I got this comment from Rachel Reeves by email criticising Sunak’s budget. She calls it a budget of ‘managed decline’, with another tax cut for the 1 per cent, from a hopelessly divided party devoid of ideas, responsible for low growth and high taxes. She goes on to contrast it with the attempts Labour has made to cut energy price increases and impose a windfall tax, and their promise to deliver the highest growth in the G7.
‘David, today was a chance to unlock Britain’s promise and potential. But the budget announced by Jeremy Hunt has put our country further down the path of managed decline, while giving the richest 1% a tax cut worth £1 billion.
No belief in the possibilities of the future. No plan to boost living standards.
Just a hopelessly divided party caught between a rock of decline and a hard place of their own economic recklessness, dressing up stagnation as stability, as their expiry date looms ever closer.
Our economy needs major surgery. But what we got today was more of the same sticking plaster politics.
It’s been the same old Tory choice for thirteen years. No growth for the many and working people paying the price.
Thirteen years without wage growth.
Thirteen years stuck in a doom-loop of low growth, higher taxes and broken public services.
Working people are entitled to ask – am I any better off than I was before? And the answer is a resounding, no.
This crisis is not over and the long-term plan isn’t there. They are continuing to paper over the cracks of thirteen years of economic failure.
Labour pushed to stop energy price rises.
Labour pushed for a proper windfall tax.
With Labour, there is another way.
Britain has immense potential.
That’s why the first mission of a Labour government is to secure the highest sustained growth in the G7, we will create good jobs and productivity growth across every part of our country.
We’d make sure Britain competes in the global race for the jobs and industries of the future, rather than being stuck in the slow lane under the Tories.
Where the Tories have thrown in the towel, only Labour will build a better Britain.
Thank you,
Rachel Reeves MP Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer’
While I agree with her totally about the budget, I am not confident that Labour under Starmer will be much different. Reeves and Starmer are Blairites, and Blair’s tactic was to fish failed Tory polices like academy schools out of the bin and go ahead with them. Or else just carry on with them as they were, but claim they were doing so more efficiently and effectively. I don’t see Starmer, with his record of betraying and persecuting anything remotely socialist, as at all different.
I had a medical appointment today at the BRI – Bristol Royal Infirmary – one of the city’s major, historic hospitals, located just off the city centre. It went ahead despite the doctors’ strike. Passing the hospital’s main entrance, we saw the picket line and the immense support they had from the Bristolian public. Drivers beeped and waved at them as they went past. If I’d had my wits about me, I should have thought to take a photo of it with my camera and posted it here. But unfortunately, I didn’t think of it.
The consultant who saw me was a young, softly-spoken Nigerian chap. He came here from Nigeria last October, and was enjoying working in the hospital and the support and friendship he had received from his colleagues and co-workers there. And he told us he was very pleased that in the Britain the NHS funded some of this care.
This is the difference between this country and nations like Nigeria, or even America. America’s probably the richest nation on the Earth, at least at the moment, but Hillary Clinton and the rest of the American political class are stilling telling their people that the country can’t afford Medicare for all. The only person telling it like it is, is Bernie Sanders. And I don’t doubt their political class would like to do to him what ours have done to Jeremy Corbyn. They had one of his aides dismissed for supposed anti-Semitism, despite the fact that, like most of the victims of such smears in this country, she was Jewish, self-respecting and strongly involved with her community.
And if Sunak, Johnson and their friends get their way, they’ll make this country like America by privatising the NHS.
I haven’t been paying too much attention to the talk about the forthcoming budget, but one thing Sunak said leapt out at me: he was going to help people into work. In my experience, that’s always Tory-speak for cutting benefits. Always. The argument is that too many people are on benefits, this is unaffordable, and the benefits system is a disincentive to people going out and getting a job. All that ‘less eligibility’ nonsense from Thatcher. And so whatever else Sunak may do on Tuesday or whenever, I strongly suspect he will cut benefits again, sending more people to the food bank, starvation and poverty.
The Tories always hide their benefit cuts behind codewords and euphemisms designed to deceive you into thinking they’re doing something for people when they’re actually taking things away. One of the other euphemisms Thatcher used was ‘self-help’. Cutting benefits forced people to help themselves, was the ideological line. And so one budget day she cut benefits and the papers ran the headlines ‘More Self-Help’.
So let’s make it clear. Sunak is a liar from a party of liars.
This is not helping people into work. This is not self-help. And Norman Tebbitt’s bike always had an ideological flat tyre.
