… on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing

Category: politics

  • WORSE THAN USELESS BORIS AND HIS NASTY TORY PARTY SCUM :: 7 Things The Government Spent Money On Instead Of A Pay Rise For NHS Staff

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    7 Things The Government Spent Money On Instead Of A Pay Rise For NHS Staff

    £2.6m: Refurbishment for White House-style press briefings

    Downing Street has spent more than £2.6 million on renovations in order to hold White House-style press briefings, it was revealed on Saturday.

    …

    £37bn: Spending on troubled Test and Trace system 

    HuffPost UK revealed on Thursday that the small print of Sunak’s budget showed the Test and Trace system is to get another £15bn, bringing its total cost to £37bn. The funding for 2021/22 comes on top of this year’s spending allocation of £22bn.

    MPs said that the “eye-watering” sums should prompt ministers to do more to prove that the system, run by Tory peer Dido Harding, was giving taxpayers real value for money. 

    …

    £340,000: Payout to Home Office official after Priti Patel bullying claims 

    On Thursday, it emerged the government agreed a “substantial” payout to settle a top civil servant’s employment tribunal claim after he quit amid allegations of home secretary Priti Patel’s bullying.

    …

    £4.4bn: Additional costs of Brexit preparations

    Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union cost the taxpayer more than £4 billion in additional government costs, according to the Whitehall spending watchdog last March.

    …

    £150m: Millions of unusable face masks

    During the early days of the pandemic, the government scrambled to secure deals with suppliers for precious personal protective equipment (PPE). Questions have been raised about many of the contracts, among the most notorious being a deal for 50 million face masks that did not work.

    The masks were bought for NHS England from investment firm Ayanda Capital as part of a £252 million contract. But the government said because they used ear-loop fastenings rather than head loops, they may not have fit tightly enough for clinical use. It confirmed in court papers that the masks would not be used in the NHS.

    …

    £60m: Falling short of supplying computers to disadvantaged schools

    A £60m contract was awarded for the education department to provide laptops to teachers and disadvantaged children during the lockdown.

    But in August, HuffPost UK revealed the scale of the failure to deliver the computers to the poorest communities. Figures obtained by the Children’s Commissioner for England showed 27 academy trusts were left with just one device each.

    …

    £1m: Boris Johnson’s ‘Brexit plane’ gets a red, white and blue makeover 

  • Conservative donor Lord Ashcroft gets lucrative chumocracy contract

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    https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/revealed-tory-donor-lord-ashcrofts-outsourcing-firm-given-350m-vaccination-contract/

    A healthcare company ultimately controlled by leading Tory donor and former party chairman, Lord Ashcroft, has received a £350m contract as part of the government’s COVID-19 vaccination roll-out, openDemocracy has learned.

    Last month the Department of Health and Social Care gave the lucrative contract to Medacs Healthcare plc. In recent weeks, the outsourcing company, which specialises in providing staff to the NHS, social care services and private healthcare providers, has been advertising for staff to work on the huge vaccination project.

    Medacs is a subsidiary of Impellam Group, a FTSE-listed firm whose largest shareholder is Michael Ashcroft, the Belize-based Conservative peer who has donated millions to the party, including more than £175,000 in the past year.

    The award of a major COVID contract to a firm with close ties to the Tories has sparked further questions about politically connected firms benefiting financially from the UK’s pandemic response.

    …

    Medacs was criticised in 2019 when a Care Quality Commission report on a homecare service run by the firm was rated “inadequate”.

    The regulator found “that the care people received was not safe. The majority of people’s care calls were not delivered at the time they were expected and people gave examples of where this had impacted significantly upon them and the safety of the care that they received.”

    Furthermore the report noted that: “medicines records were not kept up to date and CQC identified instances where medicines records showed a potential overdose”.

    …

  • UK govt attributing blame for Covid-19 on the general public

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    Nishat Siddiqi is a consultant cardiologist based in South Wales. He discusses the UK government under Boris Johnson’s lamentable response to the Coronavirus crisis. Boris ‘the falaffel’ Johnson neglected to attend 5 consecutive Cobra meetings addressing the UK’s response to Coronavirus.

    Shifting the Blame

    By Nishat Siddiqi

    As Britain’s Covid death toll exceeds 100,000, the government has set out to blame the public – but from the very beginning its recklessness, ineptitude and cronyism have paved the way for this tragedy.

    …

    Because reality showed Boris to be wrong, the government has firmly decided that we, the supposedly feckless general public, are primarily to blame. During one of her rare public briefings on the coronavirus, Priti Patel proudly declared that the police have issued 45,000 fines to people who have flouted the rules, saying that a minority of people were putting the health of the nation at risk. Scrolling through Twitter feeds of my fellow doctors, I often see remarks on how the flow of traffic has not reduced, unlike the first lockdown. They ask: “where are all these people going and why aren’t they staying home?”

    …

    Meanwhile, contracts for PPE were awarded to firms with no experience in this field, but with close links to the Conservative Party, often leading to delays, substandard equipment and the waste of millions of pounds. Since 11 March, at least 216 frontline health and social care workers have died from Covid-19, with many complaining about inadequate PPE before succumbing to the virus. The British Medical Association is now calling for all healthcare workers to be given face masks identical to the ones used in ICUs.

    Johnson promised a “world beating” test and trace system. But like so many of his promises, the reality was a source of national shame more than pride. The outsourcing to companies with next-to-no experience led to an overwhelmed system with poor communication between private companies and the NHS. The initial policy of discharging elderly patients from hospital back to care homes without testing for the virus was an unforgivable move that led to the virus spreading among some of our most vulnerable people; the fact that this coincided with strict lockdown measures, meaning that many care home residents were denied visits from loved ones, only added to the tragedy.

