A compendium of Tory corruption

Some people don't seem to grasp the sheer scale of Tory corruption, so here are details of just a fraction of what we already know about (with sources):

🔵 Tory MP Owen Paterson was caught red-handed breaking the ministerial code of conduct by lobbying for his employers within government. Randox were paying Paterson £100,000 per year, he sat in on ministerial meetings about the company, and they ended up getting £600 million in Covid contracts. 

🔵 A cross-party committee of MPs found that Paterson had brazenly defied the rules, and ordered him to serve a 30 day suspension from parliament. Instead of accepting the findings of the Paterson investigation Boris Johnson ordered Tory MPs to vote through controversial legislation designed to tear down the parliamentary standards authority, and let Paterson off scot free!

🔵 Tory leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg was one of the leading advocates of using the Owen Paterson scandal as an excuse to demolish the parliamentary standards authority. In 2018 Rees-Mogg used his company Saliston to lend himself almost £6 million at significantly below the market rate of interest, and he didn't even bother to declare these loans on the register of MPs interests (no wonder he was so keen to tear down the parliamentary standards authority!).

🔵 Boris Johnson has been caught up in multiple scandals himself, dating back to before he even became Prime Minister. There was the £126,000 in public cash paid to his mistress Jennifer Arcuri without any declaration of their relationship as one of Johnson's registered interests; the dodgy loan he received to decorate his Downing Street flat; his false declaration of a luxury holiday in Mustique; and his recent holiday in the luxury Spanish villa owned by a tax-dodging company operated by former Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, who Johnson gifted a lifetime peerage in the unelected House of Lords after he lost his parliamentary seat in the 2019 General Election. 

🔵 On the subject of the House of Lords, all sixteen of the Tory Party's former treasurers over the last seven years have been handed unelected lifetime peerages in the House of Lords, after having donated over £3 million each to the Tory operation! 

🔵 Tory politicians have been handing out untendered PPE contracts like sweeties, to such an extent that former Health Secretary Matt Hancock's former pub landlord, and his dad's mate, and his sister even got lucrative £multi-million contracts. Hancock 'accidentally' failed to include his 20% stake in his sister's PPE contract winning company on the register of MPs interests! 

🔵 The Tory government was found to have broken the law in handing a £560,000 coronavirus contract to former colleagues of Tory minister Michael Gove and Boris Johnson's ex-adviser Dominic Cummings.

🔵 Another of the major winners of this no-tender PPE bonanza was Meller Designs, which was a fashion designer until they bagged £160 million worth of PPE contracts, boosting their annual profits from £144k to £13 million. The owner is a regular Tory Party donor called David Meller, who personally lobbied the unelected Tory minister James Bethell for PPE contracts. 

🔵 P14 Medical was turned from a failing company into an absolute cash cow via a whopping £276 million in untendered PPE contracts. The owner Steve Dechan, a Tory party councillor in Stroud, used his profits from the Tory PPE bonanza to buy himself a luxurious £1.5 million country house in the Cotswolds. 

🔵 A company called Clipper Logistics got in on the untendered PPE bonanza with a £1.3 million contract. No surprise that the owner of the company is a major Tory Party donor called Steve Parkin. 

🔵 Another major Tory donor called Haraldur Agustsson bagged over £100 million worth of untendered PPE contracts across his companies Globus Shetland and Alpha Solway. 

🔵 After raking in over £1 billion in untendered coronavirus contracts, Tory-linked firms repaid the favour by kicking back a small percentage of their gains via £615,000 in donations to the Tory party!

The Tory minister who oversaw so many of the astounding no-tender PPE contracts was the unelected House of Lords stooge James Bethell who failed to declare 27 meetings with private health companies that went on to rake in over £1 billion in untendered covid contracts and then made up loads of nonsensical and contradictory excuses as to why he couldn't hand over his phone after he was caught red-handed using private WhatsApp chats to conduct government business.

🔵 The Tory government has pumped an astonishing £37 billion into the privatised shambles that is their Test and Trace operation, which has become the largest publicly funded corporate feeding frenzy in British medical history. It's been hit by ballooning costs, missed targets, 600 million lost covid tests, and scandalously high consultancy fees. The Public Accounts Committee have slammed it as an unimaginable waste of money that's had "no clear impact". No worries for Dido Harding who has presided over this absolute shambles, because she's married to the government's "anti-corruption tsar", Tory MP John Penrose!

