How could anyone believe that Iain Duncan Smith is now serious about combating food poverty?

In December 2014 a shocking Church of England funded report into the exponential growth in food bank dependency was published. In this article I'm going to consider the report and its findings, look at the ludicrous initial responses from the Tory party and then examine Iain Duncan Smith's claims that he will offer a "positive response" to the findings.

The report

As is often the case, the vast majority of the mainstream media coverage has failed to include an actual link to the report so that people can read it for themselves. I think it's important that people do have the option of viewing the documents for themselves, so here's a link.

The Feeding Britain report was financially backed by the Church of England and the inquiry members were Tim Thornton (the Bishop of Truro) Frank Field MP (Labour) John Glen MP (Tory), Sarah Newton MP (Tory) Emma Lewell-Buck (Labour) and the unelected peer Anne Jenkin (Tory).

The report concluded that a number of factors have contributed to the dramatic rise in food bank dependency. One of the main factors is the skyrocketing cost of living, with food prices prices up 46.4% since 2003 and fuel up 154%. These rises compare very badly with the average increase in wages (up just 27.9%).

Another important factor is the increased use of benefits sanctions designed to condemn people to absolute poverty for "crimes" such as being five minutes late for an appointment, having a heart attack during a employment assessment, selling poppies for a few hours a week for the Royal British Legion, attending a job interview, or refusing to work for no wages at giant multinational corporations like Poundland (owned by the US Private Equity group Warburg Pincus). The report itself details cases of people having their benefits cut off entirely for writing information on the wrong line of a document, attending an urgent medical appointment with their daughter and not applying for jobs after the deadline had already passed.

Some of the recommendations in the report include better redistribution of food wasted by supermarkets so that it can be used to feed the poor, the establishment of an Office For Living Standards within the Treasury, an increase in the minimum wage, reform of the benefits sanction system including the introduction of "yellow cards", reductions in benefits delays and many other things. I suggest that you follow the link to the report and scroll down to page 46 if you want to read the summary of all of their recommendations.

The initial Tory spin

At first the Tories attempted to spin their way out of admitting there was even a problem. The unelected Tory peer John Nash tried to deflect criticism by saying that food bank usage "went up 10 times under the previous government" a look at the actual figures shows how misleading this particular statistical soundbyte is. Food Bank usage increased from 2,814 in 2005-06 to 40,898 in 2009-10, an overall increase of 38,000 people per year using food banks. Under the Tory led government it has soared to 913,138 people per year - an increase of 872,240 people. Only in the world of tribablistic political excuses does an increase of 40,000 counterbalance an increase of 870,000.

Then the unelected Tory peer Anne Jenkin waded in trying to distract attention away from the findings of the report with a ludicrous assertion that poor people use food banks "because they don't know how to cook". If this were really the reason for the exponential growth in food bank dependency it would mean that hundreds of thousands of people must have simply forgotten how to cook since 2010! Anne Jenkin was quick to retract her remarks after the storm of criticism they provoked, but the fact that such a person was on the Inquiry panel arguing the Tory case that poor people are to blame for their own poverty, just goes to show that had the inquiry team not been packed out with Tories, the conclusions and recommendations would surely have been even more hard-hitting.

Iain Duncan Smith's response

Iain Duncan Smith has a long track record of obfuscating, misleading and outright lying when it comes to issues such as benefits sanctions, absolute destitution, workfare, the appalling treatment of disabled people and food bank usage, however this report poses a serious problem for him. Not only is it backed by the Church of England (Iain Duncan Smith laughably claims to be motivated by Christian ethics!), more than half of the politicians on the inquiry were Tories.This means that he can't just dismiss the report as being politically partisan in the way that he's casually dismissed other hard-hitting food poverty reports (such as the work of the Trussell Trust).

In a particularly weasely and misleading statement Iain Duncan Smith promised to respond positively to the report, but anyone who is familiar with Iain Duncan Smith's track record (making up qualifications on his CV, bragging that he could live on £53 per week for a year then not following through, obfuscating and obstructing, showing contempt for the dead, misusing official statistics, unlawfully bypassing parliament, lying about court judgments against him, willfully ignoring court judgments against him etc) must know that he's not a man to be taken at his word.

We only have to look back to December 2013 to see the real attitude of Iain Duncan Smith and the Tories. After laughing, shouting and smirking their way through a debate on food poverty the Tories and their sickening Lib-Dem enablers defeated an opposition motion to compel the government to begin combating food poverty (by 294 votes to 251). Iain Duncan Smith showed his outright contempt for the whole issue by refusing to speak on behalf of the government (instead passing the buck to his odious sidekick Esther McVey) and then walking out of the debate after less than an hour. Within a week he launched a blistering tirade at the Trussell Trust, which gave a very clear forewarning that the Tory Gagging law was actually designed to silence political criticism, not to regulate the lobbying industry as they tried to pretend.

