The banker loving, baby-eating Tory party thread (regenerated)

[Demitri_C]

2 hours ago, Davkaus said:

The profits must be used by the Trusts to improve health services.

Interestingly, anything that counts as an NHS income generation scheme, as car parks do, have to be profitable. If they subsidised parking to an extent that it didn't make a profit, they'd have to stop offering the service (or potentially just remove it from the income generation scheme classification, which I think means they wouldn't be able to charge anyone at all). 

I don't know how much profit they're making per car park, but if it's not a comfortable profit, subsidising staff parking may mean either making patients pay even more, or scrapping charges entirely - which sounds great, but unless there's central funding for it, it means costs have to be cut from somewhere to make up for it.

Id love to see the evidence of that in terms of what the hopsitals are actually doing with the car park money.

We had a massive scandal at our trust last year where people paid for tickets but still got a fine! But the crappy parking estates team said unless they kept their tickets cant prove they paid as was only coin machines at the time. Outrageous. Imagine your  a cancer patient and you dont fancy going hospital and this happens to you.

Disgusting and i think chief executives of the trusts should be fined and reimburse the patients when this crap happens.

[snowychap]

Marina Hyde:

Quote

News that Chris Grayling is to be appointed chair of the intelligence and security committee feels like a cosmic inevitability. There is simply no aspect of the British state that is regarded as too big to Grayl. In the event of nuclear devastation, almost certainly somehow caused by Chris Grayling, Chris Grayling would not simply survive, but there would be someone surveying the ash cloud and the onset of nuclear winter going: “You know what, clearing this up looks like a job for Chris Grayling.”

Please don’t ask by what arcane Downing Street process committee appointments such as Grayling’s are decided. You are much better off imagining a wingbacked armchair with its back to the viewer, so that all that can be heard is a Mr Burns voice rasping: “Grayling, you say. Remind me of his track record.” “Well, put simply, sir … his record is that there is no longer a track. There’s just a huge stretch of scorched earth, dozens of charred horse skeletons, and it’s all overhung by a noxious pall so toxic it makes the Chernobyl exclusion zone seem like a visit to the Selfridges perfume counter.” “Perfect. Prepare his office.”

...

I very much enjoyed last night’s Guardian headline, "Grayling closes in on role as chair of UK intelligence committee". Closing in suggests a degree of targeted precision that Chris Grayling’s career does not. The only way Chris Grayling could close in on the intelligence and security chair is if he was actually attempting to close in on the keys to a holiday caravan in Rhyl.

...more

 

[snowychap]

 

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, snowychap said:

 

That last sentence - below the preview pane for me - is so telling.

Edited July 11, 2020 by HanoiVillan

[Xann]

Quote

 

Just how does public money end up in the pockets of Cummings' friends?

by Good Law Project Limited

Like us, you might have wondered why it is that the biggest contracts to purchase PPE have gone not to manufacturers or professional suppliers but instead to pest controllers, confectioners, and opaque family offices.

You'll also have seen the stories about the placing of contracts with colleagues of Mr Cummings. But, although reporters pick them up, nothing ever happens. There's no mechanism to discover what really happened....

On 3 March 2020, the Cabinet Office shook hands with Public First, a small privately held polling company. There was no formal contract or prior advertisement or competitive tender process. It just made what procurement lawyers call a 'direct award'. And it formalised it retrospectively on 5 June 2020 and publicised it a week later on 12 June 2020. Having shaken hands the Cabinet Office paid Public First approximately £253,000 for services between March and May 2020 but the total contract value is £840,000. 

The directors and owners of Public First are Ms Rachel Wolf and Mr James Frayne. Ms Wolf and Mr Frayne have close connections with both the Minister for the Cabinet Office (the Rt Hon Michael Gove MP) and his long time colleague and Chief Adviser to the Prime Minister who works in the Cabinet Office (Mr Dominic Cummings). 

Mr Frayne and Mr Cummings were co-founders of the New Frontiers Foundation think-tank. According to Mr Cummings’ blog, he and Mr Frayne, in 2004, “set up the campaign to fight the referendum on the North East Regional Assembly as a training exercise for an EU referendum."  In 2011, Mr Gove (then Secretary of State for Education) appointed Mr Frayne as Director of Communications for the Department for Education. In that position he worked alongside Mr Cummings, who was then Special Adviser to Mr Gove at the Department for Education.

