Nigel "snowflake" Farage is having a hilarious hissy fit

Nigel Farage is having a huge hissy fit because he wants a seat in the unelected House of Lords or a Knighthood and Douglas Carswell (UKIP's only actual MP) lightly mocked him over it.

The jaw-dropping hypocrisy of Britain's self-proclaimed saviour from the terrible anti-democratic EU technocrats scuttling around in search of peerage to sit in the unelected House of Lords is so brazen that perhaps even a few 'Kippers might actually be capable of thinking "hang on a minute".

When asked by UKIP insiders to intervene in order to help secure anti-democratic gongs for Farage, Carswell responded in an internal party email that maybe Farage could be nominated as an OBE for "services to headline writers". Carswell's email has now been leaked and Farage is having a total meltdown over it. 

Farage's furious reaction to Carswell's jibe is an illustration of just how enormously over-inflated his ego has now become. Farage has claimed that Carswell's slightly mocking words were motivated by "jealousy" and then demanded that the comically inept new UKIP leader Paul Nuttall expel Carswell from the party for daring to criticise him.

Imagine the size of the ego that imagines a bit of light personal ribbing against the dear ex-leader is more damaging to the party than a witch hunt to expel the party's only MP!

Carswell is also clearly despised by Arron Banks, the obnoxious millionaire UKIP donor who is busy blackmailing the party into making him party chairman by threatening to stop pumping cash into the party if they don't.

I'm no big fan of Douglas Carswell because (like Farage, Nuttall and Banks) he's an ex-Tory, and he consistently votes in favour of pretty much every appalling scam the Tories come up with. However, being called "a terrible individual" by a slimeball like Arron Banks is clearly a feather in his cap that he can be well and truly proud of. And winding up Farage so much that he's has a pathetic dictatorial foot-stamping fit ... well that's provided everyone with a little bit of light political amusement, which we can all be thankful for in these dark and dangerous days.

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Are Brexiters immune to irony?

One of the most commonly cited objections to membership of the EU were the complaints that the EU is undemocratic and that it's not right that unelected technocrats and political appointees should rule over our lives.

On June 23rd 2016 37% of the UK electorate voted in favour of a haphazard abandonment of the EU without anything even remotely resembling a coherent plan of action for what comes next. The immediate reaction of the Prime Minister David Cameron was to hand in his resignation and begin drawing up a list of his Tory mates to stuff into the unelected House of Lords and shower with knighthoods, OBEs, CBEs and other gongs.

The House of Lords

In the end Cameron stuffed thirteen new Tory cronies into the ridiculously bloated House of Lords including two multi-millionaire Tory donors (Andrew Fraser and Jitesh Gadhia). He wanted to stuff two more Tory donors in there too but Michael Spencer (who was embroiled in the Libor rigging scandal) was rejected by the scrutiny committee and Remain Campaign bankroller Ian Taylor turned down the peerage because he didn't like the negative publicity.

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. An awful lot of Brexiters seem immune to the irony that their vote to quit the EU is going to hand even more political power to the unelected £300 per day plus expenses House of Lords political cronies club.

Theresa May

David Cameron's replacement as Prime Minister Theresa May outright refused to intervene to stop David Cameron's brazen display of political cronyism. Interestingly she was appointed as leader of the Tory party without a hint of democracy. The 150,000 Tory party members should have been given a vote on their next leader, but the other candidate Andrea Leadsom was leaned on to withdraw from the contest so that may could be anointed as Prime Minister without any filthy oiks having their say.

The Bank of England

As a result of the vote for Brexit the widely reported economic chaos happened. The Bank of England slashed their economic growth forecast for 2017 from 2.3% to just 0.8%, which was the worst decline in economic expectations since records began.

Nowadays in the UK monetary policy is decided by a small group of unelected technocrats called the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC).

The nine member MPC is comprised of the Governor of the Bank of England (appointed by the government) four external members (appointed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer), the Bank's chief economist and three deputy governors.

These nine unelected technocrats have enormous powers to influence the lives of ordinary people through tinkering with interest rates, propping up failed banks, inventing hundreds of billions of pounds out of nothing to flood the financial markets or buy up corporate bonds ... Yet there is no democratic accountability whatever and virtually nobody has even heard of the members of this tiny unelected group.

