“I don’t need to consult a folder to tell you what I believe in”

Thurrock's Tim Aker MEP takes Labour's Westminster Candidate and former Ed Miliband aide, Polly Billington, to task on the NHS during a debate at a local college in Thurrock.



“I don’t need to consult a folder to tell you what I believe in” and an attack on Labour's PFI record, I like the cut of Tim Aker's jib. Whilst Polly Billington seems to be just another Labour machine politician who would rather make a fool of herself looking up what the current party line is rather than risk saying something off-message.

Hidden away in the BBC's newspaper review

Hidden away in the BBC's newspaper review here are two interesting items that won't be headline news on the BBC itself.

First 

'Firms make a "killing" from Private Finance Initiatives awarded under Labour, says the Independent. Companies given contracts to build and maintain schools for 25 years are doubling their money by selling them on, it says.'  

This is 'no shit, Sherlock' territory but if this could be laid at the door of the Conservative lead government then this would be headline news on the BBC where the bile would be flowing over 'privatisation'. However as it relates to Labour PFI contracts, you can expect the story to receive very little attention.

The second story is on similar lines 

'... the i, reports that contractors have made £300m in profits, with contracts for NHS hospitals also being sold off. It quotes former Labour minister Margaret Hodge admitting: "We got it wrong".' 

Now usually if Margaret Hodge has something to say, then the BBC are eager to give her whatever platform she needs. But that's when she's attacking the Conservative lead Coalition government, as this is a Labour mea culpa, expect no such platform to be given. 

The BBC where the subtitle is 'vote Labour'.

Thursday morning catch-up

More Firefox tabs that I need to clear up.

1) The Telegraph report that

'Plastic bags may not be as bad for the environment as previously assumed, and may in fact be better than their “eco friendly” alternatives, government research suggests.'

This would be interesting enough but what is fascinating is that

'The report was commissioned in 2005 and due to be published in 2007, but has still not been released. '

Why has this report not been published? It is almost as though the last Labour government were more concerned with positioning than the truth.


2) The Spectator reported that the rather spectacularly nasty Damian McBride 'has a new job – head of media at the Catholic overseas aid charity CAFOD. He will be doubtless be brilliantly effective at briefing against its enemies (in CAFOD's case, hunger and the devil).'
Actually with Damian McBride's track record it is Oxfam and Christian Aid that have the most to fear.


3) Climate Depot report that according to Time Magazine 'Greens move on from 'climate change' to organic food movement'. It is almost as though the watermelons (green on the outside red on the inside) just want control and the destruction of the West's standard of living and they don't care which cause they have to espouse in order to achieve their goals.


4) Norman Tebbit's headline 'Where is Cameron leading us? To a Big Society gay wedding in Westminster Abbey? ' struck me as typical of the man; controversial, very un-PC but with more than a germ of truth. Read the whole article and note that Norman Tebbit must be the most polite of bloggers, he really gets into a conversation with the people who comment on his blog.


5) The Indian Economic Times informs us that

'Gold demand is set to stay high this year as Indian and Chinese appetite for the metal sharpens, but fresh buying in developed markets of jewellery in particular will depend on economic outlook , the World Gold Council said. '

Indeed gold is moving back up this week, although that could be due to the instability in the Middle East and Arab North Africa.


6) David Horowitz manages to get a US student to admit her support for a genocidal terrorist organisation, Hamas, that is illegal in the USA; has any action been taken against this student? What a lovely person for saying yes to supporting Hamas and Hezb'allah even after David Horowitz explains what they want to do with all Jews. This student's attitude is not unusual in the USA and indeed the UK which is why the time for Jews to flee is not far off.



7) Apparently I may be a Tory chihuahau - ChIHUAHuas are Conservatives In their Heads, Ukip At Heart


8) The Mail reported the shock horror story that London's Labour lead Camden Council was indulging in a piece of petty policy showboating:

'Samantha Cameron was last night at the centre of a row over the closure of a flagship symbol of her husband’s ‘Big Society’ policy.

