dizzy: Work-shy malingerer Boris Johnson accuses people of being work-shy malingerers?
Image of Elmo (left) and former Prime Minister Tory idiot Boris Johnson (right)
The former Prime Minister also thought consulting with employees and trade unions was “bollocks”
The former Prime Minister said workers who were worried about returning to work after the pandemic were “malingering work shy people”, the Covid inquiry has heard.
Boris Johnson also thought consulting with trade unions about back-to-work measures was “bollocks”, extracts from Professor Sir Patrick Vallance’s diary have claimed.
According to the diary from July 2021, Johnson dismissed consulting with workers or unions about concerns regarding returning to work after the pandemic, in his haste to remove all restrictions and get people back into workplaces.
“We can’t have the bollocks of consulting with employees and trade unions. They need to all come back to work,” the diary reads.
“All the malingering work shy people.”
The Trades Union Congess has pointed out in response that the law states, ‘staff and unions have to be consulted on safety in workplaces’.
The group, which reportedly has UAE state backing, is leading the race to buy the British newspaper.
The Daily Telegraph front page. Credit: Steven May / Alamy
The investment fund that has reportedly reached an agreement to buy the Telegraph Media Group has stakes in several oil and gas companies, DeSmog can report.
U.S.-based RedBird Capital has entered into a joint venture to take control of The Telegraph alongside International Media Investments (IMI) of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The two groups have reportedly agreed to provide loans to The Telegraph’s existing owners, the Barclay family, to allow them to pay off their £1.16 billion debt to Lloyds Banking Group. The family lost control of The Telegraph and the Spectator magazine, which is also part of the media group, earlier this year due to this outstanding debt.
News reports suggest that the deal is being backed by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who serves as the deputy prime minister of the UAE, the head of its state-owned investment company, and the owner of Manchester City football club.
Conservative MPs have voiced concerns over the potential purchase and the danger of foreign influence, asking the UK government to use national security laws to investigate the agreement. Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer has echoed these concerns, warning that the deal could undermine “free expression of opinion” and prevent the “accurate presentation of the news”.
The UAE is a petrostate that has the world’s largest oil expansion plans. The state-owned energy company, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), intends to increase its oil production by more than any other fossil fuel firm in the world, according to data from the Global Oil and Gas Exit List (Gogel). Adnoc said that Gogel’s data and assumptions were “incorrect and misleading” but has not provided its own figures.
RedBird-IMI has said that, under its proposal, The Telegraph and Spectator will be managed by RedBird Capital “alone” and IMI would be a “passive investor”.
RedBird Capital trades in a number of core investment sectors, including energy. The firm’s website states that it holds investments in at least six fossil fuel firms: Aethon United, CapturePoint, FireBird Energy, Four Corners Petroleum, Lambda Energy Resources, and Tally Energy Services.
All of these companies are based in the U.S., with a majority operating in Texas.
Aethon United was listed by Enverus Intelligence Research as one of the most prolific private oil and gas producers in the U.S. in 2023. It was reported in 2022 that the firm was considering a public listing that would value it at more than $10 billion.
CapturePoint specialises in carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS), a favoured technology of the fossil fuel industry that it claims will help to limit global warming. The RedBird website claims that CapturePoint is “building out a carbon capture network on the Gulf Coast and in the Midwest”.
There is limited evidence of the efficacy of CCUS at scale. DeSmog recently analysed 12 large-scale CCUS projects around the world and found countless missed carbon capture targets, as well as cost overruns, with taxpayers picking up the tab via billions of dollars in subsidies. Meanwhile, captured carbon is often merely used to extract more oil.
“If this deal goes through, it will pollute our press and the UK’s fight against climate breakdown,” Alexander Kirk, fossil fuels campaigner at Global Witness, told DeSmog.
RedBird Capital also holds an investment in Majority Strategies, a political strategy firm that claims to have worked for every official Republican presidential nominee since 2000. Majority Strategies received more than $27 million during the 2022 election cycle, including $9.2 million from the Republican Senate Leadership Fund.
Responding to media speculation about The Telegraph’s future ownership, the paper’s editor Chris Evans sent an internal memo earlier this week. Seen by Politico Playbook, the memo read: “You’ve been asking me how we can be confident that editorial independence would be protected. At the moment I know no more than you will have read.”
Polly Truscott, a foreign policy adviser at Amnesty International UK, told The Times that: “Any Emirati state ownership of the Telegraph may have serious implications for press freedom in the UK and should be carefully scrutinised by the government. In the UAE, anyone who dares to speak out against the Emirati authorities is likely to be at serious risk.”
