of Boris as any kind of pop fan, whether Rock or Punk, as I portrayed him in my last cartoon, is pretty ridiculous. Boris definitely comes across as a classical music fan. Nothing wrong with that, but I suspect that when it came to pop music he would be very much like the judge, who had to ask who the Beatles were.

And unfortunately I can very much see our infant mortality rate getting worse under Johnson. Despite the poverty and hardship inflicted on the economy and Britain’s working people by the Coronavirus and the subsequent lockdown, he’s still pushing ahead with his programme of A and E closures. There has been a mass sacking of workers on zero hours contracts, despite claims that this wouldn’t happen. The government has promised to pay workers 80 per cent of their wages if they are unable to work because of the lockdown. But that’s only if their employer agrees. And some of them, like Tim Martin, the head of Wetherspoons, don’t seem to have done. Martin’s apparently told his staff that they can go off and seek work at McDonald’s, if they like. For those made unemployed, there’s still a five-week wait for the money after they claim Universal Credit. Boris has also promised to pay the self-employed 80 per cent of their earnings. But they’ll have to wait until June to get it. For many, that’s going to be too long. As a result, Mike’s reported that people are getting into debt for food just one week into the lockdown.

Tory cuts to the NHS are destroying people’s health, and so is the mass poverty caused by austerity and now the Coronavirus crisis. This will make child poverty and poor health worse, and probably push the infant mortality rate up further, despite the best efforts of our overworked and under-resourced doctors, nurses and other medical professionals.

I am also aware that BoJob’s partner is pregnant. I wish her and her baby all the best for a safe, healthy pregnancy and delivery, and that both baby and mother enjoy good health. But I want every mother and their children to have this. And that is one of the reasons why I’ve drawn this cartoon – because they aren’t, thanks to Boris and his vile crew.

Here’s the cartoon. I hope you enjoy it, and don’t have nightmares!

 

Private Eye: Tory NHS Privatisers Heading Back into Government

This fortnight’s issue of Private Eye, for 6th to 19th March 2020, has a worrying piece, ‘Smear Campaign’, in their ‘HP Sauce’ column on page 13. This reports that Boris, having won the election, is reneging on his promise not to privatise or commercialise the NHS. Instead, two Tory MPs with connections to the Serco and the private accountancy firm, McKinsey, respectively, which were deeply involved in the privatisation and outsourcing of NHS services seems to be coming closer to getting into government. It also names another senior NHS official, who is also in favour of privatisation and who also has connections to the same wretched bunch of profiteers. The article runs

“There has been no increase in NHS privatisation and there won’t be under a Conservative government”, the Tories insisted during the election campaign. But two of Boris Johnson’s new health ministers come from leading health privatisers.

Edward Argar, minister responsible for NHS England, was chief lobbyist for outsourcer Serco before he became an MP in 2015. Serco’s involvement in NHS privatisation includes some what the Tory manifesto liked to call “Labour’s disastrous PFI deals.”

Then there’s Helen Whatley, the MP for Faversham and Mid Kent and now minister for health and care integration, who was a management consultant in the health division of consultancy McKinsey from 2007 to 2015. McKinsey’s long-running interest in NHS privatisation includes helping former Tory health secretary Andrew Lansley draw up the reforms in 2012 that created many more opportunities for private firms to be “commissioned” for NHS work.

Though th egovernment was keen to close down NHS commercialisation as an issue during the last election, the appointment of a former McKinsey consultant as health minister suggests it is no longer worried on this score now it has such a big majority.

McKinsey’s influence was further cemented in January when NHS England appointed Penny Dash, its head of healthcare for Europe,to chair one of London’s five “integrated care systems” (ICS). These were set up to make the NHS and local authority social care work better together – a responsibility that will now be overseen by new minister and ex-McKinseyite Whatley. NHS England tells the Eye that Dash is “in the process of retiring” from McKinsey, though there is no set date: thus she will simultaneously work for NHS England and McKinsey until her retirement is complete.

Dash, who has also worked for the health department, typifies McKinsey’s enthusiasm for privatisation. In 2016 she talked up the Alzira plan, a Spanish scheme whereby a private firm takes responsibility for providing care to a given population in return for a fixed, per-capita payment. In 2011, Dash tried to revive interest in an idea rejected by Tony Blair, which would have given women needing a smear test or patients wanting an X-ray a voucher to shop around among providers. Will ideas like smear vouchers soon be back on the agenda? Watch this space…

I sincerely hope not, but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if they will. Nor would I be surprised if Cummings and crew aren’t discussing them even now.

