Corruption
Jew Hate rather than antisemitism – history and attitudes…
There is a great tweet thread here pointing out that really anti-semitism is part of the failed ideology of racism (think of South Africa – no wonder they have taken Israel to the International Court of Justice). Of course, there is only one race – the human race – we all come from Africa. And... Read more
Israel rejects Egypt/Qatar-brokered ceasefire deal, begins Rafah invasion
Netanyahu’s political survival and potentially freedom from prison depends on continuing slaughter
Israel has rejected a ceasefire deal, brokered by Egypt and Qatar and accepted by Hamas, that earlier saw jubilation among Palestinians currently kettled in Gaza. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political future depends on continuing the war and who faces the resumption of criminal proceedings for alleged corruption as soon as he is out of office, is unsurprisingly putting his own interests ahead of the lives of Palestinian civilians and Israeli troops and prisoners of war.
Israel’s invasion of Rafah, where most Palestinians in Gaza have been driven by Israel’s mass murder of civilians, is said to be underway, despite token comments from the US government that it would ‘not support’ such a military operation.
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Inside Job? Ominous New Questions Surround Navalny’s Death
On April 27, the Wall Street Journal published an investigation based on as yet unpublished U.S. intelligence community assessments and anonymous briefings courtesy of “security officials from several European capitals,” which concluded that Vladimir Putin neither orchestrated Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s death in prison two months earlier nor desired it to happen.
It was a belated and confounding intervention in a case that, after an initially intense frenzy of mainstream speculation and accusations, quickly went cold before vanishing from mainstream consideration entirely.
While exerting little domestic influence outside atypically liberal enclaves in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other major cities, Navalny was the U.S. and Europe’s most cherished and prominent Putin detractor by some margin for over a decade before his death. His every publicity stunt garnered universal media attention, and the regular publications of his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) on state official embezzlement and grift in Russia invariably broke the internet. Western human rights awards were routinely forthcoming.
After purportedly being poisoned on an inter-Russian flight by the FSB in August 2020, then recovering in Germany, he made a much-publicized “hero’s return” to Moscow, at which point, he was summarily jailed. Despite giving regular interviews to the Western media from prison and testifying to the rotten conditions in which he was held, Navalny had largely faded from public consciousness by the time news of his death broke on February 16.
Immediately, the entire Western political, media, and pundit sphere was apoplectic. “Make no mistake. Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death!” U.S. President Joe Biden forcefully declared. Meanwhile, Navalny’s widow, Yulia, accused Russian authorities of “hiding his body” as they were “waiting for the traces of yet another of Putin’s novichoks to disappear”:
My husband could not be broken. And that’s exactly why Putin killed him. Shameful, cowardly, not daring to look into his eyes or simply say his name. We will tell you about it soon. We will definitely find out who exactly carried out this crime and how exactly. We will name the names and show the faces.”
Yet, on February 26, Ukrainian military chief Kyrylo Budanov “disappointed” everyone by announcing Navalny, in fact, died as a result of simple health complications – namely, a blood clot. The U.S. intelligence assessments cited by the Wall Street Journal, based on “some classified intelligence and an analysis of public facts,” reportedly draw the same conclusion. Quite why this apparent confirmation took so long to surface isn’t clear, although it delivered a “coup de grâce” to any and all suggestions Navalny was deliberately assassinated.
Since the invasion of Ukraine began, Western spying agencies and officials in Kiev have relentlessly spewed oft-intelligence insulting, illogical black propaganda about the proxy conflict. We must ask ourselves why the same sources that would have us believe Russian forces were at one point fighting with shovels, and Moscow blew up its own Nord Stream 2 pipeline, seek to shut down suggestions Navalny was murdered.
‘Cataclysmic Loss’
Budanov’s declaration decisively shunted Navalny’s demise from international headlines. Such is the pace with which events move these days that it is perhaps forgotten that immediately following February 16, there was a concerted campaign by highly influential Western anti-Russian actors for the EU and U.S. to adopt a “Navalny Act.” Under its auspices, the approximately $300 billion Russian assets frozen by Western financial institutions in the wake of Moscow’s invasion would be seized and given to Ukraine.
