conservatives

Tories have taken £291,000 in gifts from airports as Sunak eyes runway U-turn

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Original article by Adam Bychawski republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Donations raise eyebrows with Rishi Sunak expected to reject Climate Change Committee advice on banning expansions

Image of a dirty jet passenger aircraft
A dirty jet passenger aircraft

Airport operators have lavished Britain’s last three prime ministers with VIP services worth more than £200,000 since the 2019 election, analysis by openDemocracy has found.

Liz Truss, Boris Johnson and Theresa May are among the Conservative MPs who have accepted more than £275,000 in donations-in-kind from airport operators, while Conservative Party HQ has also taken more than £13,500 in donations from airport operators.

It comes as the government signals its backing for airport expansions, in contrast with advice from its own climate advisers that adding runways to Heathrow and Gatwick would be incompatible with the UK’s net zero goals. The Department of Transport told openDemocracy it was “supportive of airport expansion where it can be delivered in a sustainable way”.

Peter Barclay, the chair of Gatwick Area Conservation Campaign, said gifts to the Conservative Party were “all part of the industry’s efforts to oil the government machine in their favour”.

“It makes you very suspicious of politicians,” he said.

Sarah Clayton, coordinator of climate campaign group AirportWatch said: “Rishi Sunak has no interest in the environment, his only interest is keeping the Conservative Party going.

“The airports will use every little trick in the book in order to make sure that the law isn’t changed so they can get their expansion plans through.”

Truss, Johnson and May have accepted tens of thousands of pounds in donations in kind from Heathrow Airport Ltd and Gatwick Airport Ltd in the last four years. Both airports are hoping to open additional runways.

Theresa May alone accepted donations in kind worth more than £183,000 for the use of the VIP Windsor suite at Heathrow Airport a staggering 44 times, according to declarations made on the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

Heathrow advertises the private suite as a “unique and luxurious service” that includes a chauffeur and dinner prepared by a Michelin starred chef “served by your own personal butler”.

Boris Johnson also used the suite at least 34 times, accepting stays worth £58,000 from the airport, four of them while still in office. In addition, he made use of a VIP suite at Gatwick Airport for him and his family on three occasions after leaving office, a donation in kind worth more than £4,000.

His short-lived successor Liz Truss also made use of VIP suites at Heathrow and Gatwick, accepting 14 stays worth more than £24,000 after resigning as prime minister.

Theresa May accepted donations in kind worth more than £183,000 for the use of the VIP Windsor suite at Heathrow Airport a staggering 44 times

Tory Party HQ also accepted a £12,500 cash donation from London City Airport Ltd just days after it won the 2019 election, according to the Electoral Commission’s records, while Heathrow Airport Ltd made a “non-cash” donation worth the equivalent of £1,680.00 to the party in October 2022. It did not respond to questions about what the donation actually was.

A further six Conservative MPs have accepted gifts worth almost £7,000 in total from London City Airport Ltd since 2019. Orpington MP Gareth Bacon declared in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests that he received tickets to sporting fixtures worth £1,849 from the airport last year, which is the closest to his constituency.

Tory MPs Nigel Evans, Robert Neill, Paul Scully, Kevin Hollinrake and Gagan Mohindra also declared that they had accepted tickets to sporting events from the airport.

London City had an application to increase the size of its terminal refused by Newham Council in July, but has appealed the decision.

Operators of British airports including Heathrow and Gatwick, as well as the Airport Operators Association (AOA), also sponsor the Future of Aviation All-Party Parliamentary Group of MPs by donating £10,000 a year to pay for its secretariat.

Karen Dee, the chief executive of AOA, recently wrote that she had been “working with MPs on the Future of Aviation All Party Parliamentary Group to lobby the prime minister and chancellor to allow airports to establish arrivals duty-free stores and to restore VAT-free shopping for international tourists”.

Original article by Adam Bychawski republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingTories have taken £291,000 in gifts from airports as Sunak eyes runway U-turn

Another Sunak pledge lies in ruins after NHS waiting lists hit a new record high

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UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Grant Shapps.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Energy Security and former Net Zero Secretary Grant Shapps. Credit: Simon Dawson / 10 Downing Street, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

https://leftfootforward.org/2023/09/another-sunak-pledge-lies-in-ruins-after-nhs-waiting-lists-hit-a-new-record-high/

‘It’s part of their plan to run down the NHS by underfunding it and then to claim that the only answer is more privatisation.’

In January this year, Rishi Sunak set out his five key priorities for 2023 and among them was a pledge to reduce NHS waiting lists.

Well yet another one of Sunak’s pledges lies in ruins, after figures released today showed that NHS waiting lists have hit a record high. An estimated 7.68 million people were waiting to start treatment at the end of July, up from 7.57 million in June.