🔵 The corporate outsourcing giant Serco have been lavished with literally hundreds of millions of pounds worth of Test and Trace contracts. Their CEO is Rupert Soames, brother of former Tory MP Nicholas, and grandson of Winston Churchill!

🔵 Former Tory DWP minister Iain Duncan Smith got in on the private medical pilfering, chairing a government taskforce that produced a report advising the government to give the green light to non-alcoholic hand gel, while earning a £25,000 per year salary from Britain's largest producer of non-alcoholic hand gel (a salary he forgot to declare as an interest in the report). 

🔵 More than a quarter of Tory MPs use the practice of second-jobbing in order to boost their salary of £82,000 (plus lavish expenses).

🔵 In 2015 the Tory government scrapped the requirement that MPs who take second jobs register their employment contracts with parliamentary authorities, which means that the employment details of every single one of the second-jobbing MPs across parliament are secret.

🔵 Perhaps the most egregious Tory moonlighting MP is Ben Bradley who claims salaries for 60 hours per week on top of his MPs duties. The average MP works 69 hours a week, so if Bradley's not shirking his responsibilities as an MP, we're expected to believe that he's putting in 129 hours a week at work, leaving him less than five and a half hours per day for sleeping, eating, travel, leisure, shopping, personal hygiene, and family life. All combined! 

🔵 Tory MP Mark Pawsey has a moonlighting £30,000 per year second job as chairman of the Foodservice Packaging Association. He leads Westminster’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Packaging Manufacturing Industry (no conflict of interests there eh?), and he's repeatedly spoken during parliamentary debates to criticise regulation of the food packaging industry, and to decry efforts to make retailers and manufacturers contribute more to the cost of recycling their plastic waste.

🔵 Tory MP Alun Cairns was hired on a lucrative £15,000 salary (more than £200 per hour) by a company that was part of a consortium that was awarded a £10 million coronavirus contract the following month.

🔵 More than 50 former Tory ministers have taken up private sector jobs in sectors they covered during their time as government ministers, many of them are still in parliament as MPs, or in the vast unelected crony club that is the House of Lords.

🔵 Tory Minister Nadhim Zahawi banked £1.3million from oil company Gulf Keystone Petroleum while working as an MP, but kept his second job earnings secret via a parliamentary loophole that allowed him to avoid declaring the payments by diverting them through a consultancy company he established with his wife.

🔵 At least 90 Tory MPs also boost their incomes by over £10,000 per year as private landlords, and many of these exploitative landlord MPs have repeatedly voted against proposals to regulate the private rental sector, and 72 of these landlord-MPs voted down legislation to require landlords to make private rented accommodation "fit for human habitation".

🔵 34 Tory MPs have accepted political donations from firms linked to the Russian oligarch Viktor Fedotov, whose dodgy dealings were revealed in the Pandora Papers. Not a single one of these donations has been returned. 

🔵 The Pandora Papers also revealed that the unelected Tory lord Paul Deighton, a former government minister, had failed to declare a load of his secret offshore investments.

🔵 Former Attorney General Geoffrey Cox has been raking in literally £millions for legal consultancy work, which included representing the British Virgin Islands tax haven, while arguing against closing tax loopholes in parliament! 

🔵 In 2004 Cox bought a £535,000 Battersea flat, relying on public funds to pay his £1,750 a month mortgage repayments. He now rents the property out for about £1,000 a week, living in a different London flat so he can claim £1,900 a month in public cash to pay the rent! 

🔵 Former Prime Minister David Cameron was caught lobbying the Tory government on behalf of a company called Greensill Capital, who were paying him absolutely vast consultancy fees. The government then over-rode their own £50 million limit on emergency Covid loans to award Greensill a whopping £400 million, all of which was loaned to companies associated with billionaire Tory-donor Sanjeev Gupta. Greensill went bankrupt a matter of months later! 

🔵 Tory MPs have been taking thousands of pounds worth of freebies and junkets from gambling companies and the gambling lobby then making pro-gambling statements in parliament and producing pro-gambling advertorials for websites like ConservativeHome. Probably the worst offender is Tory MP Laurence Robertson who earns £24,000 per year (at £200 per hour) as a gambling lobbyist who argued against stronger regulation of the gambling industry in parliament, then had the barefaced cheek to claim that there was no conflict of interest. 