This is more poverty.
More starvation.
More homes without food or able to pay for the electricity.
All for the very richest, so they can have nice, juicy tax cuts.
Brexit, we were told, was all about regaining Britain’s “sovereignty” and being in control of our own destiny. But big money in British politics is a more significant threat to our future than unelected EU bureaucrats ever were.
Even though the Brussels bureaucrats have been removed from the equation, people still don’t feel they have a proper say in how this country operates. One big reason for that is the amount of money, often from opaque sources, sloshing around our political system.
Have you ever thought that the national picture painted by the likes of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Rishi Sunak differs significantly from the one you see when you look around your own family and friends? You’re not alone.
Britain ranks among the most socially liberal countries in the world on key issues, and a substantial majority now reject many of the established economic assumptions of recent decades. But you won’t see any of that reflected in the current government’s agenda. Westminster is becoming an island of irrelevance, increasingly detached from the concerns of ordinary people.
There’s a reason for that. The government cannot hear the concerns of ordinary people over the hubbub of wealthy donors and other lobbyists with shady financial backers.
As part of our Parliamentary work, we’ve been researching just how broken the system is. In this longer-than-usual email, we’d like to share some of that with you.
Dark Money and Foreign Influence
The UK has particularly lax campaign finance laws. As a result, many donations get through that probably shouldn’t. Yes, there are permissibility requirements in place, but there are plenty of ways to evade them if you want to.
The term “Dark money” refers to donations whose origins are untraceable. Because the ultimate source cannot be confirmed, there is no way of knowing whether that money comes from the kind of person or organisation that shouldn’t have influence over our lawmakers.
One example of dark money is the “Proxy Donation”. These are donations made by one person, who would not be a permitted donor, in the name of another who is. Some examples include:
Ehud Sheleg, art dealer and former Conservative party treasurer, gave over £600k to the Tory party. Documents later showed that the money originated in a Russian account of Sheleg’s father-in-law – a former official in the old pro-Putin regime in Ukraine. Proxy donations are a complete blindspot in the law, so there was no legal mechanism to hold him accountable for it.
Lubov Cherdukhin – back at it again – gave money to the Conservative party while her husband was receiving funds from business deals with sanctioned Russian oligarchs. She gave £50k to the Tories 8 days after Putin invaded Ukraine.
Mohamad Amersi has given over £200k to the Conservatives and worked closely with Boris Johnson on key policy decisions. Prior to the donation, he was given a large deposit from a Kremlin-linked company secretly owned by Putin’s telecoms minister Leonid Reiman.
“Shell Companies” are another way for dubious donors to evade the rules. According to Transparency International, 14% of LLPs established in the UK between 2001-2021 (21,000 companies) show signs of being shell companies. Here are some examples:
Conservative mega-donor Lubov Cherdukhin, who once paid £160k to play tennis with Boris Johnson, was being paid out by a shell company secretly owned by Russian senator and Putin ally Suleiman Kerimov, according to the BBC.
The offshore company Aquind is owned by a former Russian oil magnate and a Russian arms manufacturer. The company has donated heavily to the Conservative party.
Top Labour MPs Wes Streeting, Yvette Cooper, and Dan Jarvis received a combined £345,000 from a company called MPM Connect Ltd, which has no staff or website and is registered at an office where the secretary had never heard of the company.
“Unincorporated Associations” are nebulous groups with little oversight or legal classification. It’s essentially like ticking the “miscellaneous” box on a donation form when asked what kind of organisation you are.
Tory minister Steve Baker’s “Covid Recovery Group” organisation (a parliamentary coalition of anti-lockdown Conservative MPs) received tens of thousands from a UA called the Recovery Alliance. It has no digital footprint, no registered members, and its finances are completely opaque. Opendemocracy has linked it to a number of other covid conspiracy campaigns and anti-lockdown groups.
Richard Cook’s “Constitutional Research Group” – of which he is the only listed member and chair – gave £435,000 to the DUP’s Brexit campaign. No one knows for sure where the money came from, but investigative journalists discovered his involvement in a number of illicit trades, including underground trash-dumping and fire-arms sales.
According to Byline Times, 29 different opaque UAs donated £14 million to the Conservative party between 2010-2022.
Big Money
Between 2001 and 2021, one-fifth of all political donations in the UK came from just ten men with an average age of 70. If that doesn’t indicate that we have a big problem, we’re really not sure what would.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with political donations, huge amounts of money coming from multinational corporations and the mega-rich does raise questions about who really calls the shots. Especially when they seem to get things in return.