It is the highest number since records began in August 2007 and marks the eighth consecutive month of increases.

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https://leftfootforward.org/2023/09/another-sunak-pledge-lies-in-ruins-after-nhs-waiting-lists-hit-a-new-record-high/

Continue ReadingAnother Sunak pledge lies in ruins after NHS waiting lists hit a new record high

George Monbiot: Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. 

Margaret Thatcher dances with Ronald Reagan. Public domain image.
Thatcher dances with Ronald Reagan. Public domain image.

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So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

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As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans.

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The privatisation or marketisation of public services such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel.

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Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

Continue ReadingGeorge Monbiot: Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

More than a fifth of UK shoppers’ favourite grocery items at climate breakdown risk

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https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/sep/13/uk-grocery-items-climate-breakdown-risk

Report finds consumers could also face shortages of bananas, avocados, peas and tea in the coming years owing to carbon dioxide emissions

Empty supermarket shelves. Image: citytransportinfo Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
Empty supermarket shelves. Image: citytransportinfo Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

More than a fifth of UK shoppers’ favourite grocery items are at risk from climate breakdown, a new report has found.

Consumers could also face shortages of bananas, grapes, avocados, cashews, cocoa, peas, canned tuna and tea in the coming years, as the countries they come from are hit by changing weather patterns because of CO2 emissions, the charity Christian Aid has said.

Of the 25 biggest food exporters to the UK, eight – Brazil, South Africa, India, Vietnam, Peru, Colombia, Ivory Coast and Kenya – faced high climate vulnerability, according to research by the charity. It found 22% of the items in a typical British grocery shop were at risk.

Some effects have been seen already. Earlier this year, UK supplies of tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, peppers and citrus fruits ground to a halt as drought hit parts of Spain and Morocco.

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https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/sep/13/uk-grocery-items-climate-breakdown-risk

Continue ReadingMore than a fifth of UK shoppers’ favourite grocery items at climate breakdown risk

‘Stop Starmer’ initiative launches at London’s Conway Hall

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Original article republished from the Skwawkbox.

Campaign group warning of the dangers of red Tory government and to inform the public about Starmer’s authoritarianism and ‘murky’ past holds launch event featuring leading left speakers

Image rights: S Walker

A campaign to inform the public about the dangers of a red Tory ‘Labour’ government launched in London today, with a range of leading left speakers. Crispin Flintoff, the former Labour fundraiser expelled by the party in Starmer’s cowardly purge of the left after sharing, as constituency party secretary, the resignation letter of the group’s chair, told Skwawkbox that the campaign’s aims are:

to educate people about how dangerous a Starmer government would be. The media are unwilling to probe into Starmer’s murky past, expose his dishonesty or report on his alarming authoritarianism.

A healthy democracy requires an enlightened population and Trilateral Starmer is firmly opposed to that.

Ours is a grassroots campaign to get the word out via street stalls, leaflets, tailored social media posts and publicity stunts that emulate Just Stop Oil and Palestine Action. We see this as the only way to get our message out there. If the media pick up on it that would be a bonus.

A Starmer government would be just as bad – or worse – than a Tory government.

The event, which saw London’s Conway Hall full of activists outraged by Keir Starmer’s eager betrayal of the false promises he made to con Labour members into selecting him as party leader, featured:

  • former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein
  • homelessness campaigner Andrea Gilbert
  • tax and economics expert Richard Murphy
  • Sheila Day
  • DPAC’s Ellen Clifford
  • Liverpool’ Audrey White, who famously gave Starmer a dose of uncomfortable truth during his sneak visit to the city
  • former Labour and Respect MP George Galloway
  • ‘free Assange’ campaigner Deepa Driver
  • Palestine Action leader Huda Ammori
  • purged Labour member and star of ‘The Labour Files’ Becky Massey
  • NHS campaigner Dr Bob Gill
  • Jewish former party member Frances Rifkin
  • investigator Ben Timberley
  • Eric Jarvis and Phil Davison of OCISA, the group aiming to fight Starmer in his London seat at the next election
  • Colin Hendrie

Video messages were sent by former miner John Dunn, former union leader Tosh McDonald, ex-Labour MP Chris Williamson, forensic author and journalist Asa Winstanley and Carel Buxton that time did not allow to be shown, but these will be published in due course.

The event has already been targeted by apparent pal of the security services Paul Mason, so it’s doing something right.

There is, of course, no functional difference – at least for the better – between ‘long-time servant of the security state’ and compulsive promise-breaker Starmer’s red-Toryism and the blue version.

Original article republished from the Skwawkbox.

Continue Reading‘Stop Starmer’ initiative launches at London’s Conway Hall