Does anyone really believe that a man with a long track record of dishonesty; a man who who instructed his Tory colleagues to vote down a motion to compel the government combat food poverty just one year ago; a man who couldn't even be arsed to speak in, or even sit through the debate, is a man who has suddenly had an epiphany and decided to make combating food poverty one of his main priorities? Is anyone really that gullible?

A look at some of Iain Duncan Smith's other comments about the Feeding Britain report illustrate the fact that he's sticking to the same tactic of snide, sneering dishonesty.

Not got a leg to stand on? - Time to deploy a straw-man argument

One of the strongest indicators that he's simply going to continue as before was his statement that "It’s really ridiculous to assume that every single reason why someone is going to a food bank is down to what the DWP does". This is a blatant straw-man argument because the report doesn't say this, in fact nobody says this. Most people are well aware that the Tory "war on wages" has resulted in the longest sustained decline in the average wage since records began, and that as a consequence, huge numbers of working families have been driven into dire poverty and food bank dependency, which means that DWP decisions are clearly not the root cause of every single instance of food bank dependency.

What this straw-man argument shows is that Iain Duncan Smith is still insistent on using fallacious debating tactics to make his own incredibly weak debating position look stronger. We shouldn't be shocked that a man with such an appalling track record of dishonesty would use the tactic of making up a rubbish argument and then demolishing it in order to make his own desperate position look better. What we should be shocked by is the fact that, as always, the mainstream media are totally unwilling to hold him to account for using these appallingly sly debating tactics.

Workfare and sanctions league tables

Another indicator that Iain Duncan Smith is going to continue his shockingly dishonest approach is his attempt to paint the exponential growth in the use of benefits sanctions as some kind of accidental occurrence where vulnerable people are slipping through the cracks, rather than them being deliberately forced into the meat grinder by a department driven by Iain Duncan Smith's desire to juke the unemployment statistics by tricking as many vulnerable people as possible into losing their benefits and by forcing them onto Stalinist style unpaid labour schemes under the threat of absolute destitution.

Rigging the headline rate of unemployment is one of Iain Duncan Smith's main objectives as head of the DWP. The way this is achieved is by forcing unemployed people onto unpaid compulsory labour schemes like "Help to Work". Even though the hundreds of thousands of people forced on these schemes have no wages, and they're still claiming unemployment benefits, they are not included in the official unemployment statistics. If people refuse to go on the schemes, they are stripped of their unemployment benefits, meaning that they too are not classed as unemployed on the official statistics (unless they carry on signing on in order to receive no money).

Thus under Iain Duncan Smith's system people are given the choice of doing forced labour and disappearing off the unemployment stats, or refusing to be exploited as a source of free labour for Iain Duncan Smith's mates and disappearing off the unemployment stats.

Another way in which Iain Duncan Smith's department have tried to artificially reduce the headline unemployment rate is through sanctions league tables. Before 2013 Iain Duncan Smith, other members of the Tory party and numerous DWP spokespeople all repeatedly lied that there were no such things as sanctions league tables, until the sanctions league tables (that supposedly didn't exist) were leaked to the press in March 2013.

The problem with sanctions league tables and the setting of sanctions targets is that it is much easier for Jobcentre staff to meet their targets by tricking the mentally ill and the severely uneducated into committing sanctionable offences, than it is to invest a great deal of time trying to catch out the tiny minority of hardened benefits claimants who are very clued up at gaming the system. Thus hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people have been thrown into absolute destitution to meet the sanctions targets that Iain Duncan Smith and the Tories repeatedly lied about the non-existence of.

Sanctions league tables and targets do exist, a culture of tricking people into committing sanctionable offences has been encouraged within the DWP and hundreds of thousands of people have been faced with the "unpaid labour or destitution via sanctions" dilemma. These are some of the big reasons behind the exponential growth in people getting sanctioned, and significant causal factors in the rise in food poverty, but instead of admitting culpability in these deliberate policy of impoverishment, Iain Duncan Smith is insistent that it's all some kind of unforeseen tragedy, and now that he's aware of it "we want to do everything we can to make sure that people do not stumble into a process of sanctions".

