#boris johnson govt

[theotherjourney7]

Rishi Sunak-the man himself…

“…Sunak shot to prominence in 2020 when appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. Although not quite unknown before then, few had paid him much attention.

Even his appointment as Chancellor looked as much like luck as anything else. He’d managed to be promoted through the ranks of obscure ministers to hold the number 2 position at the Treasury when Sajid Javid resigned. Appointing him saved a reshuffle, so he got the job.

Then Covid happened and Sunak spent like almost no Chancellor in history. Having discovered there really was a magic money tree, which quantitative easing turned on, he had the Bank of England create all the money he needed to cover the cost of Covid.

It could be argued that anyone who spends £400 billion without asking for anything back in tax and without increasing borrowing (which he didn’t, because QE cancels government debt) is going to be popular. Sunak was.

Then came the reckoning. £37 billion on track and trace was very obviously wasted. It turned out Covid loans to businesses were handed out without any basic checks and billions will be lost. And then there was PPE corruption. Sunak must have known. The crown slipped.

But what we did not see until Covid was declared ‘over’ (when it very clearly was not) was just what the real Rishi Sunak was like. And the reality was shocking. The man who had turned the money on declared that this was an aberration. Sunak decided to play the hard man instead.

Not only did Sunak now deny there was a magic money tree, when he’d so obviously been using it, but he declared the policies he’d pursued were reckless and now he must shrink the state to pay for them. Rishi Scrooge appeared out of nowhere.

Although Covid put massive pressure on public services, and increased the cost of supplying them, Sunak refused the money to deliver the services required. From health to education, care, the legal system and so much more all Sunak offered was austerity and pressure on employees

Pensioners lost out on the inflation pay rise they were due under existing rules. Universal credit was cut even though it was known the cost of living was rising.

Tax increases were announced that hit those in work and on lower pay hardest, but which did not go near those with wealth at all.

And as fuel costs escalated because Sunak’s Treasury had failed to understand that reopening after Covid was always going to impose supply chain, cash flow and other disruptions, his rebate offer was too small, and based in the idea of a loan, not a subsidy.

In the meantime the Bank of England chose to put up interest rates to increase the cost of living, deliberately, as if people were not being punished enough. Sunak must have approved this as he has the right to veto it.

Come the latest announcements, the failure to take further measures to help those millions now facing unplayable bills revealed a complete ignorance of the despair people face when their costs go up by maybe £3,000 a year and they have no way to find that money.

At the same time he revealed he did not know how to pay for a can of coke using a contactless payment card.

And we learned that Brexit, of which he was a strong supporter, really has trashed UK exports when those of every other country were recovering.

To cap which, he’s also opposing spending on green measures as we are being told we are in the last chance saloon on climate change.

Then we discovered his wife has likely saved tens of millions in tax, quite legally, by paying £30,000 a year to use a scheme that let her do so. In other words, she consciously chose not to pay her taxes here.

So what to think of Rishi Sunak? Is he a man suitable to be Chancellor, let alone Prime Minister, as he’d clearly love to be? There are four criteria here. They’re politics, economics, empathy and ethics.

Sunak’s politics are to the right of the Tory party. He’s into small government, low tax, and leaving people to get on and sort out their own problems without state help. But that’s not what we need now.

Sick people desperately need a better, bigger NHS. We need more spent on education, the judicial system, care, the environment, green transport, climate change and social housing and benefits. Sunak is not recognising this. Politically he doesn’t recognise the need of the moment

Worse politically, his choice to make people worse off now - which has been his pattern since it was claimed Covid was over - has within it the suggestion that people must now be punished for Covid, and that was not their fault. That’s bad political judgement.

Worse still is his economic judgement. He does not realise that by crushing expenditure by the government and by at the same time forcing households into poverty he is most likely pushing us into deep recession

All Sunak thinks important is balancing his books, he has not noticed that by doing so he’s reducing the income of most people in the country - and recession has to follow. That’s the action of a man who does not understand economics, or his job.

But maybe that’s not surprising because what’s become clear is that Sunak has not got the empathy required of a senior politician. It’s either that, or he’s just so rich that the idea that you just cannot pay your bills or opt for private medicine is beyond his comprehension.

To describe Sunak as a man without the common touch is to be generous: he does not even realise that there is such a thing and that he needs to have it.

And so I come to his ethics. As his family’s decisions on tax reveal, these prioritise his wealth above the public interest. Faced with a moral choice, what is legal but not ethical is the choice made if there is personal gain to be had. For a politician that is staggering.

Is Rishi Sunak in that case a man fit to be Chancellor when his political, economic, empathic and ethical decisions are all wrong? The obvious answer is that he is not. Nor should he ever be a candidate for prime minister unless we want to create a wasteland.

Sunak’s wife’s domicile claim is based on the suggestion that she does not wish to live here in the long term. I’d suggest now is the time for Boris Johnson to help her fulfil that dream. Sunak needs to be sacked, and be free to leave.”-Richard Murphy

[theotherjourney7]

“The Week In Covid

A look at what's happened with Covid this week (as Friday 8 April 2022). Excuse the abundance of sarcasm - it's been a tough week for truth and logic!

