sercochester

 

Perhaps Manchester could change the city’s name to SERCOCHESTER. Mayor, Andy Burnham, asked for £65 million from the Boris Johnson government in support of businesses and staff affected by the Covid measures, which is "the bare minimum to prevent a winter of real hardship here”. The government had no problem handing 16 times that amount to one company, SERCO, for their inept ‘track and trace’ contracts.

SERCO - Grim Beyond Belief

 

'Grim Beyond Belief' is the Independent headline reporting that Serco expects bumper profits after securing an extension to its £1 billion Test and Trace contract while delivering its worst ever performance. I have repeatedly written about how this company and other Covid-profiting corporations are proof that privatisation of the NHS is escalating. Are there words for this sort of corruption? – Yes, a crime against humanity.

Phew, it's still for the few

  

While drinking my first coffee of the day I read this tweet from  writer and director Guy Masterson …   “I have it on good authority that at a Zoom meeting about the future of the Arts with Downing Street, Cummings told Sam Mendes that he wasn't interested and that :"the fucking ballerinas can get to the back of the queue "…

Then I saw this on my FB ...

 

  

 

Slightly depressed, I turned to Hannah Arendt. Fleeing Nazi Germany she knew a thing or two about the ‘banality of evil’

 

 

 

 I made another coffee and relaxed. At least Jeremy Corbyn isn’t PM.

 

 original blog at: www.davidwilson.org.uk

Pablo Escobar would be Jealous

 

Transparency and value for money in the way public funds are spent usually require state bodies to advertise any new contract over a certain value, and invite several bidders to compete. “Because of extreme urgency and in the interests of public health”, the government has dispensed with this requirement so that Covid-19 related deals could be signed “without competing or advertising the requirement.”

 

This has opened the door to a Covid-19 bonanza for some firms.

 

Serco have now ‘won’ over £1 billion to organise Covid-19 track and trace. There now needs to be a track and trace put in place to find out how they have managed to get this money without carrying out track and trace. 

 

I doubt that many readers can conceptualise what £1 billion means. In terms of time, 1 UK billion seconds = 32 years. In physical terms you would need 720 white vans to transport that amount in cash.

 

On a smaller scale Stroud Tory councillor Steve Dechan, who runs P14 Medical, a loss-making firm distributing medical devices, recently signed a £156 million deal to import PPE from China.

This follows the news that PR firm, Hanbury Strategy, founded by a Dominic Cummings ally, has been ‘awarded’ two Covid-related contracts for £900,000 to research “public attitudes and behaviours in relation to Covid-19”.

Topham Guerin, a communications company behind the Tory party’s 2019 digital campaign strategy, was given a £3 million contract to work on Covid-19 "messaging".

Public First, a consultancy firm owned by two friends of Cummings and Michael Gove, has been given nearly £1 million for Covid-related work.

Faculty, hired by Cummings for the Vote Leave campaign, is "conducting data modelling" for £3 million.

 

None of these ‘contracts’ went out for tender. 

 

This is what happens when you privatise the state and eviscerate local democracry. 

 

It is corruption on a scale that would make Pablo Escobar jealous.

 

***

You can find further information at Open Democracy HERE and HERE

 

"These are Dangerous Times"

 

Reg Keys is the father of L/Cpl Reg Keys, who was killed in Iraq in 2003. He was left an angry man. His son he said was, with his five fellow soldiers, “let down in life by the men who sent them to their deaths and they have been let down in death by the people who continually deny responsibility.” Reg stood against Tony Blair in the 2005 General Election when I was working at the Stop the War Coalition. I supported Reg in the early stages of his campaign and helped Brian Eno organise his first press conference. Reg himself has told of the harrasment he received at this time and I too had frightening experiences I have never talked about. 

 

Here is how harrasment is practised today. 

 

When at Stop the War I got to know ex-ambassador, Craig Murray. As a fellow whistleblower, I was an early reader of the account he gives of his time as UK ambassador in Uzbekistan, and how Jack Straw and Tony Blair rid themselves of this ‘truth teller’. I have followed and admired his life in the intervening years.

Craig has spent many weeks attending and reporting on the Julian Assange extradition hearings at the Old Bailey and these can be read on his website. His most recent post is chilling. Here it is ...

"On Saturday a small, socially distanced vigil of 18 people for Julian Assange at Piccadilly Circus was broken up by twice that number of police and one elderly man arrested and taken into custody. The little group of activists have been holding the vigil every week. I had just arrived to thank them and was astonished to see eight police vans and this utterly unnecessary police action. There could not be a clearer example of “Covid legislation” being used to crack down on unrelated, entirely peaceful political dissent.

I was myself questioned by a policeman who asked me where I lived, how long I had been in London and why, what I had been doing at the Assange trial and when I was going back to Edinburgh. (You can see me very briefly at 10 mins 30 secs trying to reason with a policeman who was entirely needlessly engaging in macho harassment of a nice older lady).

Later in the evening I had dinner with Kristin Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief of Wikileaks. I returned to my hotel about 11pm, did my ablutions and went to bed. Just after midnight I was awoken by an insistent and extremely loud pounding at the door of my room. I got naked out of bed and groped my way to open the door a chink. A man dressed like the hotel staff (black trousers, white shirt) asked me when I was checking out. I replied in the morning, and pointed out the hotel knew I was leaving the next day. Why was he asking in the middle of the night? The man said “I was asked to find out”. I closed the door and went back to bed.

The next morning I complained in the strongest possible terms, the hotel refunded me one night’s accommodation. The duty manager who did this added “It was not our fault” but said they could not tell me any more about why this had happened.

