Secrets – Left eye view

Patel’s press muzzle is far from pretty

The government plan is to amend the official secrets act to criminalise any reporter who effectively embarrasses the government. It means that anyone who publishes stuff like Hancock’s extra-marital kiss could face up to 14 years in prison.

“Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.”

(George Orwell)

The reach of the act will cover anyone from journalists to bloggers, to keyboard warriors on Facebook and you don’t even need to have signed the act to be liable. But it gets worse. Click the video link below to watch a 6 minute video explanation of this appalling new proposal…

Patel’s plan to oppose free speech is straight out of Hitler’s 25 point plan

“A free press is one of the pillars of democracy”

(Nelson Mandela)

Dismantling democracy

Boris Johnson’s conservative government was elected on a manifesto which included fair warning that they intended to ‘overhaul’ our parliamentary processes and dismantle the checks and balances that have maintained the balance between Parliament, Government and the judiciary for generations. The motivation seems to have been the fact that the courts prevented Boris (and his predecessor, Teresa May) from introducing illegal or unacceptably sectarian measures. MPs exercised their democratic right to scrutinise and ratify (or not) Parliamentary bills that would have been profitable for a few wealthy tories but disastrous for the majority of citizens. This is why Boris Johnston wants to remove legal scrutiny from his machinations.

It’s unfortunate that so many Brits either didn’t bother to read the manifesto or brushed over that page without really noticing just what it meant. Here I’ll link to various posts outlining just how they’re going about that process and why it’s such a problem for anyone interested in fair and democratic representation of the people. But first let’s hear what two parliamentary candidates had to say about the issue at my local hustings. The labour candidate, Sue Hayman counselled caution and spoke of the importance of scrutiny whereas the conservative candidate, Mark Jenkinson clearly had a different view.

Boris Johnston wants to assume power like a dictator and simply do whatever he wants without reference to parliament or law and without having to listen to anyone who may have cause for concern. And Tory MPs apparently want to help him do it. That’s not democracy.

There’s good reason why we have those checks and balances. They prevent a plethora of evils from police states to human rights abuses. They’re not just minor inconveniences to be swept aside by egotistical overgrown children like Johnson. These are our protections and the consequences if we allow this government to tear them down will be dire.

Within a single month of taking their seats in the House of Commons, every single conservative MP voted to remove their own right to scrutinise Brexit legislation. At a stroke they disempowered parliament and in doing so guaranteed that Boris Johnston won’t need to listen to MPs or the electorate in forcing through Brexit – even under the worst of terms.

That’s not all. This unscrupulous regime is attempting to influence culture itself. They’re interfering in academic appointments and attempting to politicise every aspect of British life. From schools to museums, the message is the same. And the historical implications of that are genuinely terrifying.

Then came Covid19 and yet another excuse to disempower parliament. Boris wasted no time in deploying his majority to ban parliament from scrutinising or commenting upon laws he chose to pass in relation to the pandemic – a topic with an alarmingly wide reach as we shall see. The combination of powers relating to Coronavirus and to Brexit make Johnston dictator in all but name. The government even ignored its own scientific advisory group, SAGE, choosing instead to scapegoat the expert panelists under the distorting auspices of Dominic Cummings, eugenicist and far right sectarian who seems to be pulling Johnston’s strings like some Machiavellian puppet master straight out of renaissance Italy.

It may be that Cummings’ divisive views were the impetus behind the obvious racism inherent in the domestic abuse bill recently passed by this disgraceful tory government.

As if that’s not bad enough. The tories have also voted to remove any and all protections from our NHS. They have completely ignored their oft-repeated manifesto promise to protect the National Health Service from foreign (in particular American) private health investors. This government has quite literally paved the way for the health needs of British citizens to be sold down the river, sacrificed at the altar of corporate profit and private greed. This is not democracy!

The British people did not vote for this.

In truth, our democracy has been so damaged in just a few short months that it’s genuinely reasonable to compare UK with a banana republic, a totalitarian state in which dissent is ignored, privacy is a thing of the past, laws threaten the peoples’ right to scrutinise the powers that be and where the majority become poorer whilst the elite cabal increase their own wealth exponentially.

And if you have a Tory MP… you’re not even allowed to ask them a question!

Mark Jenkinson MP represents the people of Workington by ignoring their opinions, insulting them when they raise questions and disempowering himself, their only voice in parliament.