The response of these unelected technocrats to the Brexit mess was to use it as an excuse to create £170 billion out of nothing to flood it into the financial sector. Their own evidence from last time they did they created cash out of nothing after the financial sector insolvency crisis is that 40% of the economic benefit went to the 5% of wealthiest households, but they've decided to do exactly the same thing again rather than trying a different approach.

Instead of using the newly created cash to invest directly into stuff like infrastructure, jobs, house building, services, education, industrial development ... (things that benefit everyone) they've decided to distribute the cash to the private banks to funnel into unsustainable house price and asset inflation bubbles (things that almost exclusively benefit the wealthiest people in society).

The irony

As a direct result of the vote for Brexit David Cameron used his resignation as an excuse to stuff another 13 unelected Tory cronies into the House of Lords, the UK now has an unelected Prime Minister pursuing a fanatically hard-right agenda (just like a lot of people predicted) and the unelected technocrats at the Bank of England MPC are using the (widely predicted) economic chaos as an excuse to pump vast amounts of newly created cash into the private banks to gamble with as they please.

It's absolutely obvious that the UK is an undemocratic shambles dominated by political cronyism, private corporate power and unelected technocrats, yet there's hardly any outcry about it from Brexiters. It's as if they're perfectly content with cronyism and unelected technocrats ruling over their lives, as long as they're British* cronies and technocrats.

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* Or in the case of the Bank of England Governor Mark Carney - an unelected Canadian technocrat appointed by British Tories.

It's time to scrap the discredited honours system

The UK honours system is an absolute disgrace. The worst examples are the knighthoods given to the child abusers Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith, but there are plenty of other examples of the honours system being used to reward disgraced businessmen who went on to destroy their companies through their greed (Fred Goodwin and Philip Green) and a whole host of political cronies.

The whole honours system, including appointments to the bloated unelected House of Lords, is an affront to democracy. In his six years as Prime Minister David Cameron stuffed unelected cronies into the House of Lords at a faster rate than any Prime Minister in history. He stuffed so many establishment insiders into the unelected upper house that the House of Lords is now the second biggest legislative chamber on earth, second only to the Chinese parliament!

The leaked list of people David Cameron intends to reward with establishment honours as one of his last acts as Prime Minister is an absolute disgrace. Not only is the list stuffed full of Tory MPs, special advisers and donors, it also includes one of the leading Labour coup-plotters (Will Straw) and even Samantha Cameron's personal stylist!

Here are some of the most dubious people on David Cameron's resignation honours list:

Isabel Spearman: After drawing scorn and ridicule for handing his barber an MBE in 2014 it appears that Cameron hasn't learned his lesson about excessive cronyism, opting to nominate his wife's personal stylist Isabel Spearman for an OBE!

Ian Taylor: The oil trader and major Tory donor has been waiting for a knighthood from his chum David Cameron for quite some time. Not only is he a major Tory donor having bunged them £1.6 million to the party, he also bankrolled the Tory anti-Independence campaign in Scotland to the tune of half a million quid, and handed £350,000 to the Vote Remain campaign.

Andrew Cook: Another major Tory donor who has given over a million pounds to the Tory party and bankrolled the failed Remain campaign to the tune of £250,000.

George Osborne: The former Chancellor and architect of the ideological austerity con is to become a Companion of Honor which is usually given as a supposed "reward for outstanding achievements in the arts, literature, music, science, politics, industry, and religion". The idea that George Osborne's socially and economically catastrophic austerity agenda constitutes an outstanding achievement in politics (rather than a spectacular example of conning economically uneducated people with ludicrous fairy stories) is beyond a joke.

Thea Rodgers: George Osborne's stylist is also in line for a gong. Cameron is hoping to hand an OBE to the woman who advised George Osborne to change his haircut and lose some weight in order to reverse his unpopularity. Perhaps advising him to abandon his economically illiterate "let's cut our way to growth" agenda would have done more to improve his public image?

Tory remain politicians: Cameron decided to hand out a load of gongs to his political allies. The other Remain supporting Tory MPs in line for anti-democratic handouts includes knighthoods for Philip Hammond, David Lidington, Patrick McLoughlin and Michael Fallon. 

Craig Oliver: Cameron also intends to hand out a knighthood to the guy he brought in to replace the crook Andy Coulson as his Director of Communications at 10 Downing Street.