The UAE ranks 145 out of 180 in the 2023 Press Freedom Index produced by Reporters Without Borders.
Other sources claim that the bidding process for The Telegraph and the Spectator is still ongoing and that no deal has been finalised. Paul Marshall, the co-owner of GB News, is also reportedly interested in buying the titles. DeSmog revealed in October that Marshall’s hedge fund has $2 billion in fossil fuel investments.
RedBird Capital and the Telegraph Media Group did not respond to our request for comment.
Climate Attacks
A new DeSmog analysis has found that eight in 10 opinion pieces from The Telegraph on environmental issues downplay the climate crisis.
Our analysis, for the six months ending 16 October, found that of the 171 articles covering environmental issues, 85 percent were identified as “anti-green” – attacking climate policy, downplaying climate science and ridiculing environmental groups.
Of the 1,930 opinion pieces published by the paper during this period, nearly one in five (17.6 percent) featured an attack on climate science, policy or environmental groups. Ten writers linked to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s leading climate science denial group, wrote a total of 144 opinion pieces for The Telegraph during the period.
The Telegraph’s print circulation at the end of 2019, when it last released the data, was over 300,000. It had an online audience of 13.5 million in September this year.
World leaders next week gather in Dubai, UAE, to negotiate how to reduce emissions and limit global warming. The COP28 summit is being led by Sultan Al Jaber, the chief executive of Adnoc, which is the world’s 11th largest oil and gas producer. Al Jaber has claimed that fossil fuels should “continue to play a role in the foreseeable future” – a statement labelled as “very dangerous” by former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres.
The UAE has also attempted to emphasise the importance of CCUS in capturing emissions. However, according to an analysis by Global Witness, based on Adnoc’s carbon capture plans, it would take 343 years for the firm to capture all the CO2 emissions it will produce in just the next six years. This week, the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition also revealed that at least 7,200 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended UN-led climate over the last 20 years.
Total trade between the UK and UAE exceeded £25 billion in the year ending Q2 2023, an increase of 47.3 percent compared to the year before. The Gulf state has also pledged to invest £10 billion in “priority” UK industries.
In the year following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the UK imported £2.5 billion in fossil fuels from the UAE. The average monthly value of fossil fuel imports from the UAE increased from £84.4 million in the year to February 2022, to £195 million the year after.
In total, UK fossil fuel imports from authoritarian petrostates surged to £19.3 billion in the year following the invasion – an increase of more than 60 percent.
Zarah Sultana says an independent review needs to be held after she said her party was institutionally Islamophobia
Keir Starmer, leader of the UK Labour party sucking up to the rich and powerful at World Economic Forum, Davos.
A Coventry Labour MP has accused her own party of being institutionally Islamophobic. Zarah Sultana made the claim in an interview after the majority of her Labour colleagues voted against a ceasefire in Gaza in the House of Commons.
The Coventry South MP gave an impassioned speech during the debate and voted for a Scottish National Party amendment, which called for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire”. But this was not carried, despite more than 50 Labour MPs backing it – and Sir Keir Starmer ordered his party MPs not to support it amid concerns it would allow Hamas to regroup while halting Israel’s offensive.
Speaking to Novara Media, the Coventry South representative demanded a review into Islamophobia in her party. It was during a conversion about the Forde report, which found serious discrimination problems within the Labour party.
This included evidence incidents of racism, sexism, antisemitism and islamophobia. She said “nothing serious has been done about these issues”.
Asked about Islamophobia in the party, she told Novara Media: “The Labour Party has a problem and I would go as far as saying it is institutionally racist because this isn’t just my individual experience or the experience of members. It crosses through to the briefings that come out, the kind of language that is used, the policies that we’re willing to say are fine and acceptable.”
“Instead of tackling this injustice, the Chancellor chooses to balance the books on the backs of ordinary people rather than taxing people like us who can afford it.”
Raise taxes on big polluters and the super-rich to tackle the climate crisis, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has been told by a new coalition of leading charities and campaigners.
Ahead of the Autumn Statement on Wednesday, 19 organisations have written an open letter to the Chancellor calling for a fairer tax system to address ‘rampant’ inequality and to redirect wealth to fund climate action.
There is ‘no lack of money’ to tackle the cost of living and climate crisis, only a government that requires ‘common sense’ to make those responsible for the most carbon emissions pay more, the coalition has argued.