There should be absolutely no surprise that the privatisation of the NHS is back in the Tory sights. As Mike’s pointed out in his piece today about Boris’ mendacious answers about nurses’ bursaries and free hospital car parking, the Tories are absolutely incapable of telling the truth. As for the guff about ‘Labour’s disastrous PFI deals’, well, yes, they were disastrous. But who dreamed up the Private Finance Initiative in the first place? You guessed it – the Tories. It was Peter Lilley’s big idea to open up the NHS to private investment.

The fact that Boris and his sordid band were desperate to deny they were going to privatise the NHS at the election shows how important it is that Labour should oppose NHS privatisation and demand its renationalisation. As for Serco and McKinsey, they should be thrown out of government contracting immediately. And Dash, Argar and Whatley should be kept as far from government and the NHS as possible.

Don’t believe the Tories lies – they are determined to privatise the health service. And that is something this country cannot afford.

Therese Coffey: Another Tory Minister Who Thinks Food Banks Are Brilliant

Yesterday the Canary reported that the Labour MP Zahra Sultana, who called food banks a ‘national disgrace’, wrote to Coffey about the obscene injustice of nurses having to use food banks while fat-cat bosses are rewarded with massive payouts. Sultana was understandably upset that there were now more food banks in the UK than branches of McDonald’s and that the British boss of the fast food firm had received a settlement of £30 million after they had fired him.

She got this bland reply from Coffey:

I visited a similar food bank in my own constituency that has been working together with food redistribution schemes. Marrying the two is a perfect way to try to address the challenges that people face at difficult times in their lives.

Coffey also called the people using food banks ‘customers’, thus giving the misleading the impression that they had some kind of choice over whether or not to be there.

Sultana wasn’t impressed, and neither were other commenters on twitter. She commented

I just asked the Secretary of State for Work & Pensions about the gross injustice of nurses relying on food banks while the rich get richer.

Her response? She called food banks a “perfect way” to meet the challenges of those in poverty.

The Tories are totally out of touch.

The article goes on to report that BristolLive had also said that they’d been told by one volunteer at a food bank that four or five nurses had visited a food bank in one week.

The Canary’s article also criticised Coffey for not mentioning that food banks run by volunteers are supported through donations. They’re there to help poor people struggling to feed themselves and their families because of ten years of Tory austerity, welfare cuts and Universal Credit. And Coffey certainly wasn’t going to tackle the problem of bloated salaries for fat-cat bosses and widening inequality.

The Canary further reported that the Trussell Trust had stated in April 2019 that food bank use had reached a record high point. Between 1st April 2018 and 31st March the charity had distributed 1.6 million food parcels. This was a rise of 19 per cent from the previous year. About half a million of them were given to children.

Sabine Goodwin, the head of the Independent Food Aid Network, commented that Coffey’s remarks showed how food bank use had been normalised in the UK, and that they were now the fourth emergency service.

The Canary concluded:

The DWP is not fit for purpose. And Coffey’s latest response highlights just how dangerous it truly is.

See: https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2020/01/28/dwp-minister-thinks-foodbanks-are-a-perfect-solution/

This is just the latest scandal in which a Tory minister has made a bland, evasive statement praising food banks and ignoring the underlying problem of the massive suffering the Tories themselves have caused. I think the last one was Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was similarly blasted for his complacency. In fact, food banks and the volunteers who run them are doing an excellent job. I know that two of the great commenters on this blog are involved with those in their communities. That isn’t the point. The point is, they shouldn’t be needed. There should be no benefit sanctions nor false or falsified fitness for work tests throwing people who are too ill or disabled to work off benefits. The unemployed and disabled should be given benefits at a level that allows them to live properly, paid the moment they request and need them. They should not have to wait a few days, let alone five weeks, before receiving a payment. Working people should also be paid a decent wage, so that they also can afford to feed, heat and clothe themselves and their families.