Will Straw: In order to add a veneer of balance Cameron had to nominate a few people who weren't Tory MPs, donors or advisers. The choice to nominate Will Straw for a CBE is utterly bizarre. Straw has achieved very little of note since founding the Blairite blog Left Foot Forward. He was a failed Labour parliamentary candidate in 2015, he headed up the failed Vote Remain campaign, and then he supported the failed anti-democratic coup attempt against Jeremy Corbyn.

According to the LBC presenter Stig Abell Cameron intends to hand out  48 gongs to supporters of the failed Remain campaign, and not a single one to anyone who campaigned for Brexit! Even if you opposed Brexit, the sheer bias of Cameron's goodbye gifts to his mates is blatantly disgusting.

Stig Abell proposed the solution of barring politicians from being given honours, and barring anyone who earns over £50,000 per year for the job they're supposedly being honoured for too.

My solution is a lot simpler. The whole anti-democratic honours system is just a way of bestowing establishment privilege on a select few. The whole system has now been hopelessly discredited by the cronyinsm of David Cameron and his predecessors as Prime Minister. This anti-meritocratic shambles should be abandoned completely. All honours should be rescinded and the anti-democratic House of Lords should be replaced with an elected upper chamber.

If the public want the honours system to continue in some form to recognise the achievements of people who really deserve recognition, the handing out of honours should be regulated by professional bodies. The Prime Minister and the the rest of the Westminster establishment should have no influence at all over who gets recognised.

If people want letters after their names, or prefixes, they should earn them through academic endeavour, or through recognition of their achievements by a relevant professional body. They shouldn't just be able to obtain them through being mates with David Cameron, or whoever is the Prime Minister of the day.

If people want to serve in the UK's upper legislative chamber they should get themselves elected to do so. They shouldn't be able to earn a lifetime ticket to the £300 per day for just showing up club simply by virtue of being a longstanding member of the Westminster establishment clique, or through making huge donations to the Westminster establishment political parties. 

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Philip Green to be "punished" with an impotent slap on the wrist

On the weekend that the first 20 BHS stores shut their doors for good Philip and Tina Green cavorted on their brand new £100 million super yacht Lionheart in Malta.

When Philip Green took over BHS in 2000 the company pension fund had a £43 million surplus. When he sold the company to Dominic Chappell (a twice bankrupt businessman with absolutely no retail experience) the company pension fund was already £571 million in deficit.

Between 2002 and 2004 Philip and Tina Green extracted £400 million in dividends from the company.

When David Cameron came to power in 2010 he decided to bring Philip Green into the government (presumably because his experience of asset stripping of BHS could help Cameron and Osborne in their project to asset strip the entire UK).

Until the scale of the BHS catastrophe became clear the Tories heaped lavish praise on Philip Green, pretending that by associating themselves with the very worst kind of self-serving capitalist they were somehow demonstration their good business acumen. 

“We are extremely fortunate to have Sir Philip, with his immense commercial experience and of course his fantastic track record at managing large organisations, on board.” - Francis Maude, 2010

A few years down the line the Tories are singing a very different tune. This is the updated 2016 Tory view as expressed by Tory MP Richard Fuller:

"It is a portrait of how individual greed can affect the lives of thousands of people ... Personally, I now believe he should lose his knighthood."

11,000 BHS staff have lost their jobs and 22,000 pensioners face stress and uncertainty over their catastrophically mismanaged pension funds, yet the guy who caused all of this misery by greedily pillaging the company and then selling the debt-ridden husk to a manifestly unsuitable owner faces no threat of punishment other than being possibly stripped of his knighthood!

The idea that sycophants no longer sticking the word "sir" before Philip Green's name is somehow a punishment befitting the pillaging of a company resulting in the destruction of 11,000 jobs and a vast pension black hole is yet another demonstration of how out of touch the Westminster establishment club are.

A parliamentary report has found that "Sir Philip systematically extracted hundreds of millions of pounds from BHS, paying very little tax and fantastically enriching himself and his family, leaving the company and its pension fund weakened to the point of the inevitable collapse of both."