List of links used in chronological order…

https://lefteyeview.com/2019/12/12/workington-hustings-parliament-the-executive-and-judicial-review/

https://lefteyeview.com/2019/12/23/449/

https://lefteyeview.com/2020/01/20/the-price-of-liberty/

https://lefteyeview.com/2020/01/22/tories-vote-to-disempower-parliament/

https://lefteyeview.com/2020/02/08/wot-still-nor-russian-report/

https://lefteyeview.com/2020/02/19/conservative-constitutional-con-continues/

https://lefteyeview.com/2020/03/01/further-fun-from-the-downing-st-fash/

https://lefteyeview.com/2020/04/27/email-to-my-mp-about-sages-scientific-integrity/

https://lefteyeview.com/2020/05/29/the-slow-death-of-british-democracy/

https://lefteyeview.com/2020/06/09/dominic-cummings-the-plot-thickens/

https://lefteyeview.com/2020/07/07/tories-sabotage-their-own-manifesto-promise/

https://lefteyeview.com/2020/07/27/are-tory-mps-not-ashamed/

https://lefteyeview.com/2020/08/03/nhs-privatisation-by-stealth/

https://lefteyeview.com/2020/08/09/uk-compared-with-a-banana-republic/

https://lefteyeview.com/2020/08/11/the-government-is-spying-on-you/

https://lefteyeview.com/2020/08/23/my-mp-doesnt-care-for-democracy/

The government is spying on you

Back in early June I told you about Faculty AI, the firm run by Dominic Cummings’ mates and the inexplicably large contracts this relatively small company has received. I told you about their role in the vote leave campaign and their links to dodgy tech companies such as Palatine who ride roughshod over the privacy and civil liberties of internet users.

Today The Guardian published more information about one of those contracts. Actually the same one I spoke about in June. The doomed track and trace app that never worked but that we paid Faculty AI £400,000 for anyway.

What it did achieve, as well as making money for its government minister shareholder, Theodore Agnew was to track conversations on social media. Nowt to do with track and trace but lots to do with a cynical government spying upon its citizens conversations. This part of the contract was redacted when the news first broke which is why I didn’t tell you about it 2 months ago. But now, following legal pressure and questions asked in the House of Lords, an unredacted version was published. This unredacted version reveals what Faculty was really up to on behalf of the British government.

To put this into a context it’s worth remembering that Faculty AI is run by people who were involved in the vote leave campaign’s use of Cambridge Analytica to spy on citizens’ internet messaging and send targeted misinformation to select groups of social media users. The company director’s brother also worked with Cummings on the tory party election campaign in 2019 – of course there’s no reason to assume there was any wrongdoing or sneakiness there.

Boris’ diehard supporters will, of course point out that governments have monitored citizens for years and they’d be right. Governments often use covert surveillance to monitor those suspected of serious crime – following court judgements giving them permission to do so because the case for public safety outweighs the case for personal privacy.

There’s no way that public safety can reasonably be used to justify covert surveillance of the British population to provide political advantage to the most corrupt government this country has seen since the 19^th century.

Dear constituents

Two friends of mine received the exact same letter defending Dominic Cummings little lockdown jaunt from our Tory MP, Mark Jenkinson. That’s no big deal. The amount of complaints probably meant a job lot from the printer made sense.

What’s concerning, contemptuous, even is the way that the letter appears to have been written by two different people. It’s almost as though it was forwarded to constituency MPs from Tory HQ with the instruction to add a little personal information to make it look good.
Here we unpick that letter line by line. It’s not pretty, I’m afraid.

The NHS is not safe in their hands

A few days before the general election I found myself increasingly frustrated as I tried (and ultimately failed) to get a family member to understand the threat to the NHS from privatisation. He had 2 lines of argument that I just couldn’t break through.

1. Boris has said that the NHS won’t be privatised
2. Even if it is privatised that’ll just make it more efficient.

Trying to get him to understand the contradiction between his two points was as useless as attempting to make chicken soup from a brick. He just wasn’t prepared to listen, preferring instead to flood my Twitter feed with American alt-right memes equating socialism with totalitarian communism and countering any attempt to provide reasonable balance with accusations of Marxism or just plain accusations that I was lying to him.

Well, it’s now a little under 3 weeks since the election that gave Boris Johnson an overall majority and carte blanche to do as he pleases with Britain’s economy, with the country’s approach to rights and of course with our precious public services like the NHS. So let’s review the situation, shall we?

First some history. It’s not true to say that the NHS won’t be privatised when large parts of it already have been. Private providers are rife, especially in the South of the country where Richard Branson’s ‘Virgin’ owns huge tracts of the service which are run for profit. This is the company that managed not to pay a single penny in corporation tax in 2017! The service may continue to operate under the NHS umbrella but it’s modus operandi is very far from that of the rest of the service.

NHS contracts go to private hospitals, private outpatient departments, private GP surgeries and even private ambulances. Many of these firms are indeed American, by the way so it’s very definitely not true to suggest that US healthcare firms aren’t interested in the NHS. They are and they have been for quite some time.

