A compendium of Tory corruption

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

13 reasons you'd have to be absolutely cracked to believe the Tories are "the party of law and order"

The Tories absolutely love to pose as "the party of law and order" so in this article I'm going to detail the policies they've pursued in relation to policing and the justice system since 2010 (much of it wilfully enabled by their Lib-Dem chums).

21,000+ police jobs axed: 

You'd have to have been living under a rock for the last decade not to have heard about the Tories austerity cuts to the police force, not just slashing all those jobs, but shutting down 600 police stations, and absolutely gutting police budgets too.

The resulting violent crime wave and surge in gang culture was widely predicted as they were making these cuts, but Theresa May and the Tories dismissed all the experts' warnings about their police cuts agenda as "crying wolf" and "scare-mongering".

Privatised front line policing:

If you ask the British public about privatisation of public services, the things they're most vehemently opposed to are privatisation of the NHS, schools, military, and police.

Just 4% of people who expressed an opinion thought that privatisation of the police sounds like a good idea.

This public revulsion at the idea didn't stop the Tories and their Lib-Dem sidekicks privatising a bunch of front line police services (and other massive swathes of the criminal justice system) during the austerity coalition.

This police privatisation frenzy included a £200 million deal for G4S to take over Lincolnshire police (G4S are the useless tossers who screwed up the 2012 Olympic security preparations and had to be bailed out at the public expense by drafting in off duty army and police officers to clear up their mess - more on them later).

Forensic Science Service privatisation:

During the austerity coalition the Tories and Lib-Dems decided to take the extraordinary step of privatising police forensic science services, meaning crucial stuff like the processing of crime scene samples and DNA evidence was handed over to a bunch of profiteering private corporations.

The result was ridiculously predictable: Chaos, delays, mix-ups, and deliberately tampered evidence.

One private forensics lab in Manchester was caught manipulating forensic results, which meant 10,000 cases, including rape and murder cases, had to be reinvestigated. Nobody has gone to jail over this outrageous scandal.

Nobody charged in 91% of crimes: 

It beggars belief when the Tories do their "tough on crime" posturing to whip up their right-wing authoritarian base.

Their unprecedented police cuts since 2010 mean there are fewer police per head of population than at any time since the 1970s, with an ever growing percentage of crimes involving complex and time consuming IT investigations.

Is it any wonder that such a vast percentage of crimes go entirely unpunished these days?

How on earth is it possible to pretend to be "tough on crime" when you're letting more criminals get away with it than ever?

Dodgy facial recognition:

The Tories have been extremely keen to burn mountains of cash on unproven facial recognition technology instead of actively tackling the staggering backlog of uncharged crimes they've created.

These trials have resulted in farcical levels of inaccuracy of up to 98% of people being identified as the wrong person.

They have however built up a facial recognition database of an estimated 16-19 million people, many of whom have never been charged with a crime in their lives, despite a high court ruling that the police have no right to retain such images. 

Who cares about ensuring the police comply with the law eh?

The tagging fraud:

In 2013 two private outsourcing contractors (Serco and G4S) were caught running two of the biggest frauds against the British public finances ever recorded. The fraud involved submitting thousands of fake invoices for the monitoring the electronic tags of offenders, many of whom were made up, living abroad, or even dead!

All these companies had to do was pay back what they stole (£89 million stolen by Serco, and £109 million stolen by G4S) and nobody ever went to jail for it.

In fact, within a few years the Tories brought G4S back in to run another £25 million electronic tagging contract, so as long as you're stealing out of the public purse, the Tories are keen to ensure that crime does pay!

Privatised prisons:

Most of the Tory prison privatisation agenda went on below the radar during the Tory/Lib-Dem austerity coalition. The media only really started to notice when shocking mismanagement and extraordinary staff shortages in privatised prisons like HMP Birmingham led to massive prison riots.

Surprise, surprise, the private operators that reduced HMP Birmingham to such absolute chaos they had their contract to run it rescinded were our old friends G4S.