🔵 The leader of the Scottish Conservatives Douglas Ross "forgot" to declare £28,000 in earnings from his second job, but insists that it's all just a big mistake.

This lot is just the visible tip of the Tory corruption iceberg!

If you're aware of any other Tory corruption scandals, feel free to add details in the comments.

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Why are footballers held more accountable than establishment politicians?

The mainstream media non-reaction to the Labour Leak scandal, and the ongoing lack of suspensions within the party are extraordinary in their own right.

What the leaks revealed was a bunch of horrific right-wing wreckers embedded within the Labour Party deliberately trying to lose elections, misallocating party funds, engaging in racist and misogynistic abuse against their party colleagues, and endlessly slagging off their own party's leader, policies, and supporters.

But a little thought experiment puts this scandal, and the almost complete non-reaction to it into a clearer perspective.

If leaked WhatsApp chats revealed that several players on a Premier League football team had been conspiring to deliberately lose crucial games in a misguided attempt to drive out their manager, all hell would break loose.

Especially if the players were also caught out spewing racist abuse at their own black team mates, deliberately undermining their own team's anti-racism initiatives, and repeatedly deriding their own team's fans with mental health slurs.

You could bet every penny you've got on these players being immediately suspended, coverage of the story dominating the newspaper front and back pages for weeks, the regulatory authorities getting involved, and several of the worst perpetrators ending up in jail and never playing professional football again in their lives.

But just imagine if the club decided not to suspend a single one of the players.

How do you imagine the club's fans would react if the team just carried on like nothing had happened?

And do you really think the players' mates in the media would be composing articles portraying the cheating racist scunners as the "poor innocent victims of a terrible invasion of privacy" (despite the fact that they only got caught because one of the hypothetical players had been stupid enough to upload the entire WhatsApp chat history onto the club's computer system!).

But we've seen articles from the Guardian to the Telegraph portraying these bigotry-dripping right-wing saboteurs as the poor innocent victims, and whoever blew the whistle by leaking the report as the dreadful horrible monster of the situation.

In reality we don't even need to imagine how football would react to a scandal like this, because we've got plenty of evidence of how the football community reacts to cheating, disrespect, and racism.

When the former Huddersfield, West Brom, and Notts County player Delroy Facey was caught match fixing he was jailed for two and a half years.

Two England managers have been forced out of their jobs, Glenn Hoddle over his bizarre ableist tirade accusing disabled people of being at fault for their own conditions because of "karma" and Sam Allardyce was removed after one solitary game for financial impropriety.

When former West Brom and Manchester United manager Ron Atkinson was recorded saying that a black footballer was a "lazy, thick N-word" he was cancelled. Despite being one of the pioneering managers who brought black players into his teams in the 1970s and '80s, he clearly stepped way over the line with this racial slur and lost his commentary and football columnist jobs over it.

Just think about how many times football managers and players have been sanctioned and fined for "bringing the game into disrepute", and how establishment politicians have been allowed to get away with absolutely egregious lies, expenses scamming, and horrific abuse of each other and random members of the public.

Just think about the vitriol that a whole host of football players have faced over charges of  "going down to easily", even though the referees have shown time and again that they simply don't award free kicks unless players make a big show of falling over at the point of contact.

People who fall over too easily on a sports field get more public derision than politicians who sabotage elections and spew racist, misogynistic, and ableist abuse!

The establishment political class get in comparison to footballers is extraordinary:

Consider Tony Blair's lies that led us into the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands who died as a consequence, and how he's still treated as some kind of beloved political oracle by the press, instead of the lying pariah he should be.

Consider David Cameron hiding behind parliamentary privilege like a coward to spew libellous abuse at a random Muslim guy, purely in order to falsely portray Labour's Sadiq Khan as a terrorist sympathiser.

Consider Theresa May's sickeningly racist "Hostile Environment" legislation, and how nobody in the political establishment class has faced any real consequences for the systematic abuse of black British citizens, to the extent of actually deporting scores of UK citizens.

Consider the fact that 88% of Tory Facebook ads were shown to be lies during the 2019 General Election, and absolutely nothing was done about it.

And consider the ludicrous non-reaction to the racism, mental health slurs, delaying of antisemitism investigations, and deliberate electoral sabotage carried out by the Labour right-wingers that was exposed in the Labour Leaks.