Almost a quarter of NHS mental health beds are now in the hands of private firms and they are paid handsomely out of the public purse for their efforts. This includes approaching half of the child and adolescent mental health services (whether in the community or hospital). And we all know how hard it is for adolescent mental health services to cope with demand – perhaps we can also see why.

Three private firms, Elysium (Luxembourg), Cygnet (US) and Acadia (US) own and make huge profits from British mental health services and yet they are responsible for fully thirteen of the sixteen mental health units judged “inadequate” by the Care Quality Commission in 2019.

All of these services continue to provide care that is free at the point of delivery but there’s a catch. Well, actually there are several catches…

1. Private companies tend not to provide the less profitable services – they cherry pick the ones they can make most money from, leaving the NHS to carry the cost of the really expensive treatments and procedures. In the past the NHS used money from one pot to subsidise others but that’s no longer possible. The delicate balance of public health care budgeting is being destroyed by private profiteers.

2. Private companies don’t train staff – they let the NHS do that and then they poach them. This may make them look more efficient but that’s only because they’re relying on the public purse to train their staff – staff the private firm then uses to make money for its shareholders. And make no mistake – it is all about profit. The money the NHS ploughs back into research and development is the same money that private firms plough into shareholder dividends. That means for every procedure done privately there will be less money available for treatments next year. It’s an endless spiral, a race to the bottom as we can see…

3. Private companies starve the NHS of funding and resources as outlined above. They leave the NHS impoverished as it struggles to provide the most expensive services with less and less funding. This inevitable results in reduced conditions for staff, run down buildings and equipment, overworked staff and even closures of hospitals and departments. We have seen al this in spades over the last few years, beginning with new Labour but dramatically increased in pace since the ConDem government changed the rules in 2012 to make it easier for private companies to cherry pick work from the NHS. It’s interesting to learn that many of the ConDem ministers involved also hold shares or even sit on the boards of private healthcare companies.

4. It’s not uncommon for private surgeries to go wrong and need to be fixed by the NHS. Private firms still get their money but don’t compensate the NHS for sixing up their mistakes. This cost the NHS £250 million in 2016.

5. The NHS is publically owned. That means it’s an ‘arm of the state’ and as such is bound by human rights legislation, freedom of information and data protection legislation to a much higher degree than private organisations are. If you want to know what’s happened in the NHS you fill in a Freedom of information request and the information is provided in keeping with the Data Protection Act. If you want to know what happened inside a private organisation… well… erm… not so much.

6. Healthcare data is worth a fortune to private companies who sell it to insurance companies, marketers and even political organisations (via third parties, of course). Why wouldn’t they? It’s all about profit in the private healthcare market.

This isn’t the complete list of reasons why private healthcare is strangling our NHS but it may include the most significant. At least the most significant to date.

On December 28th 2019, 15 days after we learned of Boris’ electoral victory the news broke that the government is inviting still more private firms to tender for the right to deliver NHS cardiology, paediatrics, oncology and gynaecology services. Officially this is a way to cot waiting lists but hang on a minute. Given the 6 points listed above is private healthcare really the solution to waiting lists or is it actually the cause?

This government, like the tory and ConDem governments that preceded it is using our health as a political cash cow. We’re the victims, sacrificed to ever increasing lengths of stay on hospital trolleys in A&E, all in the name of profit. Our NHS diminishes in size, in scope and in quality whilst private entrepreneurs profit from providing sub-standard care in its place. And you tell me that the NHS hasn’t been privatised.

Really?

I think you’d better go and give your head a wobble.

From Russia with love

Last November the government refused to publish its report on the extent of Russian interference in British democracy. The report’s existence but not its content was widely commented upon, leading many of us to speculate about potential implications for the conservative government, led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Boris did promise to release the report in all its unredacted glory after the election, claiming bizarrely that to let the British public know the facts before they went to the polls was not in the public interest.

Well the election is over and done. Parliament has returned and the time seems to have come. So where is it, Boris? You’ve had time to renege on your promises about workers’ rights, the minimum wage (which you mistakenly keep referring to as the living wage – a completely different concept), reuniting abandoned children and you even managed to criminalise Roma people simply for being themselves. So how come you can’t manage to publish the document you promised? You’ve had it since 17th October and…

“The protocols are quite clear. If the prime minister has a good reason for preventing publication he should explain to the committee what it is, and do it within 10 days of him receiving the report. If not, it should be published.”

Once again, this sorry excuse for a government seems determined to avoid all scrutiny, not just over the rapidly changing Brexit withdrawal proposals but over just about everything of note. This isn’t democracy, it’s dictatorship in all but name.