Legal Aid cuts:

One of the most devastating Tory/Lib-Dem "reforms" to the criminal justice system was their devastation of the Legal Aid budget, which has caused all kinds of problems by denying legal representation to those unable to afford it.

Legal Aid was originally introduced in order to level the scales ever so slightly by helping those who couldn't afford legal representation. The system was still massively stacked in favour of those who could afford to hire teams of expensive lawyers, but at least the poor had any legal representation at all.

The Tories couldn't abide this so they absolutely vandalised the Legal Aid system, leaving huge numbers of people without legal representation from family courts, through victims of crimes, to appeals tribunals against obscene "fit for work" judgements and ridiculously unjustifiable welfare sanctions.

Instead people are left to represent themselves, resulting in huge amounts of wasted court time because they don't even understand the absolute basics of legal proceedings.

It's impossible to explain the absolute horror and injustice of these Legal Aid cuts in just a few paragraphs. Here are some more links for further reading (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

Unlawful tribunal fees:

In 2013 the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition introduced upfront £1,200 Tribunal Fees designed to price low income workers out of the justice system and prevent them from seeking compensation from bad bosses who had abused and/or exploited them.

In 2017 these fees were declared unlawful by the Supreme Court because of the unfair barrier to justice they so obviously represented. This ruling necessitated the reimbursement of everyone who had paid these "barrier to justice" fees, but nothing could be done to reimburse those who were priced out of the justice system between 2013 and 2017. They just had to swallow the fact that they'd been unlawfully denied the right to seek compensation from their bad bosses by a party that loves to style itself as "the party of law and order"!

Privatised Probation Service:

Perhaps the most devastating Tory reform to the justice system of all was their unbelievably dangerous and shambolic privatisation of the Probation Service.

Somehow the Tories and their Lib-Dem sidekicks decided that it would be a fabulous idea to carve the probation system open for privatisation, leaving only the most serious (and costly) cases in public hands.

police, crime experts, and legal professionals all warned that handing probation services over to a bunch of corporate regional monopolies would represent a danger to the public, but the Tories and Lib-Dems did it anyway, because ideology apparently trumps evidence.

Then lo and behold, the probation system collapsed into chaos, mass resignations of experienced staff, soaring recidivism rates, virtually unsupervised offenders, unacceptable risks with public money, and clearing up the mess ended up costing a whopping £500 million.

Abolition of choice:

One of the most extraordinary assaults on the criminal justice system during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition was the move to scrap the right for criminal defendants to choose their own solicitor, instead being assigned one from a government approved list of mega-contractors including the usual suspects like Serco, G4S, and Capita as well as Eddie Stobart (yes the haulage firm).

This new policy would have driven hundreds of small and specialist legal firms out of business by preventing potential clients from choosing a local or specialist firm, because they've been automatically assigned representation by one of the corporate giants who bid for the regional monopoly in their area.

Thankfully this ludicrous nonsense was eventually scrapped, but the fact that it was even proposed is horrifying. There are enough ludicrous financial conflicts of interest with private companies running front line policing, forensic science, private prisons, the probation system, and electronic tagging, without them providing legal services to the people they'd profit from in their private jails if they were found guilty!

The prison book ban:

If we look back at the four previous justice system disasters, one man's fingerprints are all over every single one of them; the spectacularly incompetent Chris Grayling.

Another one of Grayling's brainwaves was the policy of banning books in prisons.

Anyone with the faintest appreciation of the fact that prisons need to rehabilitate as well as punish, must see that banning books is the kind of venal authoritarian nonsense of dictatorships, and that book bans are obviously an impediment to rehabilitation.

Like Grayling's shambolic effort to abolish legal aid choice, and his spectacularly failed probation system privatisation, and his unlawful tribunal fees, his ridiculous book ban was eventually scrapped too, after it was ruled unlawful.