Iain Duncan Smith's track record

When the Trussell trust used the information in the "reason for referral" box on their referral forms to begin collecting proof that benefits sanctions and benefits delays were responsible for a significant percentage of food bank referrals, Iain Duncan Smith refused to countenance reforming the system so as to prevent people falling into abject poverty (because the fear of abject poverty is one of the main tools he uses to get people to participate in his forced labour schemes). What the DWP did instead was to ensure that the "reason for referral" box was simply removed from the food bank referral form so that the Trussell Trust no longer had easy access to the data proving DWP culpability.

When Iain Duncan Smith says that he's going to "do something positive", we should be very wary indeed that his idea of doing something positive is not some kind of euphemism for attempting to destroy or cover up the sources of the information that people are using to criticise him with.

Conclusion

In my view Iain Duncan Smith is the most dishonest and vindictive cabinet member in the most dishonest and vindictive government in living memory. He's proven his dishonesty and his malice towards those he considers to be beneath him on countless occasions.

Anyone who is inclined to believe his claims that he's going to take "positive action" to combat the exponential growth in food povery only needs to look at his shocking behaviour (and the outrageous behaviour of his party) when the subject of food poverty was debated in parliament less than a year ago.

This is a man who couldn't even be bothered to sit through the food poverty debate (as well as having lied about the non-existence of sanctions league tables, lied about court judgments against him and blatantly misused official statistics). If anyone thinks that this is a straight-talking guy who will stick to his word, they must be the most dismally poor judges of character.

It is incontestable that thanks to his draconian regimes of "workfare or sanctions" and the widespread use of sanctions targets and league tables within the DWP, Iain Duncan Smith is largely responsible for the shocking rise in food poverty. Therefore you'd have to be completely out of your mind to think that he's an appropriate person to be given responsibility for reversing it. 

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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.

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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.

More Tory hypocrisy: Stuffing the Lords

On August 1st 2013 the Tory led government announced the addition of yet another batch of unelected political stooges to the anti-democratic House of Lords. Of the 30 new life peers, 14 are Tories, 10 are Liberal Democrats, 5 are Labour and one Green.

The fact that the Prime Minister of the day can simply select as many life peers as he likes to sit in the unelected House of Lords is one of the most anti-democratic examples of political patronage in world politics. To put the absurdity of our anti-democratic upper house into perspective, try to imagine for a moment the public outrage in the US or France if it was suggested that their fully elected senates were replaced with a system of unelected cronyism like ours.

Since David Cameron came to power three years ago, he has added an incredible 160 new life peers, which come at an average £130,000 a year cost to the taxpayer. This is a rate of 53 new peers a year, meaning that Cameron is adding unelected cronies to the House of Lords faster than any Prime minister in history. Tony Blair is the only Prime Minister to have averaged even half the rate of Cameron (34 peers a year). The rest of the people to have served as Prime Minister since Life Peerages were introduced, have added new peers at a rate of less than 25 a year. David Cameron's predecessor Gordon Brown only added only 34 peers in his three years, a fifth of the rate at which Cameron is currently stuffing the House of Lords.

Thanks to David Cameron's policy of stuffing the House of Lords, it has swelled to an incredible 861 members, none of them directly elected by the public and all of them entitled to £300 a day, plus expenses, plus subsidised food and drink in the various expensive eateries in parliament.

It is rumoured that Cameron has given the green light to yet another 23 Life Peers, but they are being made to wait a while before getting their free pass into the House of Lords because the government were afraid that adding more than 50 unelected peers in one go simply wouldn't wash with the public.

One of the most glaring problems with Cameron's abuse of the Life Peerage system is that several of the people he has given peerages to also happen to be enormous donors to the Conservative party. The pick of the current crop of 30 new lords is Anthony Bamford (of JCB fame) who had donated well over £2 million to the Tory party since 2001 via personal donations and donations through the JCB company accounts. Several other massive donors to the Tory party to have been given direct access to our pseudo-democratic parliamentary system include Philip Harris (£485,000 in Tory donations), Stanley Fink (£2.6 million in Tory donations), John Nash (£300,000 in Tory donations), Dolar Popat (£250,000 in Tory donations), George Magan (£800,000 in Tory donations) and Robert Edmiston (£1.1 million in Tory donations via his company). [source]

The fact that Cameron is rapidly stuffing the House of Lords with scores of Tory and Lib-Dem peers (including a concerning number of major Tory party donors) as a matter of official government policy is hardly surprising. It is clearly in the interests of the government to ensure that the unelected upper house is sympathetic to the government, so that any legislation the House of Commons passes, will simply be rubber stamped by the upper house. Stuffing the House of Lords with sympathetic cronies is exactly the kind of strategy one would expect of a self serving government with an aversion to oversight and accountability.

