Thursday 23 July 2020

Susan Boyle's First Audition 'I Dreamed a Dream' | Britain's Got Talent

Tuesday 26 November 2019

Bercow on Corbyn

Monday 25 November 2019

TORYFACT CHECKER

Tories branding their website a fact checker merely compounds the growing assertion they, the selfservatives wouldn't know the truth if they fell into it

Sunday 21 July 2019

the truth abou tory nhs plans outed it's not what they promised


Private firms given £9.2bn of NHS budget despite Hancock promise

Record 2018 total comes after health secretary pledged no privatisation on his watch
Matt Hancock
 Matt Hancock had promised to roll back private outsourcing of patient care. Photograph: Reuters

The amount of the NHS budget going to private healthcare firms has reached unprecedented levels, despite the health secretary’s pledge to roll back outsourcing of patient care.
The Department of Health and Social Care handed a record total of £9.2bn last year to private providers such as Virgin Care and the Priory mental health group, its annual report shows.
That is an increase of 14% from the £8.1bn that went to profit-driven healthcare companies in 2014-15 and £410m more than the £8.77bn they received in 2017-18.
It comes after Matt Hancock pledged to MPs in January that “there is no privatisation of the NHS on my watch”.


The House of Commons Library has verified the upward trend and sums involved from analysis it undertook at Labour’s request of figures about the DHSC’s purchase of healthcare from organisations outside the NHS contained in the last five years of the ministry’s accounts.
“Tory privatisation of our NHS continues to gather pace with public expenditure on independent providers now at a record high”, said Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health and social care secretary.
“These accounts blow apart Matt Hancock’s claims to parliament there would be no privatisation on his watch.”
The relentless rise in NHS privatisation is occurring even though NHS England has declared its desire to drastically reduce what it says it views as the damaging tendering of services as part of its drive to create much more integrated care, ideally delivered by NHS providers. It has produced detailed proposals – backed by Theresa May – that it hopes will form the basis of legislation to drive private firms out of the provision of NHS care as far as possible.
The DHSC’s accounts also disclose that its total spending on all non-NHS bodies has risen even more sharply than that on private firms, from £10.32bn in 2014-15 to £13.75bn last year – an increase of £3.43bn or 33% over four years. The department stressed that, while the overall amount was going up, the rise in its budget meant that the proportion of that going to private firms had remained constant at 7.3%.
That bigger £13.75bn total includes money handed to both the voluntary and not-for-profit sector, which has risen threefold over that time from £530m to £1.62bn, and also to local councils, which has gone from £1.77bn to £2.9bn. The latter is thought to cover spending on social care, community mental health services and continuing healthcare, in which the NHS pays for medical care for people with a disability, injury or illness who are living at home or in a care home.
Campaigners against NHS privatisation strongly criticised the record £9.2bn spend on private care.
“The extra £415m spent on private providers in the last year is a significant 5% increase and makes a nonsense of Matt Hancock’s pledge of ‘no privatisation on my watch’”, said Dr John Lister, a health policy academic and secretary of the campaign group Keep Our NHS Public.
Private firms receive a far bigger slice of the share of the budget for certain forms of care than the independent sector’s 7.3% average, he pointed out. “Last year, roughly 30% of all mental health spending was in the private sector and 44% of spending on child and adolescent mental health goes to private providers. Private sector domination is most complete in the provision of controversial ‘locked ward rehabilitation’, in which a massive 97% of a £304m market in 2015 was held by private companies”, he said.
“The full picture is much more alarming with the added prospect of a Johnson government putting the NHS ‘on the table’ in any future US trade negotiations.”
Paul Evans, the director of the NHS Support Federation, which monitors privatisation of healthcare, said: “In response to criticism, failures and waste, the health secretary promised no further privatisation. But since then the outsourcing of NHS services has rolled on and more services have become reliant on the private sector to deliver their core services.” For example, a third of all hip replacements on the NHS are now done privately.
Despite the pledge to roll back privatisation, for-profit firms have consistently won contracts to deliver community health, mental health and diagnostics services in the last five years, Evans added.
“Despite the NHS long-term plan calling for an end to the experiment with competition and outsourcing, the government has done nothing to change the rules that force the NHS to advertise its contracts to the private sector. The accounts of the Priory Group, the largest mental health provider, show that 52% of its income of almost £800m comes from the NHS,” he said.
A spokesperson for the DHSC said: “We are committed to a world-class NHS free at the point of use. The proportion of NHS funding going to independent sectors has remained largely stable since 2014-15. The overall funding in the NHS has increased since 2014-15, so while the proportion of spend has not changed, the amount spent has risen in both public and independent sectors.
“We want patients to receive the best quality of care possible and the vast majority is provided by the NHS, supported by independent organisations when a local doctor decides it is in their patients’ best interests.”
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Saturday 20 April 2019