It turns out that the United Kingdom is a country with absurd priorities, where the media and regulatory authorities hold footballers, football managers, and football commentators to a vastly higher standard of conduct than the establishment politicians who actually rule over our lives!

We've just become so accustomed to the political establishment lying, and cheating, and scamming their way through their careers that we accept it as a normal part of the job.

But to make matters worse, when one politician showed up who eschewed the lying, and scheming, and self-interested scamming, the mainstream media and the rest of the political class turned on him, continually portrayed him as some kind of repulsive extremist monster, and even deliberately sabotaged his party from within to prevent him from becoming Prime Minister.

Even if it had been players from a football club you don't even like, you'd want them disciplined for bringing the game into disrepute if they'd behaved like the right-wing Labour saboteurs, but somehow, because it's happened in politics rather than football, most of the nation has turned a complete blind eye to it.

And this extraordinary non-reaction provokes the question of how politics can ever be cleaned up if establishment politicians can get away with the kind of deliberate sabotage and rampant bigotry that would result in footballers, or anyone else in any other job, getting sacked, and probably jailed if they did the same.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Spain is taking political prisoners while allowing convicted fraudsters to walk free

A lot of people tend to get very angry when you point out that the Spanish political establishment is rapidly descending towards right-wing tyranny.

"But the vote was illegal" they say to excuse the shocking wave of brutal police repression against non-violent Catalan citizens that the whole world witnessed on October 1st. "But they don't represent all Spanish nationalists" they say about the Franco-worshipping fascist-saluting Falangists thugs who are gleefully celebrating the violent repression of Catalonia. "But everyone knows he's a nasty piece of work" they say about the Spanish government minister who wasn't even sacked for issuing a veiled death threat against the Catalan President Carles Puigdemont ...

And now they have something else to make excuses for. The Spanish establishment has resorted to taking Catalan civic leaders as political prisoners.

Jordi Sanchez, the leader of the ANC movement, and Jordi Cuixart, who heads the Ómnium Cultural association have been arrested and are being held without bail on possible charges of sedition because of their involvement in a spontaneous political protest on September 20th.

Jailing non-violent citizens without trial is obviously bad enough in its own right, but then if you look at some of the criminals from the Spanish political establishment who have been let off for massive corruption and fraud scandals, the shocking bias of the Spanish legal establishment becomes absolutely clear.

Rodrigo Rato (a former finance minister for the ruling Partido Popular) was found guilty of embezzlement from the Spanish bank Bankia, but was released on a technicality instead of serving a single day of his four year jail sentence.

Iñaki Urdangarín (the Spanish king's brother-in-law) was found guilty of tax fraud and corruption in Mallorca, but was released on a technicality instead of serving any of his six year jail sentence.

The Spanish nationalist establishment have got a proven track record of refusing to jail their own, even when they've actually been found guilty of incredible levels of corruption, fraud, and embezzlement. But when it comes to Catalan secessionists, they lock them up and throw away the key before there's even been a proper investigation, let alone a trial!

The crazy thing is that supporters of Spanish nationalism will immediately begin making excuses for the taking of political prisoners. They'll claim "it's for the good of Spain", and spread Orwellian propaganda about what a wonderful liberal place Spain is (while they're simultaneously excusing imprisonment without trial!). They'll turn a blind eye to the double standard that allows the convicted fraudsters Rato and Urdangarín to walk free, while Catalan civic leaders who haven't been found guilty of anything are locked up.

The big problem with this Spanish nationalist attitude is that it's massively counter-productive.

Their refusal to condemn the images we all saw of Spanish police brutalising pensioners, stealing ballot boxes, wading into unarmed and non-violent crowds with batons, and dragging women around by their hair; their blind acceptance of the belligerent escalations by the Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and the king of Spain; their excuse-making over the taking of political prisoners ...

These people don't even seem to realise that all of this violence,oppression and Spanish nationalist rhetoric has the appearance of a Francoist resurgence, and their blind support for it terrifies people who remember the same kind of blind support that millions of Spanish nationalists gave to the savage Franco dictatorship until his death in 1975.

If people are unwilling to condemn the wave of police brutality against non-violent citizens, Spanish government ministers making death threats (and not even getting sacked for it), and the taking of political prisoners, how far will they actually go in their appeasement? 

Would anything actually be too much for them? 