Greenpeace, Christian Aid, Patriotic Millionaires, Global Justice Now, Common Wealth and Friends of the Earth are among the 19 signatures which have highlighted that an estimated £22 billion could be raised by a 1-2% wealth tax on assets over £10 million.
And it seems the public agree, as a recent poll by Survation showed 82% of people in Great Britain supported a wealth tax on the richest 1% to fund climate change action.
It comes as The Guardian’s latest investigation has revealed how the ‘polluter elite’ richest 1% account for more carbon emissions that a whopping 66% of the poorest, highlighting extreme inequality when it comes to responsibility for climate damage.
Carbon emissions from the luxurious lifestyles of the super-rich mean only 12 of the richest people produce more emissions than two million homes a year, while Oxfam has said a 60% tax on the incomes of the wealthiest 1% would cut the equivalent of the 2019 carbon emission of the UK.
An injured child is brought to al-Shifa Hospital after Israeli attacks in Gaza City, Gaza on October 21, 2023. (Photo: Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The protection of newborns, patients, medical staff, and all civilians must override all other concerns,” said Martin Griffiths, the United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator.
The head of the United Nations’ emergency relief operations said Wednesday that he was “appalled” by news of the Israeli military’s raid of Gaza’s largest hospital, where hundreds of patients and healthcare workers and thousands of displaced people are sheltering.
“The protection of newborns, patients, medical staff, and all civilians must override all other concerns,” Martin Griffiths, the U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, wrote on social media. “Hospitals are not battlegrounds.”
Israeli forces’ raid of al-Shifa Hospital early Wednesday came days after they encircled the facility and began bombarding it, accusing Hamas of using the hospital and tunnels beneath it for military operations.
The U.S. backed Israel’s assertion on Tuesday, with National Security Council spokesman John Kirby telling reporters that “we have information that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad used some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them, to conceal and support their military operations and to hold hostages.”
Asked to provide specific evidence, Kirby cited “a variety of intelligence sources” but declined to publicize “a whole lot of granular detail on that.”
Hospitals are protected from military attack under international law and can only lose their protected status if they are shown to have been used for “an act harmful to the enemy.” Human Rights Watch argued in a report released ahead of Wednesday’s raid that the Israeli government has not provided sufficient evidence to justify its attacks on al-Shifa and other northern Gaza hospitals, most of which have ceased functioning due to a lack of fuel and other supplies.
An emergency room employee at al-Shifa toldAl Jazeera that during their raid, Israeli soldiers “detained and brutally assaulted some of the men who were taking refuge at the hospital.”
“Israeli forces took the detained men naked and blindfolded,” the worker added. “[They] did not bring any aid or supplies, they only brought terror and death.”
Here’s a recorded conversation between a doctor working inside al-Shifa Hospital and Israeli forces just before Gaza’s largest medical complex was raided. pic.twitter.com/O0Il2VjQaX
On Tuesday, according to Gaza officials, around 170 bodies were buried in a mass grave in the courtyard of al-Shifa, as there was no other way to safely bury them outside the hospital compound because of Israeli attacks and firefights with Hamas. A surgeon at the hospital toldReuters that, due to lack of refrigeration, the bodies “were generating an unbearable stench and posing a risk of infection.”
“The Health Ministry said 40 patients, including three babies, have died since Shifa’s emergency generator ran out of fuel Saturday,” The Associated Pressreported Wednesday. “Another 36 babies are at risk of dying because there is no power for incubators, according to the ministry.”
Israel’s bombing campaign, ground invasion, and siege have killed more than 11,000 people across the Gaza Strip, but the recent attacks on the enclave’s hospitals have made it impossible for Gaza health officials to reach the facilities to count the dead and wounded. Thousands more are believed to have been killed since the death toll was updated last week.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said early Wednesday that “we’ve lost touch again with health personnel” at al-Shifa amid Israel’s raid.
“We’re extremely worried for their and their patients’ safety,” he added.
Facing growing accusations of war crimes, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) called its raid on al-Shifa a “precise and targeted operation against Hamas.” In the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel last month, the IDF has claimed repeatedly that it is targeting militants even as it has decimated Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, bombing homes, medical facilities, schools, bakeries, and the strip’s largest refugee camp.
A confidential memo from the Dutch Embassy in Tel Aviv states that Israel is “deliberately causing massive destruction to the infrastructure and civilian centers” of Gaza in an effort to “showcase credible military force” to “Iran and its proxies,” according toPolitico.
Israel’s strategy, the memo states, violates “international treaties and laws of war.”