As far as the establishment club are concerned, Philip and Tina Green can continue living their spectacularly decadent lifestyles on the hundreds of millions they extracted out of the business they completely ruined because the disappointment of Philip losing his knighthood is supposedly punishment enough.
This is how British justice works. If you're not part of the establishment club and you pinch a bottle of mineral water or smoke a bit of herb you can go to jail But if you're part of the club (like Fred Goodwin or Philip Green) you can systematically ruin a huge business, destroy thousands of jobs and leave the taxpayer looking at vast bills to repair the damage, but you'll be able to keep your ill-gotten gains and your "punishment" will be stopping sycophants from calling you "sir".

No wonder the public are so furious with the out-of-touch Westminster establishment club when these people honestly seem to think that the same impotent slap on the wrist they gave to Fred Goodwin for destroying RBS is punishment enough for Philip Green for pillaging BHS too.

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Michael Gove's ideological vandalism of the education system

In January 2014 I felt compelled to write an article criticising Michael Gove's confirmation bias riddled historical revisionism, after he made a number of absurd claims about an unpatriotic left-wing conspiracy - spearheaded by the sitcom Blackadder Goes Forth - to denigrate Britain's role in the First World War.
      

Well over 22,000 people shared this picture on Facebook

It was so obvious that Gove was talking absolute rubbish that well over 22,000 people shared my Baldrick meme on Facebook, and as a result it was seen in the Facebook news feeds of over 1.25 million people, making it one of my most successful political memes ever.

Gove's revisionist wittering was certainly one of the most talked about subjects in the first weeks of January 2014, and as good as it is to have widespread recognition that the Secretary of State for Education is an idiot with a warped political agenda, I believe there is a much more important issue that needs addressing, and that is his policy of privatising the English education system into the hands of unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities.

As is the way with many of the most egregious Tory privatisation scams, the roots can be traced back to the preceding New Labour administration. New Labour stated the policy of bringing in unaccountable private sector interests to run publicly funded schools, and by the time they left office in 2010 there were 203 privately operated academy schools, being paid for at the public expense.

When the Tories came to power, they immediately introduced new regulations to speed up the school privatisation process and by December 2013 there were 3,522 open Academies (including over half of all secondary schools in England).

PRIVATISATION
  
One of the conditions set upon publicly owned schools that become academies is that in most cases all of the school property deeds must be signed over, for free, to the unaccountable pseudo-charities that take control of them.

In many cases ownership of the publicly funded property (land, buildings & equipment) is entirely transferred to the private sector pseudo-charity, with the public getting absolutely nothing in return. In other cases the property is given away on 125 year leases for peppercorn rent (which is as good as a permanent transfer of ownership as far as anyone alive today is concerned).

It is difficult to put the scale of this school giveaway bonanza into financial terms because (as far as I know) nobody has attempted to monitor the value of everything that has been simply given away, or rented out at ultra-cheap below market rates. If we make a very conservative assumption that the average value of land, buildings and equipment per school is something like £5 million, and multiply this figure by the 3,000 odd schools that have been simply given away for free (or rented out for 125 years at way below the market rate), we get a ballpark figure of £15 billion.

To put this into perspective, the criminal undervaluation of the Royal Mail before privatisation led to a £1 billion windfall for the private sector at the expense of the UK public. Gove's school giveaway is at least ten times as bad, even using extremely conservative estimates.

After the publicly owned property is given away for free, the public still continues to pump money into the schools as subsidies for the private sector pseudo-charities, a familiar model of private sector parasitism upon the state. Just like the "business" models corporate outsourcing leeches like Serco, Atos, G4S, Capita, Seetec, Avanta, A4E etc, these educational pseudo-charities are entirely dependent upon the state for their income.

PROFITS

The Tories are ever so keen to maintain the fiction that these pseudo-charities make no profits on their taxpayer funded subsidies, but closer inspection of the way these Academy Chains operate reveals that there is an awful lot of profit to be made out taxpayer funded education subsidies. The profits just don't appear on the balance sheet, or as shareholder dividends, as they would in the corporate world.

I'll outline four methods that academy pseudo-charities have been using to extract cash from the public pocket (Topslicing, Leeching, Expenses and Transfer Pricing).

Topslicing

One of the most blatant ways of using an educational pseudo-charity to spin a personal profit is "topslicing". Several of the largest academy chains pay out enormous profits disguised as executive salaries.

Here is an article in The Yorkshire Post detailing how academy chains have robbed the region's schools to the tune of £9 million in order to pay dozens of "administrative staff" eye-watering six figure salaries.