The fact that the Tories allowed a serial incompetent like Chris Grayling anywhere near the justice system is proof of their utter contempt for "law and order".

The hiring 20,000 police deception:

Even when the Tories claim to be helping the police by hiring "another 20,000 police starting right now", it's an absurd deception.

The natural attrition rate of police retiring, changing careers, or quitting in exasperation at the under-funded chaos they're working in, means that the UK will need around an additional 20,000 police officers over the next three years just to keep the numbers where they are.

The Tories have dressed this police hiring process up as some kind of marvellous recruitment drive, but in reality they're doing little more than the bare minimum to prevent police numbers collapsing even further.

Even if nobody retired from the police for the next three years, where would all the extra police be placed given the fact the Tories have closed down over 600 police stations since 2010, and how would their operations be funded given that the current force is reduced to the absolute bare bones after nine years of ruinous Tory austerity cuts?

The problem of course is that there are an awful lot of dangerously under-informed dupes out there who still, despite all of the vandalism detailed in this article, imagine the Tories to be "the party of law and order", and willingly believe their ridiculous false promises to restore the police services they've just spent the last nine years deliberately wrecking.

Maybe reading this article would cure them of their delusion, or maybe they'd simply refuse to read it because they don't want their political preconceptions challenged in any way.

All we can do is try, and hope that they're not so far gone that they outright refuse to engage with information that clashes with their Tory tribalist worldview.

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

OR

No wonder the political right want to destroy Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn's policy of preventing tax haven-based companies from profiteering from public funds isn't radically left-wing, it's not even particularly left-wing at all, it's actually just common sense.

A radically left-wing policy would be to ban all corporations from undertaking government-funded work (or even to turn all corporations into worker-controlled syndicates) but Corbyn is proposing nothing of the sort. All he's saying is that if companies intend to make profits from public funds via outsourcing contracts, they should at least demonstrate that they're paying their fair share in tax.

It's actually a demonstration of how fanatically right-wing the cult-like Thatcherite political consensus really is that any of them ever thought it OK for corporations to dodge paying tax on their publicly funded profits in the first place, and that absolutely nothing has been done to clamp down on these ridiculous practices while orthodox neoliberals have controlled the levers of political power.

Of course the political right are furious with these proposals, because corporate parasitism on the state is a significant business model for the mega-rich.

Tax-dodging corporate parasitism is basically risk-free, because profiteering from desperately one-sided public sector outsourcing contracts and avoiding paying tax on the profits carries way less risk than investment in anything innovative or economically productive. And if the contract somehow fails, the state ends up stepping in anyway to clear up the mess at the public expense.

Dodge paying tax on the publicly funded profits, and then use public funds to pay for the losses!

It's an incredibly brazen business model, but it's been going on for decades (remember when the Blair government actually privatised the HMRC property portfolio into the hands of a private company based in Bermuda for tax reasons?), and Jeremy Corbyn is threatening to put a stop to this ridiculous nonsense.

It's common sense proposals like this clamp-down on tax-dodger profiteering on public funds that the political right are terrified of, because they know that the vast majority of British people would agree with them wholeheartedly if they heard about them. 

So instead of openly declaring their support for tax-haven based profiteering from public funds, the political right resort to a relentless cascade of smears, deceptions, and outright lies.

They know they can't counter Corbyn on policy because the more people find out about Corbyn's actual policies, the more people end up agreeing with him and supporting him, so their only hope is to continue with the smear campaign in the vain hope of debasing the standard of political debate to such an extent that people remain largely unaware of Corbyn's actual policies.

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

OR

HMP Birmingham: A case study in failed Tory privatisation mania

In October 2011 HMP Birmingham became the first British operating prison to be fully privatised when the Tory-led government handed operations over to the corporate outsourcing giant G4S.

By 2014 whistleblowers at the prison were reporting widespread violence and drug use, prisoners staying in bed all day, and experienced staff quitting in droves.

In 2016 the prison was rocked by a 14 hour riot involving some 500 prisoners. The Tory government then attempted to bury the report that cited staff shortages as a major factor.

