"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

julian Assange - faces a 'fate worse than death'

 

How many of you are following the Julian Assange Extradition hearnings presently taking place at The Old Bailey? Probably very few because the MSM are hardly reporting it. I doubt that many of my FB ‘friends’ or Twitter followers are either. No blame on them because there is systematic banning in place. One of the only daily reports is coming from ex-ambassador Craig Murray who states:

“My (Assange) blog has never been so systematically subject to shadow banning from Twitter and Facebook as now. Normally about 50 percent of my blog readers arrive from Twitter and 40 percent from Facebook. During the trial it has been 3 percent from Twitter and 9 percent from Facebook. That is a fall from 90 percent to 12 percent. In the February hearings Facebook and Twitter were between them sending me over 200,000 readers a day. Now they are between them sending me 3,000 readers a day. To be plain that is very much less than my normal daily traffic from them just in ordinary times. It is the insidious nature of this censorship that is especially sinister — people believe they have successfully shared my articles on Twitter and Facebook, while those corporations hide from them that in fact it went into nobody’s timeline. My own family have not been getting their notifications of my posts on either platform.”

 

Please follow Craig here: 

 

The Trump regime want to incarcerate Julian in a Colorado high security prison which has been described by its own warden as a ‘living hell, offering a ‘fate worse than death.”

Meanwhile Noam Chomsky has been prevented from testifying on behalf of Julian. It’s great that yesterday Ai Weiwei attended the hearings and before him Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers). Respect also to John Pilger for his attendance and many others who turn up outside the court every day to offer their solidarity to a journalist they want to silence for exposing hideous war crimes.

Julian Assange - J"accuse

 

 

 

 

“It is a crime to mislead public opinion, to utilize for a deadly task this opinion which has been perverted until it becomes delirious.” 

Émile Zola

 

‘The Assange ‘trial’, “is comparable to that of Alfred Dreyfus, with our ‘free’ press betraying the man, their readers and viewers.’ We may not have our Émile Zola, but we do have ex-ambassador Craig Murray and ex journalists Jacob Ecclestone and Bernie Corbet. 

Their appeal states:

 

"There is a scandal and a crisis in British journalism. For the past three weeks or so a crucial extradition hearing has been taking place in the Central Criminal Court in London. You won’t know about it if you rely for your news on the established newspapers, the BBC or ITV or Channel 4. They have the resources to report it but they are not doing so.

You still wouldn’t know if you followed any of the many online news operations, which don’t have the resources to cover a major trial.

The case revolves around Julian Assange, of Wikileaks; and the government of the United States of America, which wishes to extradite this pioneering journalist and revealer of the truth and put him into a horrible prison until he dies.

Apparently there are about ten journalists regularly attending the court and taking notes, but as far as we know only one of them is publishing serious accounts of the ridiculous and disgraceful procedures. The vast majority of the public are unaware the proceedings are even taking place, let alone the distortion of justice that is happening in plain sight.

This is a case about free speech, exposure of wicked secrets, and the ability of journalists to operate in society. Yet journalists themselves are turning their backs on it. It almost seems as if they hope Assange will be taken away, removed from public view, and they will be left to plough their establishment furrow without being troubled by an outlier who showed us that some things are not as they appear.

Journalists should be covering the proceedings day by day, exposing the lengths and depths to which American and British politicians, lawyers and journalists are colluding.

The only journalist who is doing this is Craig Murray, formerly the UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, whose blog probably has a small readership, and who himself is in jeopardy of prison because of his fearless exposure of establishment corruption and lying.

The Assange “trial” is comparable to that of Dreyfus, with our “free” press betraying both the word itself and their readers and viewers. The more that people round the world are able to read what is going on, the greater the pressure on our government. Our judiciary is being corrupted and our judicial system poisoned at the behest of Trump and as a result we are sliding towards fascism. Please do all you can to give “the oxygen of publicity” to this grotesque persecution of Assange.

We are both retired. Jacob was a journalist and union leader on the pre-Murdoch Times for 20 years and then the deputy general secretary of the National Union of Journalists from 1980 to 1997. Bernie was a senior journalist on the Birmingham Post, Guardian and Independent, then editor of the NUJ newspaper “Journalist”, then an organiser, negotiator and case worker for the NUJ, then general secretary of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain from 2000 to 2016.

We might be old but we can still smell injustice and we are incredulous that the present generation of journalists is ignoring this critical travesty.

Please help.

With good wishes

Jacob Ecclestone
Bernie Corbett"

 

Ecclestone / Corbett appeal

Craig Murray reports

NHS - A PEOPLE'S TRIAGE

 

The term triage comes from the French verb, ‘to sort’. During the Napoleonic wars the French military used triage to prioritise treatment for wounded soldiers.