    …

    As Johnson finally condemns Trump, Britain should examine its own shift to the right

  • Regarding Trump

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    Let's address a few issues about Resident Donald Trump.

The US Congress building was besieged and invaded by intimidating Trump supporters yesterday to disrupt the certification of Biden as the next US president.

The rioting mob was directly incited and encouraged by Trump and Rudolph Giuliani. Giuliani called for "trial by combat" which I understand is what knights in armour in medieval times got up to so he's certainly somewhat divorced from reality.

I have some difficulty blaming the rampaging mob actually. The problem is that they have been wound up by Trump, Giuliani & Co for months on end. The deluded rampaging mob probably truly believed that they were defending democracy while those truly responsible will likely avoid being held to account due to their privileged positions.

What of Trump himself? While he quite possible believes that he is a very stable genius he is in reality a very maladjusted megalomaniacal and narcissistic fekking moron. You have to be extremely fekking moronic to fail to understand that he lost the election fair and square, that he's a luser sacked by the US electorate. His latest tantrum may be about him losing attention.

We've leaned that he's a racist misogynist and Fascist. A Fascist evidenced by his disregard for democracy and the rule of law and his authoritarianism. We've seen this in his actions abroad before his latest spree in the US.
 
We also know that he was associated with Jeffrey Epstein, wished Epstein's accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell well, promised his 17-year-old daughter that he would not date anyone younger than her - although we also know that he's a prolific liar or otherwise a total stranger to the truth - and that he would inspect semi-naked teenagers in beauty pageant changing-rooms. 

Oh, and a tax evader. I'm sure that I've missed more.

Trump is such a moron that he's shat on the very people he's going to depend on. Such people might take more of an interest in his affairs, security may be less inclined to provide a fully attentive service after he endangered capitol police, he may have alienated himself from many circles

...
    Trump lies “I’ll be there with you.”

  • Youth Activists Ring In 2021 With Renewed Demand That World ‘Wake Up to the Climate Crisis’

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    Published on Friday, January 01, 2021 by Common Dreams

    “It must be the year we take real action instead of continuing to repeat meaningless words and empty promises.”byAndrea Germanos, staff writer

    11 December 2020, Hamburg: Activists with "Fridays for Future" display a prop demanding climate action on December 11, 2020 in Hamburg, Germany.

    Activists with “Fridays for Future” display a prop demanding climate action on December 11, 2020 in Hamburg, Germany. (Photo: Axel Heimken/picture alliance via Getty Images)

    Youth activists around the world kicked off the new year Friday with a fresh round of #ClimateStrike actions and demands that 2021 be the year policymakers take sufficiently bold action to address the climate emergency.

    Many of the pleas included the hashtag #ClimateStrikeOnline, as the coronavirus crisis has forced many “school strike for climate” events to be virtual.

    “2021 must be the year that we finally wake up to the climate crisis,” tweeted Sydney-based activist Patsy Islam-Parsons, noting that it was her 69th week of Fridays for Future actions.

    “It must be the year we take real action instead of continuing to repeat meaningless words and empty promises,” she wrote.

    Greta Thunberg, who catalyzed the worldwide Fridays for Future movement, shared her signature Skolstrejk för Klimatet placard in a Friday tweet and said, “New year, same crisis.”

    The Swedish teen’s message was mirrored in a tweet from Leah Namugerwa of Uganda, who wrote: “This is week 99 #schoolstrike4climate in Uganda. The struggle continues…”

    Other climate activists added their hopes for the new year on social media as well.

    Please see missing content at the original document: Youth Activists Ring In 2021 With Renewed Demand That World ‘Wake Up to the Climate Crisis’

    Dominique Palmer, a climate justice activist and member of the U.K. Student Climate Network, put the sweeping changes needed to address the climate emergency in the context of the global efforts that emerged to contain the spread of Covid-19.

    “This year has shown that urgent action in times of a crisis is possible, and now more than ever is the time to push for a green recovery,” Palmer tweeted, pointing to a need for a system that “fundamentally restructures the economy for a habitable future.”

    In an op-ed published Thursday at the Guardian, Greenpeace U.K. executive director John Sauven also addressed the simultaneous crises. He wrote, in part:

    [W]hile the pandemic was raging, so was the climate emergency, like two horror films overlapping. We saw record-breaking wildfires engulf the West Coast of the U.S., a record number of powerful Atlantic storms, the Arctic ice failing to freeze in late October, and deadly floods hitting countries from Italy to Indonesia. We got a glimpse of a chaotic world battered by multiple crises, each making the other worse, and it was terrifying.

    Exceptional as the calamities of 2020 may seem, they could be just a taste of what’s to come unless we change direction.

    “It’s clear,” wrote Sauven, “that nothing short of a complete transformation of our economy and society can save us from climate breakdown.” He continued:

    This is why sliding back to the old normal is not an option. Unless we stop oil firms drilling for more oil, food giants destroying rainforests, and destructive fishing depleting our seas, the worst isn’t over—it’s just begun. Ending the pandemic is only half the job—we must also start something new and better. We must create new green jobs, invest in communities, and tackle the hardship faced by many at the same time. And 2021 is the year to do it.

    That call for change was also captured in a New Year’s Eve tweet from Thunberg. 

    “May 2021 be the year of awakening and real bold change,” wrote Thunberg. “And let’s all continue the never-ending fight for the living planet.”

    Republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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