Ex-Tory MP among 15 charged with placing bets on timing of General Election
FORMER Tory MP Craig Williams was among 15 people charged today in connection to bets placed on the timing of the general election last May.
Russell George, the Tory Senedd member for Montgomeryshire, and Nick Mason, a former chief data officer for the party, are also facing charges.
Welsh Conservatives leader Darren Millar said he had suspended Mr George from the Welsh Conservative Group in the Senedd.
“The suspension is a neutral act pending the outcome of the justice process,” he said.
The Gambling Commission began its investigation in June, focusing on “individuals suspected of using confidential information — specifically advance knowledge of the proposed election date — to gain an unfair advantage in betting markets.”
Laura Saunders, a Tory candidate for Bristol North West, and former Conservative party chief marketing officer Simon Chatfield, were also among those charged with offences under the Gambling Act 2005.
They are due to appear at Westminster Magistrates Court on June 13.
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Article continues at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/ex-tory-mp-among-15-charged-placing-bets-timing-general-election
NEU president slams Labour’s renewed austerity
NATIONAL Education Union (NEU) president Sarah Kilpatrick slammed Labour’s renewed austerity today, telling the NEU annual conference that Tory welfare cuts had killed her disabled father.
She accused ministers of “perpetuating and repeating the shameful pattern of punching-down and finger-pointing” by “balancing the books on the backs of the poor.”
On the first day of the conference in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, she described how her father had died at the age of 56 after being stripped of his disability benefits under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.
She said that she had experienced poverty as a working-class child in Newcastle upon Tyne and was his carer for a number of years.
“As Iain Duncan Smith gleefully applauded the welfare cuts, I represented my father in a tribunal against the DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] decision to remove his disability benefits,” she told delegates.
“He’d had his gas cut off. Couldn’t afford groceries. His elderly mother was adding tins of food to her shopping to bulk up what I was buying for him, but he isolated himself further still.
“He lost a lot of weight during that time and never really recovered.”
In 2013, her father became one of an estimated 120,000 people who died as a result of the Tories’ austerity programme, she said.
“When Wes Streeting brags to the Tories across the benches that Labour have done what they never could and slashed the welfare bill, this is what they mean,” said Ms Kilpatrick.
“Let’s be clear. Nearly two decades of economic permacrisis has not been caused by disabled people.”
Nor has it been caused by the elderly, refugees, the trans community or children in poverty, she said.
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Article continues at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/neu-president-slams-labours-renewed-austerity
Thoughts of the Day 14 April 2025 2/2 UK’s Notional Health Service
I’m ill again with overwhelming fatigue which explains in part why I’ve been neglecting this blog. It could be a symptom of something far more serious of course and I wouldn’t be surprised that it is. The UK’s NHS is reduced to little more than a notion where you have to ring at certain times of the day to be ignored by a health-ignorant de-skilled workforce in an attempt to have a 5-minute telephone conversation with and arrogant, dismissive GP a fortnight later.
Under Wes Streeting’s proposals you will be able to discuss your health with a health-ignorant de-skilled NHS employee at your home. There are already health-ignorant people I can discuss it with – neighbours, delivery drivers, postpeople, refuse workers. I can even tell random people in the street or shopworkers.