Here is another article (in the Guardian) detailing some of the ludicrous salaries paid out to directors at a number of other academies such as E-Act, The Harris Federation, United Learning Trust and Ark Academies.

The evidence on "topslicing" is absolutely clear: Academy bosses are paying themselves and their mates ludicrous salaries for carrying out the kinds of administrative work that local authorities used to manage on significantly lower salaries. These people are paying themselves far more than the teachers that actually do the work, in fact many of them are paying themselves significantly more than the Prime Minister, just to administer a few schools.

Here are some numbers:

For the 2013-14 academic year the absolute maximum salary for the head teacher of a very large school (outside of London) was £106,148 per year, and the absolute maximum for the head teacher of a large inner London school was £113,303 per year [source]. The salary of the Prime Minister was £142,000 per year.

The head of The Harris Federation (Dan Moynihan) received £317,999 plus pension contributions in 2010-11, and five other members of staff there were paid more than the Prime Minister during the same period. 

The head of E-ACT (Bruce Liddington) received a salary of £280,816 in 2012, plus £18,303 in pension contributions and a further £16,707 in "expenses". E-ACT paid six figure salaries to a further fifteen insiders too.

Academies Enterprise Trust shelled out a top salary of almost a quarter of a million pounds, whilst paying six figure salaries to a further 19 individuals.

In 2010-11 the Richard Rose Trust, which operated just two schools in Cumbria, lavished a salary of between £200,000 - £209,000 on one of their staff and another two-school group Basildon Academies handed over £220,000 - £230,000 to one of their directors.

Outwood Grange Academies Trust lavished a £182,094 salary on their director Michael Wilkins.

School Partnership Trust Academies paid their director (Paul Edwards) between £160,000 - £165,000.

It is absolutely clear that these salaries are excessive, and it is also clear that they are rocketing at way above the rate of inflation too. Against a backdrop of harsh below inflation pay increases for pubic sector workers (the teachers who actually do the work) these pseudo-charity directors are awarding themselves huge inflation busting pay hikes year after year.

According to a Department of Education spokesperson "everyone in receipt of public money has to think very carefully about the right rate of pay for staff". In other words, there are absolutely no controls on how much public cash is being poured into the troughs of privatised education for the academy executive pigs to gorge themselves upon. They are just politely urged by the DoE not to behave excessively, a request they can (and do) ignore, completely without censure.

REMEMBER - ALL OF THESE SALARIES ARE BEING PAID OUT OF THE PUBLIC POCKET AT A TIME OF "AUSTERITY".

Leeching

Compared to using inflated salaries in order to pay huge "insider dividends" to executives so that they can get around the no shareholders in a charity conundrum, leeching is a much more basic and familiar method of money extraction.

Essentially it is the age old scam of making yourself (and your associates) the supplier and the buyer in a transaction involving somebody else's money.

This is not a new problem in the education system. You'd have to be some delusionally optimistic socialist to believe that all Local Authorities (the guys that used to run our schools before Gove's mass privatisation) were so well administered that nobody was making themselves a fortune by awarding contracts to their own companies, or the companies of their mates. However the problem is getting a lot worse now, and some of the academy chains are being absolutely brazen about it too.

The most high profile example is Acadamies Enterprise Trust (the one paying six figure salaries to twenty of their staff - see above) which has been procuring "services" from their own directors and trustees to the tune of half a million pounds, none of the contracts agreed under competitive tender.

AET secretary Ian Comfort bagged £232,960 on top of his salary, and other no-bid contracts were handed out to several other AET insiders too. £171,944 has been paid out to Foster Project and Leadership Development, which belongs to AET trustee Ian Forster. Large sums have also been paid out to other trustees and executives at the pseudo-charity, including Frank Butler Human Resources and Steve Leverett.

Lets get this straight: If you did this with someone else's money in a corporation, your bosses would have you behind bars in a shot (unless of course you were doing it under their explicit orders); if you did this in local government, local investigative journalists (assuming there are any decent ones in your area) would drag you through the coals on it and possibly even get you locked up for it; but because these are pseudo-charities, it seems they can get away with it with complete impunity.

It is not as if AET is a rotten apple at the bottom of the barrel either. They are the single largest taxpayer funded academy group in the UK! 
 