In 2017 the Chief inspector of prisons found a violent, dirty, lawless, drug-riddled hovel rated as the worst prison h'd ever inspected.

In 2018 the Ministry of Justice demonstrate the shocking scale of this ideologically driven prison privatisation folly with the emergency state take-over of operations.

Amazingly the privatisation-fixated Tories knew exactly how bad HMP Birmingham was for several year, yet they just sat back and watched it deteriorate rather than admit their ideologically driven prison privatisation agenda was failing.

Even in the days before the emergency take-over they were still delaying because they were busy negotiating "commercially sensitive" contract terms with G4S!

Imagine how badly the contract must have been drafted if the private sector operators can turn a functioning prison into a violent drug-riddled horror show that even the guards are terrified to work in, and still think they've got a leg to stand on to quibble over contract terms when the the government steps in to take over the mess they've created.

Even more amazing is the fact that the Tory government have announced that they plan to hand the prison straight back to G4S after six months!

So G4S take over a functional prison, turn it into an absolute hellpit for the inmates and staff alike, hand it over to the government to clean up at public expense, and then waltz back in six months later to wreck it all over again!

Instead of negotiating over contract terms and then promising to hand the prison back to the failing outsourcing company after just six months, the government should be immediately banning G4S from bidding for any more Ministry of Justice work, calling a moratorium on all justice system privatisations, and announcing a wide-ranging public inquiry into how the prison privatisation agenda went so wrong so quickly.

To anyone with any sense the whole idea of handing prisons over to private companies is absolutely perverse. Only the most fanatical of hard-right neoliberal pro-privatisation freaks could try to argue that the primary function of prisons should be for private companies to generate private profits at the public expense, rather than keeping the public safe from dangerous criminals and rehabilitating lawbreakers so that they can reenter society with the skills and attitude necessary in order to avoid recidivism.

But this is where were at now. The cult of neoliberalism is so embedded within the Westminster political establishment that the majority of MPs and political journalists never criticise the ideologically driven privatisation of prisons, the forensic science service, electronic tagging of prisoners, the probation service, court translation services, or even front line policing. 

Meanwhile the minority of MPs who espouse renationalisation and a preference for not-for-profit public services are continually derided as the dangerous radicals and extremists!

The polling evidence is absolutely clear that the majority of British people are strongly opposed to privatisation mania, but the Westminster political establishment remain stubbornly impervious to the public view that ideologically driven privatisatise everything agenda absolutely stinks.

And that's the problem with the cult of neoliberalism - you can point to as many privatisation failures as you like (HMP Birmingham, collapsed and fraud riddled academy chains, Carillion, the rail privatisation farce, the G4S Olympic security failure, the G4S electronic tagging fraud, the forensic science privatisation calamity, the shambolic privatisation of the probation service, the absurdly inefficient Work Programme, the rip-off water companies, Royal Mail being flogged off at way below its true market value, flogging off the NHS blood supply, and dozens upon dozens of other examples) and you can point to the polling data that says the public hate it, but the neoliberal cultists will simply shrug their shoulders, ignore the evidence, and adopt their arrogant and elitist "we are the enlightened few, and the public are wrong again" stance.

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

OR

Want to know why your Council tax is going up again?

If you want to know why your Council Tax bill is going up, but the services your local council provide are worse than they've ever been before, I've got the answer for you.

The reason that councils across the country are increasing Council Tax bills whilst simultaneously cutting what they actually spend on services is that the Tory government have slashed central government funding for local governments by 67% since 2010, and they're still slashing away at the Communities and Local Government budget now.

This sustained Tory attack on local government funding means that councils have way less money to spend on maintaining local infrastructure and services.

• Local councils have far less to spend on waste services, so these ideologically driven Tory cuts are the reason that a huge number of councils have reduced bin collections to fortnightly.