At the forefront of this effort was billionaire Bill Browder, an investment manager who reaped untold sums from privatization and asset stripping in Russia during the 1990s and supported Putin’s rise to power before being turfed from the country in 2005 on national security grounds. Since then, he has transformed himself into the Kremlin’s most pugnacious overseas critic and an “anti-corruption” campaigner, despite giving up his U.S. citizenship to evade tax. Speaking to UnHerd on February 20, Browder talked a big game:
Now is the moment…Putin is willing to lose one million men, but to lose $300 billion would be a cataclysmic loss. All world leaders are looking for a way to hit Putin back for this murder. I’ve been working on confiscating these assets for the last two years, and the Navalny murder is the impetus to get it done.”
Browder had good reason to believe this campaign would bear fruit. For almost 15 years, he has traveled the world telling journalists, lawmakers, and human rights organizations a shocking story of corruption, fraud, and murder at the highest levels of the Kremlin. In brief, he claims local officials forcibly seized the Russian division of his company, Hermitage Capital Management, to carry out a massive tax scam, reaping $230 million in the process.
According to Browder’s narrative, he then set his “friend” Sergei Magnitsky, a gifted lawyer, on the case to determine what happened. The diligent sleuth duly uncovered the fraud and alerted authorities but ended up jailed on bogus charges for his courageous whistleblowing. He was then viciously tortured in prison in an attempt to make him retract his testimony before being beaten to death by guards for refusing.
Typically, Browder’s audiences have been highly receptive. Over the years, his story has been immortalized in multiple articles, books, official reports and documentaries, influencing legislation and prosecutions in numerous countries. Every member of the “Five Eyes” global spying network and the EU have been successfully lobbied to adopt a “Magnitsky Act,” which sanctions government officials overseas—particularly in Russia—for purported human rights abuses.
‘Navalny Act’
In reality, Browder’s entire Magnitsky fable is a tangled web of lies, fabrications, distortions, exaggerations, and libel. From the very moment he started spinning this deceptive yarn, sufficient open-source, public-domain evidence was available to disprove its every aspect comprehensively. Yet, it took a decade for mainstream journalists to conduct serious due diligence on his assertions. In November 2019, leading German news outlet Der Spiegel published a comprehensive demolition job, savagely indicting Browder’s integrity in the process.
In the publication’s words, Brodwer “has a talent for selling a set of facts so it supports his own version of events.” Magnitsky was, in fact, neither a lawyer nor a whistleblower. He was a crooked accountant who had long-abetted Browder’s fraudulent financial dealings in Russia and was justly imprisoned for these activities. This was confirmed by a damning ruling in August of that year by the European Court of Human Rights in a case brought by Browder and Magnitsky’s family.
While the ECHR ordered Moscow to pay Magnitsky’s relatives $37,500 due to a failure to protect his life and health, having identified shortcomings in the medical treatment he was provided in prison, no mention of murder or even unlawful killing was made in the judgment. Conversely, the court rejected suggestions his arrest and subsequent detention were “manifestly ill-founded” or that “authorities had…acted with bad faith or deception:”
The Court reiterated the general principles on arbitrary detention…It found no such elements in this case. The decision to arrest him had only been made after investigators learned he’d previously applied for a UK visa, booked tickets to Kiev, and hadn’t been residing at his registered address. Furthermore, the evidence against him, including witness testimony, had been enough to satisfy an objective observer that he might have committed the offense in question.”
Der Spiegel’s investigation contained a striking passage, the obvious import of which was bizarrely ignored by the outlet. In it, Zoya Svetova, a Moscow-based human-rights activist who investigated Magnitsky’s death in 2009, said:
What sense would it make to murder him? Magnitsky did not reveal any secret. They wanted testimonies against Browder. That was the motivation. He should have accused Browder of not paying taxes. Magnitsky was a hostage. He himself was of no interest to them. They wanted Browder.”
