Add an L to Dido

 

"Baroness Harding of Winscombe has vowed to end England’s reliance on foreign doctors and nurses if she becomes the next head of the NHS." (The Times) . I have had two major operations in recent years and three hospital stays. The first to drain blood from my brain. The second to install a new heart valve. Then after a stroke, many weeks in hospital. The first surgeon was Nigerian, the second surgeon was Egyptian and the nursing staff were from the UK, many EU countries and beyond. I have become a lifelong friend of a wonderful nurse from the Philippines. Thanks to all of them I'm still alive and well enough to shout out my anger. Baroness Dido Hardly Human can go f..k herself with her own name with added "L"

Keeping track of galloping corruption

 

 

 

“The NHS is about as safe with them as a pet hamster would be with a hungry python” EX-PM John Major

What is the connection between these two photos? The first one was taken yesterday at Ascot where 12,000 unmasked guests, looking like a scene from “My Fair Lady”, met for the five day races. Meanwhile funerals are restricted to thirty attendees.

The second photo is of former jockey, and Jockey Club board member, Baroness Dido Harding, who is responsible for several major horse-racing events including the well-attended Cheltenham Festival in March and Ascot today.

She has just applied for the job of Chief Executive of NHS England. She was appointed by Health Secretary Matt Hancock to head Test and Trace Health, ostensibly established to track and help prevent the spread of Covid-19. In August 2020 Harding was appointed interim chief executive of the National Institute for Health Protection, later renamed the UK Health Security Agency.

The Baroness is a Tory Peer and married to Tory MP, John Penrose who has, wait for it, government responsibilities for anti-corruption.

Back on the race track, what are the odds on her husband instituting an enquiry into the £27 billion test and trace / PPE monies not properaly accounted for? And anyone want to lay odds on how much longer we will put up with this galloping corruption? Isn't it time for a steward's Enquiry?

State corruption on a grand scale

 

 

“The coronavirus pandemic has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale that is harmful to public health,” The British Medical Journal

 

Richard Burgon MP tweeted this today - “Serco says it expects profits to be up by millions more than expected – to £200 MILLION. Serco says it’s due to growing demand for Test and Trace. These private companies are treating this pandemic as a get-rich-quick scheme. They should all be booted out of Test and Trace.”

We’re still waiting for the BBC to ask what happened to the £37 billion handed out in test and trace and PPE contracts.

I have written about this many times and here’s what I wrote eight months ago about Serco’s profiteering.

Not so much booted out, but criminally prosecuted

G7 - A Tale of Two Duchies

 

As Royal Navy Culdrose sees helicopters unloaded from giant transporters, cruise ships anchor off Falmouth to house the 5,000 police and as Boris Johnson flies in from his 300 mile journey from distant London, locals have the chance to contemplate the £70 million cost for all this.

 

This is a truncated version of Tanya Gold’s excellent, “The Prostitution of Cornwall”

 

 

"The Carbis Bay Hotel at St Ives, which is hosting the G7 summit this week, contains a parade of ugly beachside villas that rent for thousands a week They exists for people who travel here with their own fantasies, which rarely involve Cornish reality.

 

There was Daphne Du Maurier and Manderley now it’s Boris Johnson, the G7 and Carbis Bay

 

It’s an old story: rich and poor competing for the same space.

 

There is only one road into Carbis Bay and on it a sign: “St Ives Foodbank Welcomes You”.

 

Living costs are high, but wages are low; work is often seasonal, zero hours and without benefits. If the average Cornish salary is less than the national average, housing costs are explosive. The average house now costs eight times the average salary: and prices are still rising. You buy a house, rent it out (but not to locals, that is unprofitable), and either enjoy the income or sell it on. The old cottages by the sea are rentals or second homes.

 

It is normal to be evicted for the summer: people camp in fields or squat in campervans. One third of children under five live in insecure and privately rented accommodation, which is some of the worst maintained in Britain. 36% of children in St Ives live in poverty. That isn’t on the postcards.

 

Cornish people are up the hill on the Penbeagle Estate, a pale and uniform collection of houses, from which they contemplate their own town from a distance. 

 

Carbis Bay Hotel has destroyed a portion of woodland to build meeting rooms for the summit, despite planning permission being denied for the same site in 2018, and yet still calling itself an “Eco hotel”.

 

The “global elite”, have had footpaths closed and taken hotel rooms from vulnerable homeless people. Cornwall is two duchies now, and the G7 is happening in one of them.

 

A resident at the Treneere estate in Penzance says the housing shortage is so acute adult children are living in parents’ garden sheds. People are inhabiting cottages with water running down the walls; or they are evicted so the home can be an Airbnb. “We might as well go back to days of the poorhouse. It feels like that. What about lovely, ordinary people?” They have been obscured, I think, by lovely, extraordinary landscape, and the desire of others to possess it. "

Get Beckett

 

BBC Newsnight wore their knuckle dusters last night to get Howard Beckett, the leading left-wing candidate for General Secretary of the UNITE union. We were told that “Keir Starmer has had an epic battle to bring different factions of the Labour Party together” and "launch a new era with a leader pledged to restore unity.”

Newsnight went on to tell their viewers that, “We’ve seen emails sent to one of the top candidates to take over the UNITE union showing the depth of planning to challenge established Labour figures.” 

 

Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Howard Beckett put up a strong defence in the face of this assault, but the programme's sympathies for them were little more than allowing air time for BBC 'balance'. 

First up on camera was Tom ‘let’s bomb Syria’ Watson whose contribution to unity was summed up in this comment on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership: “The Stalinist cabal has a lot of responsibility for creating internal political tensions.” Newsnight billed him as former deputy leader of the Labour Party, but failed to mention that he is now an adviser to Paddy Power, Betfair and SkyBet on a salary in the region of £100,000. He told Newsnight that, “While UNITE carries on with its internal politics and plays these hard left games, that plays very badly with mainstream voters on the doorstep … I have no doubt that Keir Starmer can face these people down.”

Next up was Margaret Hodge whose contribution to party unity can be found in her comment to Jeremy Corbyn, “You are a fucking antisemite and racist.” She told Newsnight that, “It is outrageous that at a time when all our focus should have been on defeating the Conservative government, UNITE was having discussions on how to undermine sitting MPs and get rid of the Labour Party General Secretary, (Iain McNicol).”

After their efforts at “unity” which ensured the return of a Tory government, they have all been well rewarded. Watson with his lucrative betting job, McNicol with his ‘elevation’ to the House of Lords and Margaret Beckett as new Chair of the Labour Party NEC.