The axing of a community centre championed by Mrs Cameron has sparked an exchange of insults between Conservative Chairman Sayeeda Warsi and the Labour council leader who took the decision.

Ms Warsi claims Nasim Ali has pocketed almost £100,000 in expenses, allowances and perks since 2007 – money she says could have been used to help keep the centre open.

Mrs Cameron was filmed in the run-up to last year’s General Election serving curry at the Surma Centre in Camden, North London, praising it as a ‘perfect example’ of the Big Society in action.

But Mr Ali, Camden’s Labour leader, is now stopping the centre’s annual £125,000 funding, blaming a £100 million black hole left in the council’s finances by Chancellor George Osborne’s cutbacks.

Conservative Chairman Sayeeda Warsi says £100,000 claimed by Camden Council leader Nasim Ali in expenses and perks could have been used to help keep the centre open

Mr Ali was quoted by journalist Tom Foot, the great-nephew of former Labour leader Michael Foot, as telling members of the centre: ‘Samantha Cameron came and cooked here for votes. Where is she now? If you want to lobby, lobby Sam Cam.’'

9) The Telegraph reported on part of the legacy of Gordon Brown and his right-hand man Ed 'second choice' Balls:

'Young people starting work this year will pay taxes for the Government’s Private Finance Initiative until they are nearly 70, an investigation by The Daily Telegraph has found.'

The Labour party's use of PFI was a scandal and one that a decent investigative media would have crucified them for. As it was only Private Eye really took Labour to task over PFI; shame on the rest of them.


10) Steven Goddard at Real Science reports something that the Met Office and the BBC will not tell you: 'Global Temperatures Have Dropped 0.5C In The Last 12 Months'


More later...

The "BRIBO Laptop" - "This Bribo laptop is an aspiration, not a pledge. We aspire to send it to you, but if you win it, you may not receive it."

I see that brillo211 (Andrew Neill?) has a sense of humour... They are advertising for sale of Ebay UK 27,000 BRIBO laptops, described thus:

"Here we have a spanking new, gleaming Bribo laptop, complete with instruction sheet showing you where to place your X when the time comes.

The government has declared that it will soon issue 270,000 of these Bribos to their core voters so that they may keep up with their children's school progress on the internet, rather than get up off their sofas and walk down to the parent-teacher meetings and ask. In order to exchange them for tax-free CASH, (to allow access to the things that REALLY matter), the inevitable result will be thousands of Bribos listed on eBay shortly after issue, so I am taking this opportunity to list mine now, before the rush.

Bribo is the latest offering in the "class war" series and will be issued exclusively to "low income" families, (i.e. not much money BEFORE benefits are freely distributed to you), so here is a great opportunity for middle-class, rich buyers, (i.e.anyone with initiative or a bit of cash after having paid swingeing tax and NI and not central within Labour's core vote buyers), to get one as well. Yes, yes, we know that you've already paid for these Bribos out of your hard-earned, heavily-taxed income, but that's not the point - after all, who doesn't want the warm glow of satisfaction that comes from paying for a Bribo, ensuring that the money gets to where it's needed - into the pockets of "low income" families, just in time for the general election.

With the Bribo's browser set to the Labour party home page, this machine is ready to go from the box. Full filters and software included to protect the user from harmful on-line experiences, including landing on any page that we consider to be contrary to Labour party targets and anything that doesn't toe the party line. Any deviation of use from the true purpose of the Bribo will be met with an "off-message".

If you've been happy to let the state control your life for the last twelve years and currently have trouble living without nannying, this is the machine for you.

This whole listing is costing us £300 million, (yes, a great value £1111 per Bribo laptop[*], and about £288 million more than was spent nationally on salt for roads this year but, hey, what's the priority here - getting ever-fewer people to work or getting these Bribos to the people who really matter?), but this listing starts at 99p, no reserve start - possible only because we managed to keep it "off book" through the machinations of a very expensive, very badly negotiated PFI deal.