Anti-Russia campaigner Bill Browder speaking to the media outside the Old Bailey in London, December 19, 2018. Mr Perepilichnyy, 44, Dominic Lipinski | PA Wire
In other words, it was Browder who benefited from Magnitsky’s death, not Russian authorities, which raises the grave prospect that it was the “anti-corruption” campaigner himself who was, one way or another, responsible for his accountant’s tragic passing. Such a reading is amply reinforced by the sworn deposition of Russian opposition activist Oleg Lurie in a failed legal case brought by U.S. authorities against Russian-owned company Prevezon, based on Browder’s bogus claim the firm’s owners were beneficiaries of the $230 million fraud.
Lurie was concurrently incarcerated in the same prison as Magnitsky, and the pair crossed paths twice. The first time, the accountant was in a “happy mood,” boasting of how he was held in a “big special block” for “white crime inmates,” where cells had “plasma TV sets, refrigerators, kettles” and illegally installed telephones. The reason for his buoyancy, Magnitsky explained to Lurie, was that his Western employers would “save him…they would take him out of there” in a matter of days.
As Browder et al. wished for Magnitsky to “keep silence about their actions” and his own crime to be “not serious,” he seemed assured that freedom was impending. Lurie warned him that “his attorneys and people who claim to be standing behind him are lying to him,” but the accountant was unconvinced. Fast-forward a few weeks, and they met again. Magnitsky was “a completely different person at that time…a tangle of nerves,” Lurie testified.
Magnitsky revealed that the “Western people who stood behind him deceived him…they demanded him to sign various documents” completely unrelated to his case, which would’ve implicated him in numerous serious crimes he didn’t commit. As a result, “he had a feeling that he would never get out.” Navalny, like Magnitsky, wasn’t leaving prison anytime soon and almost certainly knew too much. Did his Western backers similarly consider it necessary to silence him?
At the very least, it is supremely puzzling that the Ukrainian government effectively torpedoed the “Navalny Act.” After all, Kiev has, since the start of the proxy conflict, implored Western leaders to hand Russia’s frozen assets to them in service of the country’s reconstruction and the purchase of ever-more weapons and ammunition. The Act would’ve delivered on those demands. There was no clear need at all for Budanov to electively sabotage the narrative of Navalny as a Kremlin murder victim.
‘British Spy’
There are also sinister echoes in the sudden mainstream “reverse ferret” on Navalny’s untimely demise with the similarly mysterious and abrupt November 2019 passing of James Lemesurier, longtime British mercenary and military intelligence operative. Immediately following his fatal fall from the window of his lavish Istanbul apartment, Western sources rushed to convict Russia without evidence, claiming his death may have been – or was likely – a targeted assassination. The most prominent was Mark Urban, veteran BBC “defence” editor.
Within hours of Lemesurier’s lethal crash landing, Urban took to Twitter, urging Turkish authorities to “conduct a thorough investigation” and “ascertain whether there was state involvement.” His misgivings were in part perked by an “extensive black propaganda campaign by Russian and Assad media and their acolytes” in the months prior. In other words, critical, independent reporting raises grave questions about whether Lemesurier’s “White Helmets” were the crusading humanitarian group universally portrayed in the mainstream or something far darker.
More substantively, “a former colleague” – whether of Lemesurier or Urban isn’t clear – told the BBC journeyman, “I know the flat well, [and] it’s not possible to ‘fall’ from that balcony.” They strongly suspected foul play as a result. Seismic stuff, although curiously, these posts were quickly deleted due to Urban allegedly receiving “new information.” The nature of this “information” and who supplied it has never been revealed. But immediately after that, the same sources that hitherto cried murder began labeling Lemesurier’s death an unambiguous suicide.
To say the least, Urban is extremely well-connected in the Western military, security, and intelligence sphere and highly adept at withholding salient facts from public view. In July 2018, he revealed he’d serendipitously spent much of the previous year interviewing Sergei Skripal, who, along with his daughter, was purportedly poisoned in the British city of Salisbury three months earlier. In the intervening time, Urban fronted multiple BBC Newsnight reports about the incident without ever mentioning his personal relationship with the GRU defector.