Would they still be making excuses and attempting to glorify Spain as a wonderful "liberal democracy" if the government in Madrid scrapped the democratically elected Catalan parliament? If the Spanish political establishment abolished free speech to make talking of Catalan independence a crime? If they sent the army in to occupy Barcelona? If they reintroduced Francoist concentration camps to punish political thought crime?

As far as I'm concerned, they've already gone way too far if they're making excuses for the state violence and political repression that's already happening.

If they can watch a video clip of a Spanish police officer violently dragging a woman around by her hair and believe that "she deserved it" because she was trying to vote in a referendum they didn't want to happen ... or if they're prepared to actively celebrate imprisonment without trial for Catalan civic leaders while establishment fraudsters like Rato and Urdangarín still walk free, then they'll likely find an excuse for pretty much anything the Spanish ruling elite do.

But what is worse, from a pragmatic perspective, is the sheer self-defeating idiocy of it. Every step the Spanish political establishment takes towards the resurrection of the Franco dictatorship is another step towards the eventual secession of Catalonia.

When the king of Spain refuses to condemn the violent oppression of his own people, when the Prime Minister of Spain refuses to discipline his own government minister for making death threats against the elected Catalan President, and when the corrupt Spanish establishment turn Catalan civic leaders into high-profile political prisoners while allowing convicted fraudsters from their own class to walk free, they're not dampening Catalan secessionism, they're wilfully pouring fuel on the fire.

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OR

The rogue bank, the failing company and the Tory Party donations

In October 2008, at the very height of the global financial sector insolvency crisis, HSBC made a very strange decision: They made a massive £214.2 million loan to a struggling company called IPGL.

To get an idea of what was more normal practice for banks during the insolvency crisis and the post-crisis recession, consider the behaviour of the (majority taxpayer-owned) bank RBS which deliberately withdrew loans or hiked repayment terms in order to drive thousands of British companies into financial difficulties, and then used their Global Restructuring Group to close down the businesses and asset strip them for their own profits.

The RBS Global Restructuring Group destroyed 12,000 businesses in this way in what executives referred to in leaked emails as "the dash for cash". After the scandal was exposed by the hard work of people like Neil Mitchell they've now had to set aside a £400 million slush fund to compensate some of their victims.

Interestingly HSBC took a very different attitude towards the struggling and massively indebted IPGL, which was being run at huge losses by the then Tory party chairman and massive Tory party donor Michael Spencer. Instead of attempting to shut it down and asset strip it, they pumped a massive £214.2 million loan into it at a time when getting loans out of a bank was like getting blood out of a stone.

Spencer then funnelled over four million in donations to the Tory party via IPLG including over £1 million for their 2010 general election fighting fund. IPLG donations also covered the cost of flying David Cameron, George Osborne and others to the Davos World Economic Forum just months before the 2010 General Election.

If HSBC propped up a failing business and that business then went on to pump millions into the Tory party to help them win the 2010 General Election, it's easy to see how people might conclude that the failing business was used by HSBC to launder money into political donations.

HSBC, the Tory party, George Osborne's office and IPGL were contacted by the investigative journalists who broke this story and offered the chance to comment. They all declined.

While this HSBC-IPGL-Tory party business was going on HSBC were also laundering hundreds of millions of pounds in drug money for Mexican drug cartels and funds for terrorist organisations.

After the Tories came to power in 2010 the conduct of George Osborne and David Cameron clearly continued to favour HSBC and Michael Spencer's business interests. Their attempted favours towards Spencer continued even after their fall from grace over the spectacular failure of their EU referendum gamble in June 2016.

• In November 2010 The Tories made the HSBC Chairman Stephen Green an unelected peer in the House of Lords (where he still sits as a Tory peer).

• In January 2011 David Cameron appointed Green as Minister of State for Trade and Investment in the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition government.

• In 2012 George Osborne hampered the US investigation into the HSBC money laundering scandal and lobbied for them not to face criminal prosecutions claiming that such a move could lead to "financial contagion" because the bank was too big to fail.

• In March 2012 Spencer was named by the disgraced former Tory party co-treasurer Peter Cruddas as one of the millionaires to have benefited from the "cash for access scandal".

• In March 2013 George Osborne was the only finance minister in the entire EU to oppose a policy of limiting bankers' bonuses to 200% of their final salary. When it came to the vote he was defeated 26-1.

• In September 2013 Michael Spencer's firm was fined £55 million for rigging the Libor rate. In the very same month David Cameron tried to make Spencer an unelected peer in the House of Lords but was foiled by the ethics committee.