REMEMBER - IT IS TAXPAYERS' MONEY THEY'RE SIPHONING OFF INTO THEIR OWN COMPANIES AND PERSONAL BANK ACCOUNTS, WHILST THE REST OF US ENDURE "AUSTERITY".
  

Expenses

Another large pseudo-charitable academy chain that has been caught out awarding large untendered contracts to insiders is E-Act which has been handed ownership of 35 taxpayer built schools, and all of the taxpayer funded subsidies that come with them. They have also been criticised for their "extravagant expenses claims, first-class rail travel and "a culture of prestige venues" for meetings".

Expenses are a classic method for extracting personal wealth from public enterprises. I won't go into it in detail because I'm assuming that we are all familiar with the kind of brazen expenses scamming of Westminster politicians, and their absolute refusal to stop despite the glare of press coverage that has continued ever since the expenses scandal broke in 2009.

It is safe to say that there are an awful lot well-to-do academy trustees and executives all over England claiming every penny they can get away with in expenses, eating fine food in expensive restaurants, meeting in exclusive conference centres, staying in luxury hotels for pseudo-charitable junkets and traveling in luxury vehicles or in first class, wherever they go.

REMEMBER - ALL OF THESE EXPENSES ARE PAID OUT OF PUBLIC MONEY THAT SHOULD BE DESTINED FOR THE EDUCATION OF OUR CHILDREN.

Transfer Pricing

One last profit extraction mechanism I'm going to look at is Transfer Pricing, which is a term that should be familiar to anyone that knows a bit about tax-dodging*.

Transfer Pricing is an accountancy trick which allows institutions to extract profit in a particular geographic location. It is usually used by corporations in order to make it appear that company profits were made in tax haven economies, when the massive bulk of their business was actually conducted elsewhere.

To give a fictional example: Slock Coffee Shops do the majority of their European business in the UK but they import all of their coffee beans via a subsidiary in Switzerland. The beans are then sold to Slock Coffee outlets in the UK at well above the market rate, which is excused with the narrative that Slock Coffee beans are in some way unique, hence the higher price. This technique allows Slock coffee to extract their profits in low-tax Switzerland, (despite having virtually no coffee shops there) and to pay virtually nothing in UK tax (despite the vast majority of their European trade being done there).

This transfer pricing trick has been used by foreign companies in order to extract profits from the Torified education system too.

One example is the Aurora Academies Trust which runs four primary schools in Sussex which demands that all of their schools must use the Paragon Curriculum, meaning that they pay a £100 per student per year premium to the American company that owns the patent on the curriculum; Mosaica Education Inc. These fees add up to £100,000 per year.

It will come as absolutely no surprise to learn that Aurora Academies Trust is owned and operated by a UK subsidiary of Mosaica Education Inc.
What is the rationale for British schools full of British children paying over the odds for an American curriculum, other than to spin a profit for the US corporation that owns the academy group?

It might be understandable if the US education system was a world leader, but it is absolutely not. The US is plummeting down the league table of academic standards even more rapidly than the UK.

Perhaps it would make sense if these schools were paying over the odds for curricula from highly successful education systems like Finland, the Netherlands, Japan or South Korea, but paying over the odds for a curriculum from a nation with a failing (and massively price-inflated) education system is frankly ludicrous.

The Paragon Curriculum is clearly designed for American, not British kids and even then it has been heavily criticised by US teaching unions and several of the schools that have used their services, only to find that the curriculum was not aligned to state standards, meaning that kids were failing their exams in alarming numbers. If this US company can't even properly tailor their curriculum to the educational standards of Louisiana, it is extremely difficult to imagine how their curriculum would be appropriate for British kids.
 
REMEMBER - ALL OF THIS CASH BEING SIPHONED OFF BY AN AMERICAN CORPORATION IS PAID FOR BY BRITISH TAXPAYERS.
  
POLITICS

One of the most shocking things about the school privatisation agenda is the number of Tory party insiders who have benefited from this scheme to give away our schools to unaccountable private sector interests. Another shocking aspect is the way that Britain's archaic and undemocratic honours system is being used to reward the profiteers that run these pseudo-charitable academy chains.