For Urban – coincidentally once part of the same British Army tank regiment as Pablo Miller, Skripal’s MI6 recruiter, handler, and Salisbury neighbor – to delete his incendiary tweets surely required a high-level intervention. At that time, as now, blaming Russia or Putin for anything and everything – including quite literally the weather – was a thoroughly safe option in the West, without any consequences attached. We are thus left to ponder how and why a long-serving, spook-adjacent British state ‘journalist’ was compelled to retract these charges.
Evidently, though, Urban’s sources – the “former colleague” who clearly said too much aside – were keen that Lemesurier’s end not be perceived or investigated as murder by anyone. Turkish media reports in the aftermath may provide a rationale for this. One article revealed James and his wife, Emma Winberg, a self-professed MI6 operative, “fought violently” outside an Istanbul restaurant just before his deadly plunge. Another suggested Lemesurier – a “British spy” – was “likely running away from someone before his death.”
Fast forward to today, and again, interested parties are eager to dismiss suggestions a high-profile Western asset’s death was the result of foul play. In Navalny’s case, as with Lemesurier, those shadowy elements – the Ukrainian government and the CIA being just two publicly confirmed so far – had every reason to accuse Moscow of murder. Yet, they not only didn’t but instead went to great lengths to remove any insinuation of deliberate killing from the equation. Make of that what you will.
Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.
The post Inside Job? Ominous New Questions Surround Navalny’s Death appeared first on MintPress News.
Why Kemi Badenoch was wrong about the Glorious Revolution
It is a week or so ago now that Kemi Badenoch claimed that it was wrong to suggest that the wealth of the UK was founded on the basis of its slave-owning and imperial past. She did, instead, suggest that the foundations of modern British wealth could be found in the relationships embedded in the Glorious Revolution that ended the rule of the Stuarts and brought William and Mary to the throne in 1688.
In a post I published here I expressed my considerable doubt about this claim, with reasons given.
In response a commentator named Steve Cushion offered a much more detailed analysis. He has, since then, explained that this comes from academic research that he has been undertaking on behalf of Caribbean Labour Solidarity, who have published his work here.
I did, however, feel it worth promoting both that paper and his original comment as a weekend read on the blog, just to show how utterly unfounded is the claim made by people like Badenoch.
This is the comment that he posted:
A different explanation of the “Glorious Revolution”
The Royal African Company, which had a monopoly on the trafficking of enslaved Africans, acted as a means for the Stuart royal family, Charles II and James II, to finance their dictatorial rule without Parliamentary sanction, while personally enriching themselves and their associates and backers from the City of London. However, denying other City of London businessmen, as well as traders based in other cities, access to this profitable trade was one of the reasons the increasingly powerful capitalist class in England turned against Catholic King James II. It led to their support for the 1688 invasion from the Netherlands, led by Protestant William of Orange and James’s daughter Mary Stuart, resulting in the coup d’état known as the Glorious Revolution. Opposition to the monopoly of the Royal African Company also came from the owners of the slave plantations in the West Indies, whose increased wealth enabled them to buy growing influence in the British Parliament. The Royal African Company could not supply enough enslaved labourers to meet the West Indian landowners’ requirements for the growing slave-based economy. At the same time, restricting the numbers shipped by the Company enabled it to exploit its monopoly to force up the price of enslaved Africans.
Pressure from those businessmen excluded from the trade, as well as the demands of the West Indian plantation owners for ever increasing supplies of enslaved labour, forced Parliament to pass the Trade with Africa Act 1697. This opened the slave trade to all English merchants who paid a ten per cent levy to the Company.
Colonial commerce, including the business of slavery, was one of the driving forces of the capitalist economy from its earliest manifestation, encouraging the expansion of a manufacturing economy. Exports from Britain accounted for around half of all industrial production in the 18th century. Inikori tells us that, in 1770, the slave trade and the plantation economy furnished as much as fifty-five percent of gross fixed capital formation investment in Great Britain.