The problem for the Tories when it comes to their policy of stuffing the House of Lords with unelected political cronies, is that it runs entirely contrary to another Tory party policy, the electoral boundary reforms that were shot down in 2012 by the only noteworthy Liberal Democrat rebellion to date. The boundary reform plan was to reduce the size of the elected House of Commons from 650 members to 600, in a way that would ensure that the vast majority of seats to be lost would be in Labour and Liberal-Democrat constituencies.

Can anyone remember the Tory rhetoric on this? That a parliament of 650 is too big and unwieldy? Can anyone remember the official Tory party statement when the boundary reform legislation was defeated by the opposition parties and various Liberal Democrat and Tory party rebels? Well if you don't remember, here's the official statement released by David Cameron's press office:
 

"The Prime Minister's view is that he is strongly in favour of smaller, cheaper and fairer politics"

Now think about the way Cameron has been stuffing the House of Lords with scores of totally unelected Tory members (including several extremely wealthy Tory party donors) at an average cost to the taxpayer of £130,000 a year each. Think about the way Cameron has swelled the size of the unelected House of Lords from 704 members in 2010 to 861 now, with yet another 23 waiting in the wings.

Do these sound like the actions of a man that is "strongly in favour of smaller, cheaper, fairer politics"?

Do they buggery!

Once again Cameron's actions expose the emptiness of his words as just another populist justification narrative to obscure his real motivations (cementing Tory power by eliminating the parliamentary seats of opposition MPs). It is absolutely staggering that a man of such brazen dishonesty is able to serve as Prime Minister, he lies repeatedly and virtually everything he says is coated in a veneer of misleading political spin.

That Cameron is stuffing the Lords at an unprecedented rate is an incontestable demonstration that he was outright lying about his justification for boundary reforms. He clearly hasn't got the faintest interest in making politics smaller, cheaper and fairer. So what is the real motivation behind the Tory political reform agenda?

Lets think about how it is even possible to describe an elected house of 650 members as bloated and inefficient and demand that it is reduced by 50 members, whilst simultaneously believing that an entirely unelected house of 704 is nowhere near large enough and stuffing it with an additional 160 members in the space of just three years.

In my view, the only possible conclusion to draw from this contrast is that in the minds of people like David Cameron, the problem with the UK electoral system isn't that it is archaic, unrepresentative and riddled with anti-democratic practices, but that there is actually too much democracy and nowhere near enough unelected political privilege for their liking.

 

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Margaret Thatcher's toxic legacies
                                 
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People of Britian, your Prime Minister is lying to you (again)
                  

What do Tory donors get for their cash?

Who could ever forget the sight of a grotesquely hypocritical David Cameron working himself up into a fit of faux outrage at the fact that the Labour party are mainly funded by the trade unions. There was a man who knows damn well that his own political party is almost entirely funded through vast donations from the wealthy and privileged (many of them "rogues" to put it mildly), ranting on about the fact that the Labour party are funded through small donations from millions of working people.

Cameron knows exactly where the vast majority of Tory donations come from, because he gladly prostitutes himself out to the wealthy like some kind of podgy, shiny faced, middle aged male escort, "having dinner" or "attending drinks receptions" with anyone willing to stump up a few hundred grand in order to attempt to buy some influence.

How could anyone that pays the scantest regard to politics be able to forget that the Tory party treasurer Peter Cruddas was forced to resign in March 2012 after being covertly filmed bragging that a "Premier League" donation of £200,000 to £250,000 would buy direct access to David Cameron and George Osborne, and that all feedback from such meetings would be put directly to the number 10 policy committee?

It is worth noting that, despite the Cruddas "cash for influence scandal", the Conservative party website still hawks access to David Cameron and other senior Tory figures for cash, with the highest levels of access ("dinners, post-PMQ lunches, drinks receptions, election result events and important campaign launches") available for a £50,000 fee. The following link contains a list of some of the people and organisations to have recently stumped up fifty grand in order to rub shoulders with the Tory hierarchy - Conservative Leader's Group members 2013.

It seems that at least some of the public are able to see through Cameron's ersatz outrage over party funding, since Labour have actually extended their lead in the polls since Cameron scored the PR own goal of focusing attention political donations, yet another appalling PR blunder for someone whose only private sector experience was a stint as a PR man for Carlton TV (a job which was arranged for him by his mother-in-law).

In my view there is still nothing like sufficient mainstream media coverage of the tiny cabal of super-rich donors that have bought such extraordinary access to the Tory top brass, so I'm going to profile a few of these people, in the hope that this article might get shared around a bit.