Probably the most high profile Tory insider to profit from the Tory school privatisation agenda is "Lord" Philip Harris, an unelected Tory member of the House of Lords who is most famous for being the boss of Carpetright. His Harris Federation group now controls over a dozen schools in London (all of which have had their name changed to "Harris ..."). The ownership of several of these schools was forcibly converted to "Lord Carpetright's" academy chain against the wishes of the staff, the children and local residents.

Philip Harris has donated nearly half a million pounds to the Tory party in recent years.

Another high profile beneficiary of the Tory school privatisation agenda is the hedge fund manager and massive donor to the Tory party "Lord" Stanley Fink, who is the chairman of ARK academies, a group which now controls 18 taxpayer funded schools.

Stanley Fink has donated over $2.6 million to the Tory party.

"Lord" John Nash is yet another Tory party donor that is deeply involved in the school privatisation agenda. He has established an academy chain called Future Academies which controls four schools in London. Future Academies hit the headlines in 2013 after it was revealed that they had appointed a 27 year old with absolutely no teaching experience as the head teacher of one of their schools.

In January 2013 Nash was parachuted into the anti-democratic House of Lords by David Cameron in order that he could become Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools. The conflicts of interest in having a guy that operates four privatised but taxpayer funded schools working as a schools minister with responsibility for privately operated taxpayer funded schools is incredibly obvious. Another obviously worrying aspect is the fact that a staunch supporter of, and generous financial donor to the Tory party is now responsible for overseeing the national curriculum that is taught to our kids.

John Nash and his wife have donated nearly £300,000 to the Tory party.

Another Tory cashing in on Michael Gove's school privatisation bonanza is the former treasurer of the Tory party Alan Lewis. He is the "patron" of the Kings Science Academy in Bradford and also the owner of the land on which the school is built, meaning that £12 million in public funds look set to flow into his bank account over the coming years. In early 2014 it was revealed that the head of Kings Science Academy has been arrested over allegations of fraud.

Alan Lewis has donated at least £374,000 to the Tory party.

David Cameron has used the archaic and undemocratic honours system to reward several academy bosses -  the ones that are "topslicing" education funds in order to pay themselves and their mates six figure salaries. Here are a few examples:

Dan Moynihan - the guy that bags over £317,000 a year for chairing Lord Carpetright's chain of Harris Academies - was handed a knighthood by David Cameron in 2012.

Robin Bosher - the head of primary education at Harris Academies - also bagged a knighthood from David Cameron in 2012.

Michael Wilkins - the guy that takes over £180,000 as director of Outwood Grange Academies Trust - was handed a knighthood by David Cameron in 2014.

CONCLUSION

Michael Gove and the Tory party have been waging ideological war on the education system and the mainstream corporate media are pretty much letting them get away with it.

• They have given away countless £billions worth taxpayer funded infrastructure, for free, to unaccountable private sector interests, including to a number of major Tory party donors.
• The virtually unregulated shambles they have introduced has created countless opportunities for the unscrupulous to pillage taxpayer funds that are supposed to be used to educate our children.
• They have allowed academy bosses to "topslice" extraordinary salaries and inflation busting pay rises for themselves at a time when teachers (the people that actually do the work) are having their wages repressed with below inflation pay rises.
• They have allowed schools to set up extremely dodgy financial arrangements, where the directors and trustees divert taxpayers' cash into their own businesses and personal accounts via no-bid "service" contracts.
• They have allowed foreign corporations to establish academy chains in order to extract vast sums out of the education system (and out of the country) by charging for the use of their curricula.
• They have used the UK's archaic and undemocratic honours system to lavish Lordships and Knighthoods upon the people who are milking the privatised education system for everything they can get out of it.

If the Labour party had any backbone at all they would be promising to put an end to this shambles by forcing academies to hand back the property deeds to schools that were built at the taxpayer's expense, and by imposing regulations on their wages and business practices. But instead all we get is silence.

 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.

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 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

              
Michael Gove's Great War revisionism
               
The "unpatriotic left" fallacy
           

What is ... Confirmation Bias?
            
Tory policy: Serve the rich, smash the poor
     
Michael Gove, food poverty and neoliberalism
           
The Tory "War on Justice"

                         
What is ... Wage Repression?
               
What do Tory donors get for their cash
              
The "Making Work Pay" fallacy
      
What is ... a Justification Narrative?

            

Note: This article was amended in April 2015 to give a little more detail on the way that school properties have been simply given away, or leased out at below the market rate on 125 year contracts.