The person at my door had a native English accent. I had been staying in the hotel over four weeks and I think I know all of the customer facing staff – not a single one of them has a native English accent. I had never seen that man before. This was a four star hotel from a major chain. I suspect “do not get sleeping guests out of bed after midnight to ask them what time they are checking out” is pretty high on their staff training list. I cannot help but in my mind put it together with my encounter with the police earlier that day, and their interest in when I was returning to Edinburgh, but there seems no obvious purpose other than harassment.

The hotel incident may just be in the strange but unexplained category. The busting of the Assange vigil earlier is of a piece with the extraordinary blanking of the hearing by corporate media and the suppression of its reporting on social media. These are dangerous times.

I am now safely back home in Edinburgh."

Craig Murray website

More blogs on the Assange hearings below

 

Serco and Catch 22

 

Serco provides services in defence, justice and immigration, transport, prisons and catering. In 2006 they started moving into the NHS ‘market’, including clinical services, hospital management and catering.

When I say ‘provides services’ that is not strictly correct. Serco provides nothing. At least nothing tangible. It does provide profits to the company and its shareholders. The actual ‘providing’, of getting a specific job carried out, is done by others. If they have expertise in anything, it is as financial managers and middlemen. Serco sub-contract the real work to others.

In 2014, Serco withdrew from the NHS clinical services market after eight years. This followed a series of loss-making contracts and fines totalling £100 million. They admitted giving false data to the NHS when running GP services. It was reassuring when the company announced there had been “a complete change of management and significant reform of all governance and procedures” It was short-lived.

In 2019, Serco was fined £3 million by the Home Office for contract failures relating to its provision of housing for asylum seekers. In the same year, the firm signed an agreement to escape prosecution by the Serious Fraud Office over a notorious prisoner electronic-tagging scheme run by its subsidiary, Geografix. An investigation found that Geografix had engaged in fraud and false accounting, inventing half a million pounds worth of costs which were ‘complete fabrications’. Serco had to pay the government almost £100 million compensation and legal costs as a result of its subsidiary’s behaviour.

None of this matters because Serco are back, thanks to the government awarding massive NHS contracts without the checks and balances normally applied to contract tenders.

Today they operate 30% of Covid test sites, with the rest run by Sodexo and G4S, Mitie, Boots and the army. Financial ‘oversight’, courtesy of Deloitte. To date, these contracts total £500 million.

These deals have have been kept secret and are not advertised or open to public competition. Furthermore, Serco is allowed to “refine” its own service level agreements, oversee its own monitoring, and are not subject to penalties for underperformance.

David Davis MP, the former Brexit Secretary, has said, “Whilst it’s entirely understandable that the Department of Health have accelerated or maybe even short circuited some of the procurement processes in the circumstances, there is no excuse for secrecy either over the number and size of the contracts and most particularly over the level of service the contracts deliver.”

Professor Allyson Pollock, member of Independent SAGE, said it was “beyond belief” and “extraordinary” that despite “clear evidence of the extraordinary failures of the privatised test and trace system”, the government wasn’t “terminating these contracts and reinvesting it into public health services and labs which have been shown to be highly effective.”

You may have watched Panorama when a NHS health worker reported sitting at home, week after week, waiting to be alloted Covid clients. The phone never rang. The track-and-trace programme itself could not be tracked or traced.

If you check the internet, you can find that everyone from travel agents to rodent infestation companies are grabbing track-and-trace contracts.

Health minister, Edward Argar, was formerly head of public affairs at Serco, while the company’s chief executive, Rupert Soames, is the brother of former Tory MP and party grandee Nicholas Soames.

The fiasco is a result not just of corruption, but of Tory cuts to public health and their dogmatic obsession with outsourcing. Instead of throwing money at these private firms, they should have invested in the NHS and their labs to build an effective track-and-tracing service.

When I research the background to the coronavirus ‘business’, I am reminded of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, but without the humour. “They buy my tomatoes at four cents apiece and sell them back to me the next day for five cents apiece. They make a profit of one cent apiece. I make a profit of three and a half cents apiece.”

Time to sit down and read Heller’s book again.

Exposing war crimes too boring for BBC

 

 

Julian Assange’s ‘crime’ has been to alert the world to the hideous crimes perpetrated against innocent women, men and children in the name of the USA and the UK.

He and Wikileaks published a video taken from a helicopter hovering over people in a Baghdad street in 2007. These included Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, Saeed Chmagh. Gunfire erupts from the helicopter. “Hahaha. I hit ’em,” shouts an American voice. Another is heard saying, “Oh yeah, look at all those dead bastards.”

A man is trying to crawl away. A van draws up and its occupants climb out and lift the wounded man. The helicopter opens fire again. The rescuers disappear in a cloud of dust. “Look at that. Right through the windshield,” one of the airmen cries exultantly.

Eleven dead, including two children. This was too much for Washington. Not the glee of the killers, not the slaughter, but the fact that Assange and Wikileaks inforrmed you and me of what was happening.

Now Trump’s USA want to put Assange into solitary confinement until he dies. There must be no more Assanges, no more Wikileaks, no more public knowledge of these war crimes.

Noam Chomsky has said, “Julian Assange has performed an enormous service to all the people of the world who treasure the value of freedom and democracy and who therefore demand the right to know whar their elected representatives are doing.”

Meanwhile when asked why the BBC has not been reporting on the extradition hearings at the Old Bailey, their Home Affairs correspondent, Daniel Sandford, says, “I have been in a few hearings and it is slightly repetitive.” Yes like the sound of those machine guns.

You can read daily reports from the hearing not from a BBC journalist, but from ex-ambassador Craig Murray here .... 

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/

 

Photo: Ai Weiwei