Adrian Beecroft (Leaders group member)

Tory donor Adrian Beecroft was even invited to draw up Tory employment
policy for them. His proposals included several measures which would
have many obvious financial benefits for his personal business interests.

Private Equity manager Adrian Beecroft has donated over half a million pounds to the Tories since 2005.

Beecroft is the head of the private equity group that administers the barely legal loan shark operation Wonga. The Wonga business model is to prey on the mentally ill, the financially illiterate and the absolutely desperate by offering them usurious loans at eyewatering interest rates. The typical interest rate on a Wonga loan is an incredible 5,853% APR!

Even in the free-market obsessed United States, such outrageous loans are illegal, but here in the UK the Tory party are stubbornly resisting efforts to regulate the so-called Payday lending sector and introduce maximum APRs. Does this resistance have anything to do with the fact that one of their biggest donors runs one of the biggest legal loan shark operations in the country?

In 2012 the Tory leadership invited Beecroft to draw up Tory employment policy for them. What Beecroft came back with was nothing short of a corporate wishlist of pro-business anti-worker regulations, including proposals to introduce sack-at-will legislation, to restrict access to unfair dismissal claims and slash awards that are made to those that are not excluded entirely, to create immunity from prosecution for employers that hire illegal immigrants and to remove carry-over legislation to allow new owners of businesses to rid themselves of long established workers.

Legal loan shark companies like Wonga would be obvious beneficiaries of attacks on labour rights such as sack-at-will legislation and the denial of the right to claim unfair dismissal compensation, however there are obvious benefits to several of his other business interest too, such as hedge funds intent on asset stripping companies they have acquired finding it much easier to rid themselves of the pesky employees.

There was such an uproar about Beecroft's proposals that the Tories couldn't implement many of them, however they have implemented other reforms that benefit legal loan sharks like Wonga, such as George Osborne's decision to make the newly unemployed wait a whole week before they are allowed to claim unemployment benefits (Wonga Week), making a tough situation significantly harder and pushing more people into the financial desperation necessary in order to turn to usurious companies like Wonga.

Philip Harris (Leaders group member)

Philip Harris, is the founder of Carpetright and has an estimated fortune of £285 million. He has donated nearly half an million pounds to the Tories in recent years.

In recent years Harris has been using his pseudo-charity Harris Academies to hoover up state schools and convert them into academies. Harris has been handed the property deeds of millions of pounds worth of state schools, for free.

Once these state schools are converted into academies, they are still taxpayer funded, but this funding is now topsliced by Harris directors who award themselves ridiculously inflated salaries. The director of the Harris Federation bagged £317,000 plus pension contributions in 2012, with a further five individuals at the pseudo-charity earning in excess of £140,000. An interesting comparison can be made with the maximum local authority salary for secondary school head-teachers which in 2012 ranged between £42,379 and £112,181 (with only the head of a large inner London secondary school eligible for the highest salary). Thus, the people actually doing the work of teaching the children and running the schools get low salaries, whilst the Harris executives fill their pockets at the taxpayers' expense. The idle bosses stuffing their pockets, whilst the people that actually do the work get a tiny fraction of the recompense; an all too familiar Tory party business model.

Stanley Fink (Leaders group member)

Fink is a hedge fund manager with an estimated fortune of £120 million. He has donated over £2.6 million to the Tories over the years. After Peter Cruddas was forced to resign over the "cash for influence" scandal, Fink took over as Tory party treasurer.

Fink was given a seat in the House of Lords by David Cameron in 2011. As a director of several financial institutions, Fink has benefited from the Conservative refusal to regulate the City of London in the wake of the financial sector meltdown ans well as gaining from other Tory policies such as their huge cuts in corporation tax and their reduction of the top rate of income tax.

Aside from his financial sector interests, Fink is also chairman of Zenith Hygiene Group, which is hoovering up ever more government contracts. According to Zenith website "More and more educational facilities and government premises rely on Zenith to meet and exceed their unique requirements. In the education sector in particular we are a growing presence, both directly and through third party contractors." Perhaps it is only coincidence that so many government contracts are being handed to a major Tory party donor?

John Nash (Leaders group member)

John Nash: One of many major Tory donors to have been
appointed to the House of Lords by David Cameron

John Nash and his wife have donated almost £300,000 to the Conservative party since David Cameron became Tory leader.