• After the bankers' bonus defeat Osborne wasted £50,000 of taxpayers' money on fighting a futile legal challenge against the EU bankers' pay cap, a battle he finally abandoned in December 2014.

• In January 2015 the Times editor Camilla Cavendish had a dinner with David Cameron and then spiked an investigative story about fraud at HSBC. She was soon appointed as Cameron's adviser at the Number 10 Policy Unit.

• In 2015 George Osborne washed his hands of the HSBC Swiss accounts scandal, and repeatedly refused to confirm whether he had discussions about the bank's collusion in tax evasion with Stephen Green before his appointment as a government minister.

• In January 2016 George Osborne delayed a Competition and Markets Authority report into reducing the dominance of the big four banks that was widely regarded as a move to placate HSBC.

• After resigning in disgrace after his EU referendum gamble failed David Cameron reportedly tried to make Spencer an unelected peer again in his resignation honours list, but was foiled a second time. 

• Although Spencer didn't make it into the unelected House of Lords in David Cameron's resignation honours list Camilla Cavendish (the former Times editor who spiked the HSBC fraud story) did.

The £214 million HSBC loan to the failing IPGL and their subsequent donations to the Tory party have now been referred to the Electoral Commission by the SNP's Roger Mullin, who is calling for an immediate investigation. The Labour MP John Mann has called for a public inquiry into what he called "the biggest party donor scandal ever".

Coverup/whitewash?

The French libertarian philosopher and economist Frédéric Bastiat once wrote that "when plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it", which stands as true today as when he wrote it in the 1840s.

There are so many revolving doors between Westminster politics, the financial system, the financial regulators and the media that it seems unlikely anyone will ever be properly held to account.

The Canary and Move Your Money broke this story on April 28th, but 5 days later the mainstream media has yet to move on it, preferring instead to focus the public attention on "vital" issues like the Shadow Home Secretary getting her figures muddled up in a radio interview and then subsequently correcting them.

The whole thing reeks of corruption, but we all know by now how these things tend to play out. Even if the story does eventually get some limited mainstream media coverage it'll doubtlessly all be brushed under the carpet again, and if anyone ever does end up getting the chop for it, it'll almost certainly be some lowly minion who gets fed to the wolves, not any of the big players.

But at least you know some of the murky details now.

Credits

The investigative work into the HSBC-IPGL-Tory party money flow was done by Fionn Travers-Smith of Move Your Money. The story was publicised by Steve Topple of The Canary.

The SNP's Roger Mullin deserves credit for publicly raising this issue with the Electoral Commission and Labour's John Mann deserves some too for calling for a public inquiry.

Follow them here:

Fionn Travers-Smith (Twitter)
Move Your Money (Twitter/Facebook)
Steve Topple (Twitter)
The Canary (Twitter/Facebook)
Roger Mullin (Twitter)
John Mann (Twitter)

You should also follow the HSBC whistleblower Nicholas Wilson (Twitter) for more corruption coverage.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

David Cameron's cronyism is an affront to democracy

David Cameron has given 62 honours to his mates in easily the most controversial resignation honours handout since Harold Wilson's "Lavender List" in 1976.

Aside from showering a load of knighthoods and other gongs on his Tory cronies (including Samantha Cameron's stylist and George Osborne's image consultant!), David Cameron also appointed yet another 13 Tories into the unelected House of Lords along with two unelected crossbench peers and one unelected Labour peer.

During his six years as Prime Minister David Cameron has stuffed the House of Lords with unelected cronies at a faster rate than any Prime Minister in history. The House of Lords now has an incredible 813 members thanks to the sheer number of former politicians, major party donors and party hacks Cameron has shovelled into it.

Thanks to David Cameron's six years of cronyism the House of Lords is now the second biggest legislative chamber in the world, second only to the Chinese parliament. It's by far the biggest unelected chamber, and as such is an affront to democracy.

The 13 new unelected Tory peers include the massive Tory donors Jitesh Gadhia and Andrew Fraser, who can be added to the staggering number of millionaire Tory party bankrollers to have been handed seats in the House of Lords by David Cameron.