IMPORTANT NOTE - Terms of this auction:

1) In addition to winner paying final price and postage, a promise has to be made in writing that the winner, (and family), will use their postal vote for Labour at the forthcoming general election. Failure to adhere to this condition will render the listing null and void. (Please refer to the included instruction sheet for guidance on how to comply.)

2) This Bribo laptop is an aspiration, not a pledge. We aspire to send it to you, but if you win it, you may not receive it. Stocks are limited and there's currently a rush to get them to as many "low income" families as possible before the next election is announced. In the case that we are unable to adhere to this aspiration, any moneys that you have paid will not be returned, they will be hosed over poor families or bankers.

3) The first edition Bribo is initially available ONLY to addresses in marginal Labour constituencies where the election result is looking a bit dodgy. If you don't live in such a constituency, then you'll have to wait for the toughened, hard-shell, 2nd version which would be issued to more "low income" families when it appears that things really are getting bad. And we'll just keep dishing out Bribos further and further up the food chain until we see the swing that we deserve.

4) By buying the Bribo, you agree to pay the government an extra 50p a month on your phone bill, ostensibly to allow private telecoms companies to upgrade their infrastructure without recourse to their shareholders and dreadful bankers, but really it's another unavoidable stealth tax, to transfer more money from your pocket to ours.

5) We reserve the right to change policy at any time, especially if polls show us to be pulling well ahead before the next election.

If you're not happy with these terms, please do not bid.

Postage terms:

1) The winning bidder is liable to pay ALL taxes and stealth taxes applicable to their residency - at least 50p in the £, although cash-back on taxes will be made available to "low income" families in the form of a non-means-tested benefit cheque.

2) Where our aspiration can be realised, the Bribo will be despatched in a brown envelope.


For more information on the Bribo, please go to:

http://dailyreferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/first-look-labours-new-free-laptop.html

[*] = If you're a taxpayer who is more concerned about value for money than we are, you cannot bid on this item - it's not for you. However ... the same model under a different branding can be bought at PC World for just £179. The price quoted to us by the preferred supplier was the "John Lewis list" price, which we are more used to dealing with and which we always use as the benchmark when we negotiate such complex PFI deals."

Satire of the highest order... I think from Steve Green of Daily Referendum.

Gordon Brown's Enron Accounting

The often marvellous Alex Masterley has a fascinating piece about the Treasury's Enron style accounting:

"The Treasury has today decided that many private finance initiative projects will remain off the government’s balance sheet. It is not hard to see why. Public sector capital spending is budgeted to fall from £44bn ($68bn) this year to a £22bn a year in 2013-14. The billions of pounds of PFIs and PPPs that are in the pipeline would not be able to go ahead if they had to be included in those numbers.

Despite previous promises to move towards international financial reporting standards, the Treasury has now issued guidance to Whitehall departments indicating that, while PFI projects count on departmental accounts, a different accounting standard will apply for the Treasury’s budgeting purposes.

Yes, you read that right. The projects count on the balance sheet of individual departments, but when it coumes to drawing up the balance sheets for the whole government, they disappear. You could not make it up, but apparently they do.

About 60% by value of PFI projects lie off balance sheet, lie being the operative statement. Let us not forget that in many recent PFI projects the government has had to underwrite the project equity as well as contract as the end user. So if the contracting Department has successfully removed the risk in the contract it must have shifted the risk to the project (prop. HM Government). On the other hand, if the risk is not transferred and remains with the Department and is thus on the Department’s balance sheet (as per the Department’s accounts), it should consolidate onto the government’s books.

“Not so”, say the Treasury, “they don't because .... err .... because they don’t”.

Ken Lay would have been proud."

How's your "moral compass" Gordon?