Here are some situations where extremely wealthy individuals and corporations used their financial heft to influence things:
In 2021, the Conservatives received £400k in donations from oil and gas companies while the government was deciding on new oil and gas licences.
More generally, the Tories took over a million from oil companies between 2019 and 2021.
From 2020-2022, the Conservatives took £15 million from the financial services industry, which they were certainly kind to when it came to dealing with banker’s bonuses.
Labour MP Wes Streeting received £15k from John Armitage, former Tory party donor and manager of a hedge fund that owns half a billion dollars in US health insurance and private healthcare. Streeting recently came out in support of private hospitals.
The “Leader’s Group” is a dining club of Tory super-donors that has given over £130 million to the party since 2010. The club’s billionaires and business moguls have been known to dine with Boris Johnson.
In 2022-2023, controversial groups, including gambling giants, climate sceptic organisations, and evangelical Christian groups, made over £1 million in donations for staffing the Labour front bench. Recipients include MPs Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves, and Yvette Cooper. Reeves alone received nearly £250k.
Recently, Crossbench peer Caroline Cox received large donations from American evangelical Christian activists against gay marriage that used hateful language about Muslims.
While the Conservatives often top the list when it comes to money in politics, remember that this is a cross-party systemic problem. The real issue is that the rules that are supposed to prevent the wealthy from buying influence just aren’t strong enough. We’ve allowed a situation to emerge where money can buy outcomes almost directly, and the mechanisms to detect the sources of that money are ineffective. Our system just isn’t fit for the 21st century.
The first step to fixing any problem is admitting that there is a problem. Our political system is addicted to money, to the extent that we’re now shutting real people’s voices out on a regular basis.
As you know, Open Britain’s mission these days is to deliver a democracy that works for everyone, not just the rich and powerful. That means a political system primarily driven by people, not primarily driven by money. That’s what democracy was always meant to be about.
As you might expect from what you’ve read above, we don’t take donations from shady think tanks or Russian oligarchs. All our work is funded directly by you, our supporters. We believe that having our work funded through small donations from a large number of people is the healthiest model of all, one that allows us to say what needs to be said to whoever needs to hear it. We hope you agree.
I got this email from the internet petitioning organisation 38 Degrees yesterday. They are launching a pin as part of their campaign against the Tory privatisation of the NHS. They say it’s free, but they’re asking for donations to fund the campaign. I don’t object to this as it is in a very, very good cause and have donated and ordered one for myself.
‘David, we’re planning the next steps of our NHS anti-privatisation campaign and we need your help.
Since we launched our petition warning the Government not to listen to the likes of Sajid Javid and Ken Clarke’s ideas on charging the sick for being sick, over 103,000 of us have added our names. [1] Thanks to you, our strength is growing.
Over the next few weeks, we want to drive home this message to the Government: don’t you dare privatise our NHS! And together we’ve come up with the perfect plan. Thousands of us said we’d help shine a spotlight on the issue by wearing a pro-NHS pin in a recent survey. [2] So, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to make it happen.
Now, here’s the exciting bit – we’ve designed a striking limited edition pin that we can all wear to send a clear message: the British public demand an end to the creeping privatisation of our NHS, and are proud of this cherished institution. We’ve already sourced a UK based ethical producer to bring this vision to life.
But if we’re going to send our pins to production on the scale needed, we’ll need your help. To do this, we need to raise £32,000. That’s a lot, but if just 3,721 of us chipped in an average donation of £8.60 today, we’d have the money we need to hit go right away!
So David, will you help us make this exciting plan a reality by chipping in today? After you donate, you can sign up to reserve your own pin.
Imagine walking along your high street – and seeing the people you pass wearing this pin with the same message as you. Our strength is in our numbers, David. No matter what the rich, powerful and connected might think, they won’t get away with charging for NHS services if we – the people who use it – fight back. And we could even get pro-NHS MPs to wear it too!
We know public pressure works. Last year we turned a disused ambulance into a huge advertising van and drove it across the country, while Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak battled it out to become our next PM. [3] In her first speech as Prime Minister, Liz Truss said the NHS was one of her top priorities. [4] And Rishi Sunak has been forced to promise he’ll bring down waiting lists. [5]
Together, we’ve held our politicians to account, and reminded them of how much ordinary people like us value our NHS. If tens of thousands of us show our support publicly, nothing will be able to stop us.