Yesterday I had a hospital echocardiogram test. Afterwards the friendly cardiac physiologist showed me her computer recordings. My cow valve seems to be pumping away with enthusiasm. I recommit to not eating beef ever again.

She went on to tell me what the hospital policy was for cardiac patients. It is triage. The consultant cardiologist now proritises level of treatment based on medical history, telephone consultation and necessity or otherwise for an on-site test.

I am happy with my cow and with my treatment yesterday and over recent years by the NHS. But that said, we should not be returning to a system of triage, but it is happening. Not only because of Covid-19, but from years of weakening of the NHS and the enrichment of those responsible. It’s long past time to operate a people’s triage and prioritise a fight back against them for our NHS. We need to remember Aneurin Bevan’s words, “The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it.”

 

In my last three blogs I have written about the scandal and corruption spreading its tentacles through the NHS and how companies like Serco, G4S, Capita and Deloitte are amongst the leading ‘privateers’. That is only half the story.

The Canary has now published an article on the ‘award’ of Covid-19 PPE (personal protective equipment) related contracts. If you think the NHS is still safe from the prowling monied-mafia perhaps you need to read it.

 

Some examples:

 

£43.8m contract awarded to a ‘dormant’ company, TAEG Energy, for the supply of hand sanitisers.

 

£252m to investment firm Ayanda Capital for face masks.

 

£186m to Uniserve, owned by pro-Brexit Prosperity UK.

 

£650,000 to Hanbury Strategy, a company founded by Vote Leave director, Paul Stephenson and friend of Dominic Cummins.

 

£49m to Ventures Ltd, a company with only £100 in assets.

 

£18.5m to employment agency, Aventis Solution, with total assets of £322, for face masks.

 

£93.7m to Globus (Shetland), a company who donated £400,000 to the Tory Party. 

 

£956,000 to Public First, headed by James Frayne and Rachel Wolf (who wrote the Tory 2019 manifesto), for “advice on Covid-19 and reorganising the health and care system”. It was previously awarded £840,000 to conduct research on public opinion regarding government policies and £116,000 to examine how the government can better learn from the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

£108m to Clandeboye Agencies Ltd, a nut and coffee products company and to PestFix, a rodent infestation company. PPE contracts for overalls awarded to a ‘fast fashion’ company, an online advertiser and Medpro Ltd, a private trust manager.

  

Read the full Canary article here. I’m afraid it goes on and on, but I will mention just one more. A company, Faculty, has been awarded over 13 contracts, worth £3m to help develop NHS labs and improvements to NHS data analytics. At a time when NHS labs are being 'awarded' to the 'privateers' and now proving worse than useless (see SERCO), I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

 

We need a 'People's Triage' to sort this out.

 

www.davidwilson.org.uk

 

What's Left of ''Our' NHS?

 

‘KEEP OUR NHS PUBLIC’ - A slogan I see in nearby house windows. Too late. It needs editing to, ‘KEEP WHAT’S LEFT OF OUR NHS PUBLIC’. Yes, it’s disappearing with a mixture of galloping privatisation and government cuts.

 

Minor injuries units are mostly closed. Diabetic units have been closed in some areas. 54% of sexual health units have closed. GP appointments are by phone only. Over 15 million are on waiting lists for tests and treatment.

A quarter of patients, following an urgent GP referral, wait over two months for their first cancer treatment. If your cancer referral is from a screening programme, 87% are now left waiting over two months for treatment.

38,000 heart operations have been postponed. And no, it’s not all to do with Covid-19, as the 18-week target has been missed for four years by an NHS weakened by a decade of cuts.

A hospital chief executive told Polly Toynbee of The Guardian they used to have 4 people waiting for a year for diagnostics and treatment. Now it’s 1,200. The Nuffield Trust records 48% of people who require treatment waiting beyond the 18-week limit, the worst since records began.

We are talking of patients who are in the higher risk groups at risk from Coronavirus so they face a double threat. In addition no foreign staff are arriving, and the Home Office is delaying visas for overseas doctors already here and waiting to work.

Never mind this may be a threat to many of us, but it is a life-saver for SERCO and the privatising wolves slathering at the hospital doors. As an NHS patient whose life was saved twice by ‘foreign’ surgeons and nurses I recently received this unsolicited email from a private health insurance company - “Have you ever thought to yourself if you were to get ill or injured, would you want to avoid a waiting list of 3-6 months for NHS treatment.” No, but I have thought I, hope Hell is too hot for whoever is responsible for writing this and that you get taken there in a Serco prison van.