The increased rate of industrial growth based on exports depended on purchasing power generated by the British West Indies. Demand stemming from Africa, the Caribbean and North America based on the sugar industry was responsible for more than half of the growth of English exports in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. The business of slavery greatly contributed to increasing investment in the British Empire, particularly the construction of the infrastructure that such trade required. Additionally the re-export of sugar to the Europe brought enormous profits. Half of the non-agricultural workforce in England and Wales was employed in production for export, accounting for much of the growth in manufacturing output.
Based on: Patrick K. O’Brien and Stanley L. Engerman, “Exports and the growth of the British economy from the Glorious Revolution to the Peace of Amiens in Barbara Solow (ed.), Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
This is where Tory laws on protest might lead
This is how the US police treat professors who ask what they are doing on the campus where that professor teaches:
It is worth watching this CNN video from the moment Emory Econ Professor @CarolineFohlin came across the violent arrest of a protester on campus and asked the police, with shock, "What are you doing?" That's all that prompted an officer to hurl her to the ground and handcuff her. https://t.co/QKNRqOoIiS pic.twitter.com/3wzSIOcD6U
— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) April 26, 2024
I have little doubt such behaviour will be copied here in due course.
Labour has supported Tory laws on protest. They give me no hope that anything will change.
Penalties on carers make clear that we are being governed by people who do not care
As the Guardian has noted:
New figures show more than 150,000 unpaid carers are now facing huge fines for minor rule breaches, as MPs, charities and campaigners demanded an immediate amnesty.
They added:
The Guardian can reveal 156,000 unpaid carers are repaying severe penalties – in some cases tens of thousands of pounds – for often unwittingly overstepping the £151-a-week earnings limit while caring for a loved one.
11,600 carers hit by the penalties are paying back sums of more than £5,000. About one in five unpaid carers in work breached the strict weekly earnings limit last year, an illustration, campaigners say, of a broken system.
The last point is the key one. Of course, benefits have to be limited as to who can claim them. But benefits also have to recognise the realities of life - where rigid control of everything that happens within chaotic real-world situations - as the lives of carers usually are - cannot be controlled. That is most especially true when care-giving is the absolute and necessary priority of those providing it.
A system that does not provide for that is callous.
A penalty system that imposes costs way in excess of the loss suffered by the government, as this one does, is beyond callous.
Creating the capacity to pursue claims that impose poverty when the object of this benefit was to relieve it is indicative of a mindset that has lost touch with reality.
Of course, if there is fraud, chase it, but I very much doubt that many of these claims involve fraud. They refer to simple human error. In that case, there should be forgiveness in most cases, coupled (perhaps) with repayment, at most, of a part of the sum overpaid, representing a fair tax rate (ten per cent?) on the excess earnings not declared.
But so long as this persecution continues, we are living in a country governed by a political party that shows it just does not care.
As disasters go, the Rwanda Bill knows almost no limits.
The Lords gave in to the Commons on the Safety of Rwanda Bill last night, as ultimately they must. Democracy is sovereign and if those who have been elected insist that red is blue then the Lords, having used their best endeavours to request that the Commons change its mind, must give way even though they know that what the Commons is claiming is wrong.
This is what happened last night. The Lords eventually agreed to let a Bill promoted by a corrupt and racist government pass despite all the false claims within it. Rwanda is not safe, whatever the Tories say.
The Lords are also right that the damage to the UK’s reputation as an upholder of international law will be considerable.
The law that will now be enacted is also absurd. Instead of in any way solving the problem of migration it will throw vast sums of money at token gesture deportations that will be devastating for those involved, including most of the public servants who will have to be engaged in this process. It is not even clear, as yet, that any planes will be found to undertake the necessary flights to Rwanda.