But this is precisely what Tories like Coffey do not want to happen. They are dismantling the welfare state because they wish to relieve high earners – the rich – of the tax burden of supporting the poor. They originally tried justifying this with specious arguments about ‘trickledown’. The money the rich saved would trickle down to the poor as their social superiors opened new businesses, employed more people and paid higher wages. But they don’t actually do any of that. It just stays in their banks accounts, accumulating interest while they boast about how many hundreds of K they’ve trousered. I also believe the Tories actually like food banks because they see them as the British counterpart to the American system of food stamps.

They also have absolutely no problem with rising inequality. In fact, I remember them openly being all for it. Right at the beginning of the Thatcher project in the 1980s, various Tories appeared on BBC documentaries about benefit cuts and wage restraint raving about how wonderful it was. They believed that conditions should be made worse for the poor, as this would encourage them to ‘do well’. Thatcher herself was a fan of the less eligibility system of Victorian poor relief. Like them, she believed conditions should be made as humiliating and oppressive as possible for those on welfare in order to make them get a job as quickly as possible. He successors have weaponised it further, and now see it as a means of culling the sick and poor. 130,000 people have been killed so far by austerity in a campaign described by Mike and other bloggers and welfare commenters and organisations as the genocide of the disabled.

Food banks are not a perfect solution for people people at a difficult point in their lives. They are a severely inadequate attempt to ameliorate some of the worse effects of Tory austerity and welfare cuts. It is great that people are there, trying to do something for the poor.

But it is a glaring disgrace that they should be needed in first place. Coffee is a smooth, smiling dissembler trying to put a good front over utterly disgraceful, murderous Tory policies. She and the wretched government she serves can’t fall soon enough.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on the Economic, Academic and Social Costs of Brexit

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown issued another stinging attack on Brexit in the I yesterday. She sharply criticised the Brexiteers triumphalism, that made them demand the mass celebration of Britain’s departure from the EU with a ‘festival of Brexit’, churches ringing their bells up and down the country, street parties and ‘a big, fat, jingoistic party in Parliament Square on January 31st’. She compared the proposed celebrations with the forced, state-mandated festivities of North Korea, and quoted the Roman satirist Juvenal on how the rich distracted the plebs with bread and circuses while taking away their liberties. She also bitterly complained about the way Remainers were now seen as somehow treacherous for their rejection of this wave of jingoism despite the closeness of the vote in the referendum. But she also made very good points about the immense cost Brexit had already inflicted on our economy, education, and society. She wrote

According to a detailed report by ratings agency S&P, Brexit has already cost the economy £66bn. It calculates that the amount is more than we paid into the European Union for 47 years. The economy is stagnant. The Union  of the four nations may not hold. Migrants and black, Asian and minority ethnic Britons are experiencing more hostility. Complaints are met with increased hostility or disbelief. Universities are panicking about the potential loss of EU grants and the Erasmus+ scheme – a travel bursary for young people which enriched their lives.

Musicians and artists are losing essential EU connections. Care homes cannot get workers because EU citizens are leaving. Too many feel unwelcome or are discouraged by new, costly and unfair immigration rules. NHS workers from elsewhere are becoming disillusioned.

She then describes how an Asian friend, Priti, told her about the increasing racism she was experiencing.

My friend Priti, a nurse who came over from India five years ago, says: “This is not the country I came into. Not the place my parents loved when they studied here. It has become so impolite. Even when I am changing a bandage or putting drops in their eyes, some patients shout at me to go bac. My colleagues are great but I am going – I have a job in Dubai. They need us but don’t behave well.”

We need these foreign nurses and doctors, who do an excellent job caring for our sick. It’s disgusting that they should be treated with such contempt and abuse.

Brexit is wrecking our economy, placing the Union under potentially devastating stress, and impoverishing our education system, our arts and culture, and denying needed expertise and labour to the NHS. But somehow we are meant to celebrate all this as a victory for Britain.

Alibhai-Brown herself says that Remainers should follow Will Hutton’s advice, and light candles on 31st January before going back to Brexit. She says that we must, for the sake of the younger generation and the future of this once-formidable nation.

I don’t think we can reasonable go on opposing Brexit forever without isolating ourselves politically. But I think we should be trying to get the best possible deal with the EU and trying to forge lasting, beneficial links with it.

While pointing out that so far, it is a massive, astronomically expensive failure.