As director of both Sovereign Capital and their subsidiary ESG, Nash benefited from the award of two £multi-million government contracts. In May 2011 ESG was awarded a £69 million government contract to administer Iain Duncan Smith's desperately failing Work Programme in Warwickshire and Staffordshire. ESG also won another £4 million contract to bully unemployed people in the West Midlands into doing mandatory unpaid labour schemes, for which the firm gains £800 for every person they force onto these unlawful Labour party approved workfare schemes.

Like Philip Harris, Nash is another beneficiary of Michael Gove's school privatisation-by-stealth schemes, with his pseudo-charity Future Academies taking over a number of state schools in the Westminster area.

In 2013 David Cameron gave Nash a seat in the House of Lords and immediately made him a government minister with responsibility for overseeing the development of the new national curriculum. This is a classic example of the anti-democratic nature of the House of Lords. If the Prime Minister of the day wants to appoint one of his cronies as a government minister, there is no need to seek any kind of electoral approval, the guy can just be parachuted into the House of Lords and appointed a government minister. Do we really want to see Tory party donors parachuted into the House of Lords and gifted responsibility for deciding what our kids are taught in school? 
 Alan Lewis

Yet another high profile Tory party donor 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. Lewis has donated at least £374,000 to the Tory party in recent years.

Dolar Popat and other "Lords"

Ugandan born Popat has donated significantly more than £250,000 to the Tory party and is another Tory donor to have "coincidentally" been given a seat in the House of Lords by David Cameron and then been appointed as a government minister. Popat took over from  Lord Marland (yet another rider of the  £200,000+ donation to the Tory party > Lord > Government minister  gravy train). Other major Tory donors to have found themselves appointed to the house of Lords by David Cameron include George Magan (£811,000 in donations), who was appointed as a Lord in January 2011 and Robert Edmiston (who has donated more than £1.1 million via his company IM Properties), who was also ennobled by Cameron in January 2011. 

Paul Ruddock

Ruddock was the boss of the Lansdowne Partners hedge fund until late 2013 and he remains a major shareholder in the company. He has made over £600,000 in donations to the Tory party.

The most obvious reward for these donations was the Kinghthood he received in 2012, however he has been a financial beneficiary of several Tory party schemes.

Lansdowne Partnerships is a major shareholder (29%) in Circle Health, a private health company that was awarded the £1.2 billion contract to run the Hinchingbrooke hospital in Cambridgeshire. According to the Daily Mirror Circle Health have plans to snap up £8 billion worth of NHS contracts.

Ruddock and Lansdowne partners are not the only financial link between Circle Health and donations to the Tory party.

Crispin Oday has donated over £222,000 to the Tory party - He is the boss of Oday Asset Management which holds a 21% stake in Circle Health.

Martyn Arbib has donated over £478,000 to the Tory party - He is the founder of Invesco Perpetual which holds a 22% stake in Circle Health.

Michael Platt has donated £75,000 to the Tory party - He is the founder of Blue Crest Capital which holds a 7% stake in Circle Health.

Returning to Paul Ruddock, the Tory carve-up of the NHS isn't the only policy from which he is benefiting financially, he's also cashed in on the decision to sell-off the Royal Mail at significantly below it's true market valuation. Despite Vince Cable's promise to keep "spivs and speculators" out of the Royal Mail, ordinary investors were limited to stakes of £750, whilst Lansdowne Partners were handed £50 million worth of Royal Mail shares. Within hours the value of these shares had bounced up towards their true market value, netting Lansdowne an instant profit of £28 million.

David Ross (Leaders Group member)

Whilst his company was collapsing into ruin leaving a vast
£51.8 million pension shortfall and unsecured creditors and
trade suppliers facing appalling losses, David Ross managed
to find £50,000 to give to the Tories so he could continue
to rub shoulders with David Cameron and Co.

Ross has donated at least £265,000 to the Tory party, including a £17,500 donation to former Tory MP Louise Mensch.

In February 2013 Ross's firm Cosalt was put into administration, with shareholders losing all of their investments and trade creditors taking an estimated £9 million loss. The biggest black hole in the company finances was a huge £51.8 million pension deficit, which will be paid off by the government via the Pension Protection Fund. Ross is estimated to have a £710 million personal fortune and whilst his company was collapsing into administration causing huge losses to shareholders and creditors alike, he managed to find another £50,000 to give to the Tory party so that he could continue to rub shoulders with the likes of David Cameron, George Osborne, Jeremy Hunt and Theresa May.

George Robinson & Hugh Sloane (Leaders Group members)


These two guys run the Sloane Robinson hedge fund. Sloane has donated more than half a million pounds to the Tory party in recent years and Robinson has also given them at least £379,000.