• Local councils have far less to spend on local amenities like libraries, public toilets, leisure centres, and public spaces like parks and indoor markets, so these ideologically driven Tory cuts are the reason that they're being closed down and sold off to property developers.

• Local councils have far less to spend on running their planning departments, so these ideologically driven Tory cuts are the reason that simple planning applications are taking longer than ever to process.

• Local councils have far less to spend on highway maintenance, so these ideologically driven Tory cuts are the reason that our roads are deteriorating so badly.

• Local councils have far less to spend on youth services, so these ideologically driven Tory cuts are the reason that councils up and down the country have cut back on youth clubs andother programmes to keep young people occupied and out of trouble.

• Local councils have far less to spend on social care services for the frail and elderly, so these ideologically driven Tory cuts are the reason that millions of elderly and infirm people are being left with totally inadequate care, meaning they end up in hospitals, which puts a lot more strain on the NHS (which the Tories are also deliberately under-funding).

The infuriating thing is that despite the devastating impact of these ideologically driven Tory cuts going on all around us, our local councils have no choice but to raise Council Tax rates in a desperate attempt to plug a few of the most serious of the gaps.

So where has all the money gone that the Tories have saved by slashing the Communities and Local Government budget to pieces?

While they've been gutting local government budget the Tory government have simultaneously been distributing lavish tax cuts and handouts to corporations and the mega-rich.

They've slashed the top rate of income tax to give an average £100,000 annual tax break to Britain's 13,000 income millionaires, and since 2010 they've cut the corporation tax rate from 28% to just 19% today, (which is by far the lowest in the G7).

Then there's all the handouts the Tories have given to corporations and the rich through ridiculously one-sided outsourcing contracts that cost more to run than they'll ever actually save, rip-off privatisation scams to flog off public property at way below its true market value, and the wholesale give-away of public property to wealthy Tory donors.

So the next time you ask yourself why you're paying way more Council Tax when your local services are worse than they've ever been before ... some smug corporate fat cat somewhere has purchased a brand new luxury yacht to berth in Monaco, or blasted six figures on a classic Aston Martin to add to his already extensive car collection.

Thanks to the Tory ideological obsession with the upwards redistribution of wealth, that's what you're paying for.

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

OR

The Carillion collapse is a textbook example of Tory economics

The collapse of the construction and outsourcing giant Carillion is a textbook example of the Tory privatisation ideology in action.

We now have 43,000 workers worrying over their jobs; hundreds of public services at risk (including hospitals, schools, prisons & other public infrastructure); a government in chaos because they carried on handing out £billions in contracts to this stricken company even after three profit warnings; and a pension fund with a £600 million black hole in it (which will be bailed out by the taxpayer).

Meanwhile executives at the company stand accused of rewriting their bonus rules in 2016 (when the company was already in huge trouble) so that they could keep all their bonuses, even in the case of corporate collapse.

A bunch of private profiteers has walked away with stacks of cash, leaving the public to pick up the bill for sorting out the chaos they've created.

However, the problem is that the Tories are pro-privatisation extremists. There's no way they'd bring the services back in house to protect jobs and public services. Their fanatical hard-right ideology prevents them from doing that, so they'll scrabble around trying to get other private sector profiteers to take over Carillion's contracts, and likely pay extortionate inflated prices, because other private sector companies know that the Tories need them to take over the contracts more than they actually need the contracts themselves.

The corporate executives got rich. The shareholders were handed dividends every year as the company drained vast sums out of employees' pension schemes. And now the scam has collapsed, the Tories are going to ensure that the taxpayer covers the cost by bailing out the pension fund, and by re-tendering all the contracts at inflated prices.

From a taxpayers' perspective, or from the perspective of good governance, the Carillion collapse is an absolutely scandalous failure.

However from a Tory party perspective it's actually another success story, because it's yet another example of the private sector soaking up all the profits at the taxpayers' expanse, then dumping the debts onto the taxpayer when the hollowed-out husk of the company collapses into liquidation.

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

OR