'a cynical distortion of public finance'

Those were Gordon Brown's words when he described the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) during the last years of the last Conservative government. For an excellent analysis of the way that Gordon Brown has used the PFI as a way of spending money and making future commitments whilst hiding the figures from the public you MUST read Fraser Nelson and Peter Hoskin's piece in the current issue of The Spectator. A shocking story and one that is not as well known as it should be. Although I knew many of the facts I was surprised to learn that Gordon Brown has even found a way to wriggle out of the new EU disclosure rules that are due to come into place next April. Read it and get angry, it's our financial future Gordon Brown has destroyed.

The problem with large numbers

A large number, possibly a majority, of people in this country are mathematically challenged, they don't really understand large numbers. A million, a billion, a trillion; they are all just big scary numbers. In my second plug for an old Etonian who is not in David Cameron's shadow cabinet, do take a read of Devil's Kitchen and his reporting of a Guardian Comment is Free comment on government spending. Here's a short extract:

"The NHS IT programme is a complete, utter fucking mess. It doesn't work and it never will work. It will eventually be scrapped, and if Liebour were still in power it would promptly be replaced by something even more useless and expensive.

It will end up costing the taxpayer twenty billion pounds. Do you understand what twenty billion pounds are? Let me help you:

On the day that Queen Victoria died, I put half a million pounds in used fivers in a suitcase, took it out into the woods, and burnt it in a bonfire. There wasn't any good reason for doing this—in much the same way as there isn't any good reason for much of Liebour's 'public spending'—but I did it anyway.

Then I did the same thing the next day. And the next. And the next. Every day of every week of every month of every year since the day that Queen Victoria died I have been burning half a million pounds in used fivers in a suitcase in a bonfire in the woods.

And I'm still not at twenty billion. I've still got nearly two years to go."

The amount of money this Labour government have wasted is hard to comprehend but is insignificant when compared to the money they have committed the country to spend on PFI scams.

NHS Privatisation

I read this article in The Times about how "Ministers have begun a review of London NHS property in a move that could lead to the sale of some or all of the capital’s biggest hospitals to raise billions of pounds for new projects." and I couldn't help imagine how the BBC and the British Press would have reacted had this been a Conservative government "selling off the family silver". The double standards of the British media disgust me and whilst they are less awe-struck by Gordon Brown than they were by Blair (up until the Iraq war), they are still prone to go gently on the Labour government.


"The Times has learnt that the London strategic health authority, which includes the 31 primary healthcare trusts in the city, has hired investment bankers to advise it on the options. The NHS has one of the largest property estates in Europe, valued at more than £23 billion. In London the huge and ageing property portfolio comprises nearly 100 hospitals and hundreds of smaller sites, which together cost £700 million a year to maintain. The review follows Gordon Brown’s plan to reap billions from selling off a swath of the Government’s £337 billion of assets."


So here we go with more sale and leaseback deals, raising quick money here and now whilst committing future governments to crippling repayments. This Labour government really are ensuring that this country is well and truly screwed for the future.

A true scandal

The The Guardian have a fantastic report about the ongoing scandal that is the Labour Governments' PFI scheme and the new tax avoidance aspects. The article starts "Billions of pounds of private finance initiative projects approved by Gordon Brown, including the refurbished Treasury headquarters in Whitehall and the new Home Office, have been moved offshore by their City owners to avoid paying tax on their profits."

This section should also be read "Prem Sikka, professor of accounting at Essex University, said yesterday that the latest revelations should be the subject of an inquiry at Westminster. "The disclosures of the way these contracts are being handled ought to be investigated by the Commons Treasury committee. The government should put clauses into PFI contracts preventing them being transferred offshore for a set period. "The only reason to move to the Channel Islands is to avoid taxes or to take advantage of less transparent auditing. The taxpayer is losing out. They are having to pay rent for these projects, but the tax base is declining.""

Do read the whole article.