In June 2012 David Cameron took the unusual step of lambasting the (so-called) comedian Jimmy Carr for tax-dodging, describing Carr's behaviour as "very dodgy" and "morally repugnant". Just a few weeks later George Robinson and Hugh Sloane were ordered to repay £millions in back tax after a £13 million Sloane Robinson tax swindle was declared unlawful. Did Cameron jump onto his high horse and declare Sloane and Robinson's financial affairs "very dodgy" and "morally repugnant", of course he bloody didn't! In fact, Cameron is still accepting their political donations and according to the 2013 list, still rubbing shoulders with Hugh Sloane at Leaders Group lunches and drinks receptions too!

Gary Lydiate (Leaders Group members)

Lydiate is the Chief Executive of Kilfrost and has donated more than £200,000 to the Tory party in recent years.

In late June 2013, Lydiate was part of a gaggle of around 30 businessmen that joined David Cameron on his visit to Kazakhstan, a country ruled over by a brutal human rights abusing dictator called Nursultan Nazarbayev. It is reported that Lydiate, on behalf of Kilfrost, agreed to invest £50 million in Kazakhstan. Instead of focusing the company expansion drive on the North East of England (where Kilfrost is based) where a few more jobs would be more than welcome, he's decided to pour all that cash into a bloodsoaked dictatorship instead.

Ian Taylor (Leaders Group member)

Englishman Ian Taylor has donated half a million quid to the Tories, and
another half million to the anti-independence propaganda campaign
in Scotland.

Taylor is the chief executive of the oil trading company Vitol and has donated over half a million pounds to the Tories since 2005. Taylor was named as one of the beneficiaries of the cash for access scandal. It is allegaed that his company were given help by the coalition government to set up oil contracts with the rebel forces during the Libyan civil war worth an estimated £500 million.

Under Taylor's leadership Vitol have a long record of extremely dodgy dealings, including a £1 million payment to the Serbian war criminal Arkan (to "sort out" an oil deal) and supporting Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq with kickbacks (for which the company was fined $17.5 million in the US). The company also stands accused of using elaborate tax avoidance Employee Benefit Trusts to allow their employees to avoid paying Income Tax and National Insurance on their incomes. (source for claims in this paragraph)

English born and raised, and London resident Taylor has also pumped another half a million pounds of his cash into the anti-independence "Better Together" campaign in Scotland, funding two anti-independence propaganda sites. These contributions make this English Tory the is the single biggest donor to the anti-independence campaign in Scotland, a place where panda bears are more common than Tory MPs.

David Rowland

Rowland is one of the biggest donors to the Tory party having gifted them well over £4 million.

He was penciled in to become Tory party treasurer in 2010 but withdrew after the press began digging into his past, exposing the fact that he dodged tax by siphoning his wealth through tax havens, first in the Caribbean, and then through Guernsey where he set up residence for 30 years. That Cameron would even consider appointing a serial tax dodger as his party treasurer further illustrates his hubris in squeling about Trade Union donations to the Labour party.

Other Rowland scandals dug up by the Daily Mail include a lead pollution accident in Idaho, the bankruptcy of Hibernian Football Club in the late 1980s, serial asset stripping, infidelity and probably worst of all, a close friendship with the odious Prince Andrew.

Michael Ashcroft

Ashcroft is yet another tax-dodging Tory party donor. If you haven't heard of him then you really haven't been paying attention to politics for the last couple of decades. Ashcroft bases himself in Belize for tax purposes and has given the Tory party over £10 million in cash donations and services.

If you believe that a donation of that size (enough to keep the entire Conservative party going for a whole year) is not enough to buy some political influence, you must be absolutely crackers.

When Ashcroft was given a seat in the House of Lords, solemn assurances were given by the then Tory party leader (now foreign secretary) William Hague, that Ashcroft would give up his non-domiciled status and actually begin paying UK taxes on his fortunes. Almost a decade later it was revealed that Ashcroft had remained non-domiciled, and that Hague's own personal secretary James Arbuthnot had lobbied for Ashcroft to keep his non-dom status, and that Ashcroft had continue avoiding millions of pounds in UK tax on his earnings.

In February 2013, "Lord" Ashcroft announced that he was to quit funding the Tory party out of his opposition to David Cameron's liberal attitudes, specifically his desire to introduce Gay marriage legislation.

The Duke and Duchess of Bedford

This couple are reportedly worth £630 million and are perhaps most famous for being the owners of Woburn Safari Park in Bedfordshire. The couple have donated £49,300 directly to the Tory party, whilst a company which lists the Duke of Bedford as one of their directors has also handed the Tory party over £100,000 in donations.