Ms Wolf formerly worked as an advisor to Mr Gove and has also worked for Mr Cummings. She founded the “New Schools Network”, a charity which supported the ‘academisation’ of public schools, under a programme of reform designed by the Mr Gove and Mr Cummings. The New Schools Network drew public criticism for receiving £500,000 of public money without being required to undergo a competitive bidding process. She has been a vocal public supporter of Mr Cummings’ plans for reform of the civil service. And she co-wrote the Conservative Party’s manifesto for the 2019 general election.

Latest: July 11, 2020

We have issued proceedings

Crowdjustice

 

[StefanAVFC]

Clap for them on Thursday

Take their parking from them on Friday

Kick them out of the country on Saturday

[NurembergVillan]

19 minutes ago, StefanAVFC said:

Clap for them on Thursday

Take their parking from them on Friday

Kick them out of the country on Saturday

Chill on Sunday.

[bickster]

The Tory Party's new slogan - Arse Wiping for Northern Oiks, it's what you voted for!

 

[Xann]

Quote

 

Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

The UK's mobile providers are being banned from buying new Huawei 5G equipment after 31 December, and they must also remove all the Chinese firm's 5G kit from their networks by 2027.

Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden told the House of Commons of the decision.

It follows sanctions imposed by Washington, which claims the firm poses a national security threat - something Huawei denies.

Mr Dowden said the move would delay the country's 5G rollout by a year.

He added that the cumulative cost of this, and earlier restrictions announced against Huawei earlier in the year, would be up to £2bn.

"This has not been an easy decision, but it is the right one for the UK telecoms networks, for our national security and our economy, both now and indeed in the long run," he said.

Because the US sanctions only affect future equipment, the government has been advised there is no security justification for removing 2G, 3G and 4G equipment supplied by Huawei.

However, when swapping out the company's masts, networks are likely to switch to a different vendor to provide the earlier-generation services.

Huawei said the move was: "Bad news for anyone in the UK with a mobile phone" and threatened to "move Britain into the digital slow lane, push up bills and deepen the digital divide."

 

BBC

Another expensive U-Turn, but one that needed to be made.

Now for the nuclear power station?

[blandy]

2 hours ago, Xann said:

BBC

Another expensive U-Turn, but one that needed to be made.

Now for the nuclear power station?

This is getting more complicated. The reasons now given, I don’t believe to be valid at all. We’ve been fig leafed. Security my arse. It’s true that China is very naughty with espionage, hacking, IPR theft, human rights abuses, all kinds. Not an ideal trade partner. Better avoided where possible while their govt is such a wrong ‘un. Better to choose a more open, free trading partner for sure.

But this is all about Trump. He’s right about China, largely. If the US wishes not to trade or export with China, that’s for them.  But the US uses export control and ITAR as a tool of state policy. That’s what’s happened here . Trump’s blocked Huawei from using US tech, and given the UK an excuse to change its mind after general requests didn’t get the desired result. NCSC have no doubt been pressured to release a fig leaf reason about “well now Huawei isn’t using US chips, our assessment about security risk is no longer valid”. Not really true that, I’d wager.

The tories in particular are terrible at getting it right with China and we’ve been played here by the US too.

 

 

[chrisp65]

Should make the brave new trade deal interesting for the brexit boys to negotiate.

Easiest deals in history.

[Xann]

20 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

Easiest deals in history.

No downside.

[Xann]

Quote

 

This stinks. It stinks worse than any of the other carrion this government has buried. Every day for the past fortnight, I’ve been asking myself why this scandal isn’t all over the front pages. Under cover of the pandemic, the government has awarded contracts worth billions of pounds for equipment on which our lives depend, without competition or transparency. It has trampled on its own rules, operated secretly and made incomprehensible and – in some cases – highly questionable decisions.

Let’s begin with the latest case, unearthed by investigative journalists at the Guardian and openDemocracy. It involves a contract to test the effectiveness of the government’s coronavirus messaging, worth £840,000. It was issued by the Cabinet Office, which is run by Michael Gove. The deal appears to have been struck on 3 March, but the only written record in the public domain is a letter dated 5 June, retrospectively offering the contract that had already been granted. There was no advertisement for the work, and no competition. No official notice of the award has yet been published. The deal appears to have been done with a handshake and a slap on the back.

But we do know who the contract went to. It’s a company called Public First, owned by a married couple, James Frayne and Rachel Wolf. Since 2000, Frayne has worked on political campaigns with Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser. When Gove was education secretary, he brought both Cummings and Frayne into his department. Cummings was Gove’s chief political adviser, while Frayne was his director of communications. At roughly the same time, in 2010, Gove’s department awarded Wolf a £500,000 contract to promote his “free schools” obsession. Guess what? That didn’t go to competitive tender, either. Wolf co-wrote the Conservative party’s election manifesto in 2019.