SO MUCH OWNED BY SO FEW


Half of England owned by less than 1 per cent of population, research finds

Palko Karasz


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Half of England owned by less than 1 per cent of population, research finds
Land ownership in England, a source of enormous wealth, is often shielded by a culture of secrecy harking back to the Middle Ages.
But a researcher says that after years of digging, he has an answer.
Less than one percent of the population — including aristocrats, royals and wealthy investors — owns about half the land, according to Who Owns England, a book that is to be published in May.
And many of them inherited the property as members of families that have held it for generations — even centuries.
In the book, author Guy Shrubsole, an environmental activist and writer, identifies many of the owners and compiles data gathered by peppering public bodies with freedom of information requests and combing through the 25 million title records in the government’s Land Registry.
He reached a striking conclusion — that in a country of around 56 million people, half the country belongs to just 25,000 landowners, some of them corporations.
The findings go to the heart of a potent political issue — economic inequality — that is roiling nations and feeding populist movements on multiple continents.
The Labour Party seized on Shrubsole’s findings, first published this week in The Guardian.
“Don’t let anyone tell you our country doesn’t need radical change,” Jeremy Corbyn wrote on Twitter.
Comparison to other developed countries is difficult, because they do not have national land registries.
Records can only be viewed one at a time through hundreds of local registry officers, they are not fully open to the public and ownership can be obscured through shell corporations.
But Britain has greater wealth inequality than peers like Germany, France, the Low Countries and Scandinavia — though less than the United States.
And the UK has not seen the kinds of wars and revolutions that over centuries wiped away sprawling estates owned by nobility in most of Europe.
Who owns the “green and pleasant land” of the English countryside can be a well-kept secret, in part because a large segment of it does not even figure in public records.
Government efforts to make a public accounting of land ownership date to the 19th century, but according to the Land Registry, about 15 percent of the country’s area, most of it rural, is still unrecorded.
“Much of the land owned by the Crown, the aristocracy, and the Church has not been registered, because it has never been sold, which is one of the main triggers for compulsory registration,” the registry says on its website.
Mr Shrubsole began documenting England’s estates after the Brexit referendum in 2016.
“If Brexit really meant ‘taking back control of our country’ then I’d like at least to know who owns it,” he wrote in an op-ed in The Guardian a year after the vote.
Housing prices in England are among the highest in Europe and have soared during the last generation.
Mr Shrubsole’s book documents ownership, maps unregistered land and argues that the concentration of ownership helps keep available land scarce and expensive.
Houses, stores, office buildings, schools and farms are often held under long-term leases, paying a steady stream of rents — directly or through intermediate leaseholders — to major landowners.
He said that by publishing his research, he wanted to start a conversation.
“It should prompt a proper debate about the need for land reform in England,” Mr Shrubsole said. The issue of land relates to the country’s housing crisis, to economic inequality, to climate change and the intensive use of farmland, he added.
The ancient idea that wealth meant land does not always hold true in modern times.
But, land accounted for half the UK’s net worth in 2016, according to data from the Office of National Statistics — double that of Germany and higher than in countries like France, Canada and Japan.
Britain’s net worth more than tripled between 1995 and 2017, driven primarily by the value of land, which rose much faster than other kinds of assets.
“The main economic challenge and the social justice issue is that for the last 30, 40 years, landowners have enjoyed enormous unearned windfall gains at a faster rate than wages or the economy have grown,” said Josh Ryan-Collins, head of research at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London.
“There is nothing that the landowners have done to earn those incomes,” he said.
He said that even agricultural land has become the object of speculative demand, pushing prices and gains for landowners up further.
But even if land reform has not been on the agenda of the Conservative government, it has had to address the housing crisis and agricultural subsidies.
Recently, Conservatives have focused their criticism on the European Union’s farming and forestry subsidy system, which has put aristocrats, the royal family and wealthy investors among the top recipients of taxpayer-funded aid.
The Queen’s estate in Sandringham, north of London, received £695,000 in aid in 2017, according to a public database of payments.
An agriculture bill in Parliament promises to change farm subsidies after Brexit.
Instead of direct payments based on the total amount of land farmed, payments in the new system would be based on factors such as contributions to the environment, animal welfare and public access to the property.
“As we know, many of the beneficiaries are not even UK or EU citizens, but foreign citizens who happen to have invested in agricultural land,” said environment secretary Michael Gove, during a 2018 debate on the bill in Parliament.
“It is a simple matter of social justice and economic efficiency that we need to change that system.”
Most of the European Union is also grappling with concentrated ownership of farmland, though not to the same degree.
A 2017 report by European Parliament lawmakers said that in 2010, three percent of farms controlled half the agricultural land within the bloc.
“Agricultural land is not an ordinary traded good, as soil is non-renewable and access to it is a human right,” the report said.
“As with the concentration of financial wealth, too high a concentration of agricultural land splits society, destabilises rural areas, threatens food safety and thus jeopardises the environmental and social objectives of Europe.”
Scotland, where land ownership is in the hands of even fewer people and organisations, has enacted a set of land reform laws.
In 2004, it abolished feudal rules that were still in effect, helping many longtime tenants to become outright owners of their land.
Other legislation introduced the right to roam, giving the public access to vast privately held lands.
“The example of successful land reform programmes in other countries, like Scotland, should give us hope,” Mr Shrubsole wrote in his book.
“Get land reform right, and we can go a long way towards ending the housing crisis, restoring nature and making our society more equal.”