No, really! Who would have thought it...

Apparently "NAO says public being 'taken for a ride' by PFIs". The Telegraph reports that "The discrepancies in the amounts paid for the simplest changes to public finance initiative (PFI) projects such as providing new locks or keys have been laid bare in a report.

The National Audit Office, the Whitehall spending watchdog, found that the cost of installing a new electrical socket ranged from £30.81 to £302.30.

A new lock cost anything from £15.09 to £486.54, while the price of a key ran from £4.26 to £47.48.

While one PFI contractor was prepared to put up a new noticeboard for free, another charged £149.71.

In all, Government departments and other public bodies spent more than £180 million on changes to operational PFI projects in 2006."


The PFI Companies are experienced and money minded negotiators, the "officials" who are told to negotiate with them don't stand a chance. PFI was a way of getting public spending up without it showing on the Government's books and so breaking Gordon Brown's golden rule. It is a con trick and we will be paying for it all long after Gordon Brown has lost his job and has retired to Scotland to spend more time with his pension.

Debt matters

I see that the true level of problem DEBT is coming to the fore. The Telegraph reports that "The pound has slumped to its lowest level in 20 months, after a "shocking" raft of figures revealed how deeply reliant the UK has become on debt."

Not a shock to anyone who has been reading this blog or similar.


"Britain's current account has recorded its worst deficit since the late 1980s, making Britain's national balance sheet worse than the United States' for the first time since Nigel Lawson was Chancellor of the Exchequer."

And going to get much worse.


"Figures published by the Office for National Statistics caused a major sell-off of the pound, as experts warned that the UK currency would have to fall in value to bring the current account back into line. Sterling dropped to 98.9 on the Bank of England's comprehensive trade-weighted index, which measures it against a basket of other currencies. This is the lowest level since April 2006."

What do you think the bottoming out value of the £ will be? $1.75, $1.50, $1.25, $1.00? Against the Euro? €1.50, €1.25, €1.00, €0.75?

"The pound's weakness followed ONS figures showing:

• The current account deficit almost doubled in the third quarter to £20bn. As well as being the biggest deficit ever in cash terms, at 5.7pc of gross domestic product it is now comparatively even bigger than the deficit in the US, and equals the worst-ever shortfalls in the past half-century, recorded in the 1980s."

Why aren't the BBC publicising this?


"• The domestic saving ratio, which measures how much of their incomes people are setting aside for the future, excluding pension contributions, remained deep in negative territory. At minus 1pc, it means families are borrowing in order to fund their everyday lifestyles - a highly unusual situation replicated in the late 1980s, before the last property crash."

I wonder why? Maybe the example of the current government's manic borrowing, much of it hidden via PFI schemes.


"• The amount families and businesses are having to set aside for mortgage and debt payments hit the highest level since the early 1990s, in the latest sign that the record mountain of UK lending is causing serious pain. The household debt service burden rose to 13.6pc of income - the highest level since 1991, while the equivalent measure for non-financial businesses hit 28.8pc of their profits - the highest since 1992."

A "mountain of debt", absolutely the case and a bloody big mountain.


"• The Government's finances dipped even deeper into the red, as the Chancellor suffered a record shortfall on his budget in November. The ONS said public-sector net borrowing was £11.2bn - the biggest since comparable records began in 1993. It brings the total lending so far this financial year to £36.2bn, and raising the likelihood that Chancellor Alistair Darling will overshoot his £38bn forecast this year."

This is all without the PFI debt, with that the situation would look a whole lot scarier. This Labour government have mortgaged the whole country and rescuing the situation may not even be possible - we may be totally screwed.


"Diana Choyleva, director at Lombard Street Research, said the drop in the currency's value indicated investor's collapse in confidence in sterling.

"I have been in this business for ten years and this is the most uncertain I've felt about the prospects for the UK economy. Things could get much worse.""

Much worse Diana, very much worse.