In response to these latest revelations, the government claims it had to override the usual rules for public procurement because it was responding to an emergency. There are several problems with this claim. The first is that six weeks elapsed between the government’s first recognition that coronavirus presented a potentially serious public health risk and striking the deal with Public First. The second is that, of the four contracted services later listed on the government’s website, two were not for testing the government’s coronavirus messaging at all, but for “EU exit comms”: in other words, Brexit. The coronavirus work, according to this list, did not begin until 27 May. The Cabinet Office now claims that when it said “EU exit”, it meant coronavirus. This seems an odd mistake to make.

The third problem is that the government’s communications on the pandemic have been disastrous. Did it choose to ignore Public First’s “emergency” work, or was it of little value?

On Friday, the Good Law Project (GLP) issued proceedings in the high court against Gove, alleging breaches of procurement law and apparent bias in the granting of the contract to his longstanding associates. It is crowdfunding the challenge.

But this, extraordinary as it is, is not the strangest of the cases the GLP is taking on. Another involves a pest control company in West Sussex called PestFix, which, according to the GLP, has listed net assets of only £18,000. On 13 April, again without public advertisement or competition, the government awarded PestFix a £32m contract to supply surgical gowns. PestFix is not a manufacturer, but an intermediary (its founder calls it a public health supply business): its role was to order the gowns from China. But, perhaps because of its lack of assets, the government had to give it a deposit worth 75% of the value of the contract. The government’s own rules state that prepayments should be made only “in extremely limited and exceptional circumstances”, and even then must be “capped at 25% of the value of the contract”.

If the government had to provide the money upfront, why didn’t it order the gowns itself? And why, of all possible outsourcers, did it choose PestFix? In the two weeks before it awarded this contract, it was approached by 16,000 companies offering to supply personal protective equipment (PPE). Some of them had a long track record in manufacturing or supplying PPE, and had stocks that could be deployed immediately.

 

Grauniad

How many died whilst they manouevred their tax swerving, traitor chums' pockets into the cash stream? 

We should be dragging the filth into the streets.

[Davkaus]

It's vital that we remove Chinese equipment from our national infrastructure. But fill your boots for the next 5 and a half months. 

[Genie]

15 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

Should make the brave new trade deal interesting for the brexit boys to negotiate.

Easiest deals in history.

Now we’ve let them bang on our door for a couple of years we should let them in and tell us what they can do for us in return for our trade.

[OutByEaster?]

So, just to recap on economy 2021 - we've left our largest neighbouring trading bloc, managing to piss them off in the process and not put in place easy processes for a seamless transition, we've also managed to piss off the world's second largest economic power through Hong Kong and the US's war on Huawei, leaving ourselves with a narrow band of helpful potential trade partners, the largest of whom has spent the last twenty years looking for economies in crisis to bend over and take advantage of, and we've done it in the middle of an unprecedented global pandemic that threatens a global recession, under the leadership of a group whose history suggests that self interest will always come before national interest in matters of economy.

We'll be fine right?

 

[ml1dch]

9 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

So, just to recap on economy 2021 - we've left our largest neighbouring trading bloc, managing to piss them off in the process and not put in place easy processes for a seamless transition

This is the only bit I'd take issue with - we've gone out of our way to ensure that the transition is as deliberately bumpy and chaotic as possible. 

[snowychap]

Peak Grayling?

Chris Grayling fails to become intelligence and security chair

Quote

Chris Grayling, the former cabinet minister, has unexpectedly failed in his attempt to become chair of parliament’s powerful intelligence and security committee after being ambushed by MPs.

Opposition members voted instead for another Conservative Julian Lewis and agreed to meet again before recess where they are expected to discuss releasing the long delayed report into Russian interference in British politics.

Lewis secured the votes of the four opposition members, three MPs and one peer, on the committee in what amounts to a humiliating defeat for a figure who was personally backed by the prime minister for the role.

One source said Grayling “didn’t see it coming”. The nine members of the MPs’ committee voted five to four in favour of Lewis.

...more

[ml1dch]

 

 

[ml1dch]

2 hours ago, snowychap said:

Peak Grayling?

Chris Grayling fails to become intelligence and security chair

 

If true, that's next-level control freakery.