In September 2013 it was revealed that the Duchess of Bedford has been investing in two aggressive tax-dodging scams called Twofold First Services and Cobalt Data Centre. The Caymen Island based Twofold Services scheme has been described as "abusive" and "artificial" by the Treasury. Margaret Hodge, the Public Accounts Committee chairwoman, was referring to the Cobalt Data Centre scheme as "deeply depressing to find greedy individuals exploiting a perfectly proper Government objective to line their pockets".

It is interesting to note that David Cameron didn't hesitate to condemn the comedian Jimmy Carr for investing in similar aggressive tax-dodging schemes, but when it comes to aristocratic Tory party donors using tax-dodging schemes described by the government themselves as "abusive" and artificial", he has absolutely nothing to say on the subject.

Michael Hintze

Hintze with George Osborne

 
Yet another Tory donor to be up to his eyeballs in tax-dodging scams is the hedge fund owner Michael Hintze. He has donated over £1.3 million to the Tory party directly,  donated another £154,000 through his CQS Management hedge fund and also loaned them more them £2.5 million.

In 2011 CQS Management fiddled their accounts so effectively that they only ended up paying £30,000 in Corporation tax on an operating profit of £85 million. Hintze's Luxembourg based company has successfully avoided paying corporation tax on its profits for years by logging huge artificial losses described as "administrative expenses". Even though CQS has been making paper losses for years, it has been given countless awards at the numerous financial sector awards ceremonies. Had they actually been recording huge losses year after year, rather than just creating them in order to avoid paying corporation tax in the UK, one would have thought they would have struggled to get many best hedge fund awards.
CQS also helped their employees to avoid pating tax on their earnings by paying them through convoluted artificial schemes so that they would only pay 2% tax, rather than the 40% - 50% rates of income tax, had they been paid a normal salary.

In October 2013 Hintze held a lavish £3 million birthday party for himself and several Tory cabinet ministers (including William Hague, Theresa May and Chris Grayling) were in attendance. Just a week or so after enjoying the lavish hospitality of one of their parties biggest donors they attended the Lord Mayor's Banquet where they heard David Cameron promote the idea of everlasting austerity.
  Asil Nadir

Convicted thief Asil Nadir gave large political donations to the Tory party 
whilst he was plundering Polly Peck. After more than two decades the 
Tories still refuse to return the money to the Polly Peck creditors.

After nearly two decades hiding in Northern Cyprus the shamed former business tycoon Asil Nadir returned to the UK and was eventually tried, found guilty of stealing £29 million from Polly Peck, and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. The thefts took place in the years before Polly Peck collapsed in 1990. During his tenure as Polly Peck CEO, Nadir donated £440,000 to the Tory party.

You may think that it is a bit much to conclude with political donations that were made when Margaret Thatcher was still Prime Minister, however these donations adjusted for inflation would now be worth over £1 million. The Conservative party still steadfastly refuse to return the cash to the Polly Peck creditors, even though it was donated to them by a convicted criminal via the company he was in the process of pillaging.

Conclusion

Only the most gullible and cretinous Tory supporter could possibly have read their way through this list and still maintain that there is nothing wrong with the way the Tory party is funded, or protest that these donors have not been getting any level of reward for their donations.

Of course there will be no paper trail to prove exactly what political favours have been handed out in return for these donations, even Neo-Labour weren't stupid enough to leave an incriminating paper trail in the cash for honours scandal. One would expect the Tories to have taken similar precautions, since the one thing most people can agree on is that the one thing the modern Tory party seem to do exceptionally well is corruption.

Only the most delusional of Tory fanatics could allow themselves to believe that all of the huge government contracts, lordships, introductions of extremely favourable legislation, ministerial roles and even invitations to write government policy for them, had nothing to do with the hundreds of thousands of pounds these individuals have donated to the Tory party. This leaves us with only one conclusion. Anyone that knows about these dodgy donations but continues to vote Tory must actually approve of this subversion of democracy: The tribalist Tory apologist must actually believe that it is only right and proper that the privileged should be able to use their wealth in order to subvert democracy by purchasing political favours from the government of the day.

What you can do ...

This list is far from exhaustive. You could look into the background of other major Tory party donors and post your finding in the comments section. Here is the list of Tory donors to have recently donated at least £50,000 in order to join the Leaders Group. 

Leaders Group members 2013

And here is a very useful search tool that allows you to search Tory party donations:

Search the Money

If you are less inclined to dig around in the murky world of Tory party political donations, you could help by sharing this article around so that as many people as possible get the chance to read about what the mainstream media remain suspiciously tight-lipped about.

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