So, David, will you be one of the special people that helps make this happen by chipping in whatever you can afford today? After you donate, you can sign up to reserve your own pin.
PS: 38 Degrees is a campaigning organisation with a small office team and so doesn’t have the facilities of an online giant like Amazon. Please be patient with us after you make your order, we will try our best to get orders out to you as quickly as possible! To ensure as many households get a pack we’re limiting orders to one pack per household. Please also note, packs will not be shipped outside of the UK. You can find out more on our FAQs page here.
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:
A few days ago I signed a 38 Degrees petition, as this says, sending a message to Sunak about the number of people on NHS waiting lists. They sent me this follow up message asking me to get on various other social media platforms, which I’m not on. However, I’m putting this up for anyone who is on them to send their personal message to our farcical Prime Minister.
‘David, you’re one of more than 33,000 of us who said you’re up for holding Rishi Sunak to account for delivering on his pledge to bring down NHS waiting times. [1] Thank you!
The latest figures – released this morning – revealed that 7.2 million patients are stuck on waiting lists in England alone. [2] It’s a notable INCREASE since the Prime Minister made his pledge a few weeks ago. [3] What’s worse, experts are warning that waiting times are unlikely to fall in 2023. [4]
It’s a step in the wrong direction and now it’s up to us to raise the alarm!
Together, we can make sure he knows we’re watching and demanding urgent action. Getting this message all over social media is a crucial step in piling on the pressure needed to force him into action.
So, David, will you share a message with your friends and family to demand the Prime Minister delivers on his pledge to bring down waiting times? Use the buttons below to spread the word:
If you listen carefully, you can hear the Conservatives scraping the bottom of the barrel. Through all of the corruption, scandals, and resignations over the years, Rishi Sunak’s government is facing a serious dilemma: they’ve got no one normal left to serve in key positions.
That’s why Lee Anderson MP was just made deputy chair of the Conservative party. Not because he was the best candidate but because there are simply no decent people left who are willing to go down with this sinking Tory ship.
Anyone who’s familiar with “30p Lee” will not be surprised to see him immediately cause a scandal. After all, this is the man who condemned food bank users for being “bad at budgeting”, refused to watch England play because they took the knee to stand against racism, and expressed delight at being named the “worst man in Britain”
A core part of Anderson’s new role is promoting the government in the media and generally garnering public support. It’s not an enviable position for anyone to be in, but they genuinely seem to have found the worst possible person for the job.
Anderson is, of course, off to a roaring start as deputy chair. He very publicly called for the return of the death penalty just before his appointment, forcing Rishi Sunak to awkwardly clarify that that was not the government’s official position. He also advocated for a “naval standoff” in the channel over small boats and got himself into a petty row with a BBC reporter who brought up his past. That’s just in his first week.
The real story here is not just that Lee Anderson is the worst kind of politician and person (though that’s hard to deny). It’s that Rishi Sunak is too weak to fight off the extreme and incompetent wing of his own party. He’d rather bring them into the fold than take any kind of principled stand.
Rishi’s lame-duck government is an opportunity for far-right ideologues like Lee Anderson. Since Johnson, they’ve made a comfortable home in the Conservative party and advanced an anti-democratic, xenophobic, economically illiterate agenda that has had real repercussions for the public. Sunak, despite his promises for change, is only letting them dig their heels in even further.
The most frustrating part of all this is that, despite what he may say, Lee Anderson and his ilk are nowhere near being representative of ordinary British people. Yes, there are some people who share Andreson’s extreme, pigheaded views, but they are a tiny minority and should never be allowed to dominate the political debate, let alone occupy positions of power and influence over our lives.
Nigel Farage plays that game too. He claims to be an ordinary bloke, someone you might have a pint with in your local pub, but he isn’t. He’s a multimillionaire TV show host with a global network of rich and influential friends. Remember that the next time you hear him dishing out questionable advice about the direction we should be taking our country in.
All this shows why our mission to fight for proper democracy is so important and why we MUST succeed. If we don’t, our broken democracy will continue to allow people like Lee Anderson to exercise power and influence over our lives. What a terrible thought that is.
I haven’t donated to Open Britain, but I’m putting this message up because it is an accurate statement of the dire state of politics under Sunak and the Tories.
‘We’ve got a plan to ramp up the campaign to stop public money being spent on Boris Johnson’s legal fees. David, you’re one of the 123,000 of us that have signed the petition against this ridiculous decision. Now will you help up the pressure on the Government?