And at the end of the day, after all this waste of effort, political capital, international reputation and money, the policy will not work. The chance of being deported to Rwanda will be so small, so extraordinary is the cost of each person deported and so limited is the capacity to actually secure agreement for anyone to leave, that the deterrent effect on those seeking to cross the Channel will be precisely zero. The boats will not be stopped, and that was the aim, racist as it always was.
So, what has been achieved by the Tories? They have proved that they are racist, vindictive, callous and straightforwardly cruel.
They have evidenced that the truth does not matter to them, and nor does the rule of law.
They have delivered overwhelming evidence of their ability to waste public funds when it suits them.
Most of all, they have shown that they are liars. Rwanda is not safe, even if they have passed a law saying it is, contrary to all the evidence.
So, electorally I think this also backfires for them. As disasters go, this one knows almost no limits.
The absurdity was apparent in comments by Tim Loughton MP on Sky last night. His claim was that we must have somewhere to send people who came to the UK who we decide are not refugees but who could not be returned to their country of origin because they would be refused entry there or they would be harmed if they did return. In other words, they are undoubtedly refugees with a right to asylum but we just do not want them, which contravenes international law. He then wanted them sent to Rwanda, with a dubious recent history on this issue.
You could not make such absurd claims up, but he offered then as if he was sincere. If he was then he also proved he will be doing politics a public service at the next election by standing down. In the kindest possible comment I can offer, let me suggest that he clearly is unable to construct coherent thoughts.
And meanwhile, some poor refugees will suffer the most inhumane treatment by this government. It is my hope that lawyers will still be able to find ways to obstruct their evil desires. What else is Common Law for?
US refuses to say it won’t kill Assange
Wikileaks journalist remains imprisoned as US continues to pursue discredited extradition case – and refusal to give binding guarantee would result in his immediate release if UK justice system was fit for purpose
The US has refused to give a specific, binding guarantee to a UK court that it will not execute journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Assange has been held for years in solitary confinement in Belmarsh prison while he fights the US government’s attempt to extradite him so it can imprison him for years beyond his lifespan, after Assange exposed war crimes in Iraq by the US military.
The case should have been laughed out of court three years ago, when the main US witness admitted he had been lying all along in his claim that Assange induced him to hack US systems. Instead, Assange has been submitted to what former UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer described as sustained psychological torture – and still faces the likelihood of imprisonment for more than a century.
His recent appeal was adjourned to give the US time to affirm properly that it would not kill him if he was extradited, a sick joke when there has been longstanding evidence of US plans to murder him outside the US.
Incredibly, the High Court has refused to admit fresh evidence of CIA plots to kidnap or kill Julian Assange.
The judges say the rationale for kidnapping or killing Assange would be removed if he is extradited, and the evidence is thus not worth consideration.
Read that again. pic.twitter.com/PqwJIg4yAn— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) March 26, 2024
The judges even refused to admit fresh evidence of the US’s plans to assassinate Assange, instead offering the US another opportunity to have him in their hands if they would promise not to put him to death. The US.
But Assange’s wife Stella has revealed that the US has refused to say that it will not kill him and has offered only a boilerplate statement about the death penalty, while denying Assange the free speech protections it would offer to any US citizen:
The United States has issued a non-assurance in relation to the First Amendment, and a standard assurance in relation to the death penalty.
It makes no undertaking to withdraw the prosecution’s previous assertion that Julian has no First Amendment rights because he is not a U.S citizen. Instead, the US has limited itself to blatant weasel words claiming that Julian can “seek to raise” the First Amendment if extradited.
The diplomatic note does nothing to relieve our family’s extreme distress about his future – his grim expectation of spending the rest of his life in isolation in US prison for publishing award-winning journalism.
The Biden Administration must drop this dangerous prosecution before it is too late.
The US statement says the death penalty will be ‘neither sought nor imposed’, but this is non-binding and meaningless given its previous attempts to kill him. The refusal to guarantee there will be no death penalty in Assange’s specific case should mean under UK and European human rights laws that the extradition is immediately refused by the UK court and Assange should already be free. Even if the assurances had been given, the likelihood that the US’s treatment of Assange would lead to his death should be enough to quash the bid.