Katie Ghose of the Electoral Reform Society said: "For a prime minister who promised to cut the cost of politics, David Cameron is leaving a big bill for the taxpayer as he leaves office. His parting gift of 16 Lords is a sorry legacy, both in terms of cost to the taxpayer and the quality of our democracy. Mr Cameron’s Lords legacy could have been about real, democratic reform. Instead, he has unfortunately chosen to follow the well-trodden route of every other PM and packed the second chamber with former politicians, donors and party hacks. These unelected peers will cost the taxpayer millions over the long term – hardly a fitting goodbye."

Numerous political figures, including senior Conservatives have complained about David Cameron showering honours and peerages on his cronies like confetti, but it's unlikely anything will be done about it. The House of Lords as a cushy retirement club for retired and rejected politicians and party political hacks suits the Lib Dems and the Labour Party just as much as it suits the Tories.

Steve Hilton, who was David Cameron's director of strategy between 2010 and 2012 said that Cameron's cronyism was a symptom of Britain's "corrupt and decaying democracy". He then went on to highlight the contract between the rebellion against the undemocratic nature of the EU with the much more undemocratic nature of the House of Lords saying that "the corruption comes when the honors system starts to clash with democratic principles. The most obvious way this happens is when people who are not elected make the laws which we live under, ... we’ve just fought and won a referendum campaign on the principle that unelected bureaucrats in the EU should not have the power to impose laws on us [and] I’m not clear why this principle applies to unelected foreigners but not to home-grown appointees."

The Labour response to this almost unbelievable display of cronyism has been typically idiotic. Instead of attacking Cameron for yet again stuffing millionaire Tory donors into the House of Lords and showering a load of honours on his Tory mates, a load of Labour MPs from the Anyone But Corbyn faction have actually focused their criticism on the one Labour appointment in order to score political points against Jeremy Corbyn!

Not only did the Anyone But Corbyn camp give the Tories a free pass on their Brexit shambles by using it as a (rubbish) excuse to launch their hopelessly inept pre-planned coup against their own leader, they're now trying to let the Tories off the hook for the most overt display of political cronyism in 40 years by using it as an excuse to attack Corbyn again!

The Lib-Dems, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party pretend to oppose the unelected House of Lords, but when it comes to undemocratic peerages for their politicians, they don't turn them down.

The only significant political party to properly oppose the unelected House of Lords establishment club is the SNP so it's fitting that I leave the last word to one of their elected politicians:

"This list confirms what we already knew - the Westminster honours system is rotten to the core.The former Prime Minister has well and truly overstepped the mark of acceptability with these awards by choosing to use his resignation to hand out knighthoods and honours as a form of personal patronage." Tommy Sheppard MP

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Boris Johnson's logical bind

In an LBC interview the figurehead of the Vote Leave campaign Boris Johnson has claimed that it's well known that there's "an operation in Downing Street" to bribe and blackmail business leaders into supporting Remain. He went on to detail claims that the Tory government have been using the honours system as a carrot and threats of no more government contracts as a stick.

It doesn't matter whether you're a Leave supporter or a Remain one, Boris Johnson's claims of such high level corruption in the Tory party provide absolute proof that he himself is corrupt.

There are two options:

Johnson is either lying about this Downing Street operation to blackmail and bribe businesses into supporting Remain, which means he's prepared to spread fantastical conspiracy theories about the leadership of his own political party in order to serve his own personal interests. 

Or he's not lying and he's openly admitted to being a member of an exceptionally corrupt political party, but rather than leave the party in disgust, he's staying in the Tory party, and even backing David Cameron (the man he accuses of this appalling corruption) to stay on as Tory party leader even if the Brexit campaign is sucessful!

Whichever way you look at it, Boris Johnson has put himself in a logical bind where the only possible conclusion to be drawn is that Boris Johnson supports corruption.

Either he's prepared to corruptly feed the public a bunch of fantastical lies in order to promote his personal agenda, or he's willing to turn a blind eye to the most shocking levels of corruption at the very top of the Tory party and even back the man he accuses of this corruption to remain at Tory party leader and Prime Minister.

The logical bind Boris Johnson has put himself in leaves us with the obvious question of why we should ever believe a word he says about anything if his own words act as an open admission that he supports corruption.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The former Prime Minister, his wife, the vulture fund and their son

After the inconclusive Spanish general election in December 2015 the ruling right-wing Partido Popular (PP) government have tried to hang onto power, despite not having enough MPs to form a majority (even with the support of the centre-right Trojan Horse protest party Ciudadanos). In the months since the election PP has been rocked by one corruption scandal after another, including a huge corruption scandal in Valencia (24 PP politicians and people with ties to the party arrested) and the implication of the wife of their environment minister in the Panama Papers scandal.