The National Audit Office (NAO) – the body responsible for monitoring the Government’s spending – have said they’ll be speaking to officials to “obtain more information” about these costs. [2] But they’ve not yet committed to a formal investigation. [3]
We need to make it clear to the NAO that taxpayers footing Johnson’s legal fees is something worthy of real investigation. But to do that, we’ll need the voice of the British public to be heard loud and clear. So we’re planning on sending the petition, some punchy polling, and messages from all of us who have joined the campaign to the NAO.
Together we can show them the public wants a proper investigation into whether or not we should foot the bill for Boris Johnson’s legal fees.
David, will you answer 3 quick questions, to let the National Audit Office know what you think? It could help persuade them to launch a formal investigation. It should only take about three minutes and we’ve included the first question below to get you started:
Do you think taxpayers footing the bill for Boris Johnson’s ‘partygate’ legal defence is a sensible use of public money?
Boris Johnson has reportedly earned more than £1 MILLION, since leaving Downing Street, in speaking fees. [4] He made this mess, he can clean it up himself. It’s up to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to stop this, and we have seen with the recent case of Nadhim Zahawi, the former Conservative party chair, that a formal investigation condemning this use of public funds could be enough to force him to act. [5]
David, will you answer 3 quick questions, to let the National Audit Office know what you think? It could help persuade them to launch a formal investigation.It should only take about three minutes and we’ve included the first question below to get you started:
Do you think taxpayers footing the bill for Boris Johnson’s ‘partygate’ legal defence is a sensible use of public money?
I definitely do not think that cash-strapped Brits should be expected to have their money wasted on Johnson’s personal expenses. He’s rich enough already, although he whined that the Prime Minister’s salary wasn’t enough to live on. How does he think people on the dole or disability benefit, or the low wages he and his party have pushed for so long survive?
Just this evening got this assessment of Rishi Sunak’s cabinet reshuffle, and how the Tories really are becoming more authoritarian and anti-democratic from Open Britain.
‘Dear David,
Today, Rishi Sunak announced the fifth ministerial reshuffle of the past year. Since Boris Johnson came to power, we’ve been through three PMs, four culture secretaries, four levelling up secretaries, five health secretaries, four justice secretaries, and five chancellors. All in (technically) one premiership.
This time, Sunak is splitting up the business ministry and DCMS, awarding promotions to some loyal colleagues and slight downgrades to others. Culture warrior Kemi Badenoch is now in charge of Business and Trade, and Lucy Frazer will become the 14th DCMS minister (now “CMS”) since 2010.
While democrats everywhere will be glad to see the back of Nadhim Zahawi – replaced as Tory party chair by Greg Hands – it’s hard to see anything particularly positive in this reshuffle. OK, the new departmental focus on net-zero and technology may give rise to clearer policy positions and/or more focused strategy, but it’s hard to see how this solves Sunak’s biggest problems…his weakness and lack of popularity. After all, the biggest drains on his credibility – Dominic Raab and Suella Braverman – remain in post.
Sunak has said that “the government needs to reflect the priorities of the British people and be designed to deliver for them”. He clearly wants us to think that this unelected administration, which has now ventured far from its original mandate, has some glimmer of democratic legitimacy. In the context of their dire polling, that seems laughable.
If anything, today’s events seem to confirm that this is indeed a zombie government, devoid of new ideas and simply going through the motions, pretending to work for the British people – without making any of the difficult decisions that would entail.
The hard right of the Tory party has no interest in proper democracy or the actual will of the people (or, indeed, the wellbeing of the traditional Conservative Party). Quite simply, their objective is to stay in power long enough to implement their extreme policies and bend our democratic system out of shape so that it operates in their favour in future. Sunak knows this but is too weak to stand up to them. That’s why Raab and Braverman STILL have seats in Cabinet.
Open Britain is working to ensure that everyone can have their voice heard at the next general election, increasing the likelihood that these anti-democracy zealots get swept away.
Our ‘Defending Democracy‘ core objective is about resisting the authoritarian legislation being pushed by this administration, AND fighting against the hard-right’s attempts to sow social division and skew our democratic institutions under the guise of legitimate and responsible government.
These tasks are two sides of the same coin: combining to ensure that the extremist minority at the heart of the current Tory Party and Reform UK are never again allowed to run this country into the ground against the wishes of the public. We can’t afford to be complacent or passive – we’ve got to bring the fight to them. And we will.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 