1. Hancock (the UK's former Health Secretary) made the news again this week, in what I initially thought was a psychology experiment testing "just how much BS will the public take'.

2. He claimed the UK pandemic strategy of ‘suppressing the virus until vaccines and treatments were available’ was the right one, he’s glad they followed it, and they have beaten Covid.

3. It transpired he was being serious. Or at least he was serious he wanted the public to believe it. When folk pointed out his government didn’t suppress the virus until they had to and their delays led to some of the longest national lockdowns in the world, 10s of thousands dying, 100’s of thousands left moribund, the biggest fall in GDP of all OCED countries, thousands of businesses going bankrupt, the BBC swiftly took him to task for trying to re-write history and reported widely on it. Sorry, they didn’t really.

4. The symptom profile in the UK was expanded this week. It now includes the commonest symptoms of Covid, two years after we knew the commonest symptoms of Covid, and about eighteen months after acknowledging the actual symptoms of Covid could have helped suppress the virus until vaccines were available.

5. But the expanded symptom profile is just in time - the same week - as shops start to sell Covid tests. Maybe Johnson and Hancock’s mates have taken enough of the taxpayers money and it’s time for someone else to make some bucks off a pandemic that is robbing people of their freedoms and loved-ones.

6. The public now have to pay to test for a disease the government are wilfully permitting to spread (a lesson in supply and demand economics), only to be allowed to spread it freely anyway…

7 ...They have now officially moved from shafting the public discretely to shafting the public at every opportunity and in plain sight.

8. The ‘Covid is like the Flu’ crowd were served another blow as Covid hospital admissions peaked higher than they did in January, a mere three months ago. Either climate change is really playing havoc - it is - and we are having several winters a year - we’re not -, or Covid isn’t the fecking Flu!

9. But apparently, according to experts (I mean, armchair pundits) it’s OK the hospitals are filling up, because only half are in ‘primarily’ for Covid…Apparently if you go to hospital for a reason that isn’t Covid, Covid can’t harm you…no, that can’t be right. Oh yeah, its the endless stream of BS from the denialists.

10. Estimates put hospital acquired Covid at 22% of all inpatient Covid cases. Meanwhile, staff are still expected to wear plastic bibs and paper masks to protect themselves and their patients. It’s not like they are dealing with high risk patients, or we can’t afford staff going off sick. Oh wait, they are and we can’t.

11.The Govs HSE are now refusing to pursue the allegation that their guidelines on PPE for staff are stupid and likely led to avoidable HCW deaths, as alleged by one of their senior advisers (the death bit).

12. And if the allure of working on the NHS frontline wasn’t great enough, on top of the ‘we don’t give a sh!t about you PPE guidelines’ and the ‘why don’t you have a real world pay cut’ incentives, staff must now join patients in England in paying for parking. But Johnson loves the NHS, honest!

13. Just to prove Johnson has won the fight against Covid, the public in a number of areas were told not to go to hospital unless problems were life-threatening due to ‘high levels of Covid cases’.

14. Other A&E departments had to turn ambulances away because they were too full because of “high levels of Covid cases”.

15. Elective operations also had to be cancelled due to…yes…you’ve guessed it…’high levels of Covid cases’.

15. But don’t worry Javid and his mates have a solution that will reverse the decade of underfunding and neglect his government have pursued, the refusal to strengthen the NHS during the pandemic, and their inability to appreciate the need to actually care for those who get Covid

16. Their Covid Recovery Plan (no not a rehab service for those recovering from Covid. Wouldn’t that be nice.) will take more of the public’s money for the NHS and invest it in the…private sector. Wait, let me check my notes again…yes they will strengthen the NHS by investing more of the NHS’s money in the private sector. Maybe we didn’t pay them enough to do near f’all during the initial stages of the pandemic.

And apparently paying a private hospital to do knee operations will free up some ambulances, GPs, and A&E staff to treat strokes, heart attacks and cancer. No, makes perfect sense, when you don’t have an utter scoobie about how healthcare actually works.

17. But seriously, what could go wrong putting a bunch of out-of-touch accountants in charge of the public’s health?

18.Speaking of out of touch unqualified Ministers, this week the Education Minister said it was fine not to wear a mask because he washed his hands a lot.

19. In other news, WHO declare that Covid is airborne.

20. And in other news, Long Covid rates in children climb even higher, as yet more evidence emerged of physical consequences of repeated exposure to a SARS virus - who could have guessed?

21. The Government responded to a number of business sectors request to limit the impact of Covid on their businesses. To which the Government duly tried to limit the impact of a rapidly spreading virus by stopping anything that would stop it spreading.

22. In other news, the economic recovery falters and businesses struggle as staff members contract some sort of mysterious viral illness. They think it may be a viral infection called ‘Like-the-flu honestus' derived from the Latin word ‘Fuk’um’. Oh wait, no, it’s Covid!

23. A number of business leaders ask the Government to bring back free testing. Not the businesses making money from the tests, other businesses losing money because there are no free test. It all gets a bit confusing.”-Dr. Dan Goyal