One of the biggest PP corruption scandals of all is going on in Madrid, where PP ran the city council from 1991 until they were turfed out by a Podemos led coalition in 2015. The scandal involved the sale of hundreds of units of social housing to a consortium between a US based vulture fund called Blackstone and an entity called Magic Real Estate.

The Mayor of Madrid who oversaw this corrupt fire-sale of public property was Ana Botella, who is the wife of former Prime Minister Aznar (you might remember him as one of the few world leaders to back Bush and Blair's catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq). Botella was a controversial figure before she decided to sell off a load of public property on the cheap because she never actually won a Mayoral election, she was parachuted into the role after the resignation of her predecessor.

The sale of the 1,890 apartments at the heart of the corruption scandal came during the biggest sell-off of public property in Spanish history, with billions of euros worth of public assets being distributed to the likes of Blackstone and HIG Capital (USA) AXA (France), Burlington Asset Management (UK) and the even the Bank of China!

The €128.5 million sale of the 1,890 social housing units was highly controversial at the time because it violated the first option rights of the tenants, and nobody but the utterly credulous believed the promises that rents wouldn't be hiked by the new owners. Within a couple of years, as expected, the new private owners raised the rents by up to 43% and began the process of evicting dozens of families (social cleansing).

The next revelation, in the summer of 2015, was that the American vulture fund Blackstone had significant links with José María Aznar Botella (the son of the Mayor and her husband, the ex-Prime Minister of Spain) and Juan Hoyos Martínez de Irujo (the ex-Prime Minister's close childhood friend). So it's established that the major of Madrid oversaw the sale of public property to an American vulture fund with links to her own son and to her husband's childhood friend!

In April 2016 a preliminary investigation into the sell-off was released establishing a number facts. Here are some of the findings:

• The sale price significantly undervalued the properties, meaning the buyers benefited from a €32 million discount  on the actual value of the assets (about a 20% discount).

• The council acted unlawfully by not conducting any official valuation of the properties before allowing the buyer to set the sale price and then simply accepting it without consideration of whether it represented value for money.

• The sale was not put out to competitive tender, as was legally required.

• The housing units were sold as a block which violated the rights of the tenants who had the contractual right to purchase the properties for themselves after 7-10 years of occupancy.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the PP Mayor of Madrid oversaw an unlawful sale of public property, at a massive discount, in an uncompetitive manner (the client got to set the price) to a consortium with which her her own son and her husband's close friend had significant connections.

The current Podemos led city council have stated that they would try to reverse the unlawful sale if the irregularities in the preliminary report are confirmed. Meanwhile the party responsible for this corruption scandal (and countless others) are doing all they can to cling onto political power at the national level.

The appalling thing is that despite all of the corruption scandals, PP have a core demographic of mainly older tribalist voters who will under no circumstances vote for any other party. This is a very similar situation to the Tory party in England, who can always rely on backing from some 20% of likely voters, no matter how extreme their incompetent, or how many scandals the party is rocked by.

There is no doubt that the 2011-2015 right-wing government of Spain was the most corrupt of all since the fall of General Franco's fascist dictatorship in 1975. Aside from the aforementioned scandals there's also been the €449 million Gürtel embezzlement case, the secret Bárcenas slush fund for PP politicians,  the former PP economics minister Rodrigo Rato's involvement in the Bankia collapse and bailout, the imprisonment of Carlos Fabra for tax fraud, the Palma Arena corruption scandal, and on and on ... However even with all of these scandals being public knowledge, PP still somehow managed to secure more votes than any other party in the inconclusive December 2015 general election!

If no coalition government is agreed by the 2nd of May, the Spanish constitution dictates that there will need to be another election no later than the 26th of June. Podemos (who broke through at the last election to become the third largest party in Spain within just two years of their foundation) look likely to make more gains because of their consistent anti-corruption stance, but PP can't be ruled out of the equation because they have plenty of older tribalist voters to support them. The existence of the PP tribalist voter block means that if younger Spanish voters (who are much less likely to support PP, but also much less likely to vote) don't turn out in force because of "election fatigue", PP could end up creeping back into power despite their disgusting track record of corruption.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.