The fact that he is not yet free of the threat of extradition, let alone walking around in the freedom he should have, is a damning indictment of the state of UK justice and democracy.
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Rishi Sunak is to blame for the inability of millions to work
Rishi Sunak has launched am attack on what he calls ‘the sick note culture’. I am, quite frankly, appalled.
Sunak is one of the richest men in the country. He has admitted that his family uses a private GP, let alone private healthcare for more complicated issues.
He is protected by privilege and wealth from the stresses that impact millions of people in the UK.
The possibility that a person might suffer stress as a consequence of their inability to work out where their child’s next meal might come from, or how they might keep a roof over their head, or how they might provide childcare when they go to their third job, which they have to take to meet the extraordinary increases in the cost of living imposed upon them by the Bank of England, or that they might be racked with guilt about their simple inability to provide for those about whom they care, is, I am quite certain, beyond his comprehension.
More than that, I doubt that he has even thought about the need to imagine it. In that case, of course he cannot see why those things that he calls the ‘ordinary stresses and strains’ of life might become, in themselves, totally incapacitating. It takes callousness on a considerable scale for anyone in his position to describe them as such, but that is what he has done.
Worse than that, fourteen years of Tory rule have created the healthcare crisis that we have.
Let’s leave aside the underfunding of the NHS, where funds provided have been insufficient to ensure that demand, not least for mental health services, can be met.
Let’s also leave aside the deliberate attack on the credibility and work ethic of NHS staff since 2021, in which he has played such a major role. Instead, let me just draw attention to other critical factors.
First, there is Covid. Sunak is a key player in the collective denial of the impact of this disease by his government and its predecessors since Boris Johnson decided to claim that its impact had effectively ceased from 2021 onwards.
That claim is complete nonsense. Not only do lots of people still get Covid, but it is as debilitating as ever, in many cases significantly threatening health well-being.
Covid is also a major secondary health risk. Increases in related illnesses, and in particular cardiac-related disease, are significant. The government is trying to pretend that none of this is happening.
Nor are they taking necessary action. For example,they are still doing nothing to provide a guarantee of clean air which is a precondition of good health. It could do that. Moreover, it has been shown that if it did so in school classrooms, where the spread of this disease is so easy, not only would we get major healthcare benefits, but the rate of learning amongst children would increase dramatically, improving education performance across the board. But his government does nothing, because it does not care.
Secondly, the age to which people are expected to work is now increasing. I might be in the fortunate position of being in good health and able to work to the capacity that I have delivered for many years at nominal retirement age, but I am well aware that this really is not normal. Vast numbers of people from their 50s onwards struggle with all sorts of well-being issues related to health that reduce their capacity to work, and too many employers know this and refuse to provide opportunity for those of older age.
Third, Sunak’s government has done nothing whatsoever to address the crises of diabetes, where the type two variant of this disease is entirely treatable. However, that is only possible if major changes in diet are made. This does, in particular, require dramatic reduction in the intake of sugar among the population as a whole, and a significant reduction in the consumption of ultra-processed foods. There is, nothing that could increase health in this country more than doing that, reducing both obesity related illnesses and type two diabetes hospital admissions as a result. Despite this, and despite the fact that this has been known for a very long time, his government has absolutely refused to address this problem. Instead, his health secretary is actually married to the boss of British Sugar. You could hardly make that up.
Then there is the assault on employment rights that this government encouraged. Its goal of a so-called ‘flexible workforce’ has been achieved at the cost of an enormous increase in insecurity for the majority of people in the country, who have suffered a reduction in their economic security as a consequence, giving rise to an increase in their stress. This now seems to have transferred into a widespread inability to work, so disabling is it.
There are, I am sure, other factors in play. But, these are sufficient to make it clear that if there is a responsibility for sickness in the UK then that belongs to Rishi Sunak and his predecessors and his colleagues in office since 2010. There is, quite literally, no one else to blame.