John Ward – Labour Disaster : The Two Eds Twiddle As Britain Burns – 31 October 2014

Fingers testing the wind direction and sending tweets….but not on the pulse or pointing at Camerlot

In the face of rampaging and ruinous neoliberal mendacity, the Labour leadership is failing to stop its advance. Either they go now, or Labour will not be the biggest Party next May.

There is, at large in the UK and elsewhere, a community of celebrity Brits who spend much of their media-quote lives pretending that everything in the UK is hunky-dory neolib-wise, and a disaster public sector-wise. The latter has pretty much always been true, but the former is such an obvious lie that I sometimes want to ask David Cameron why his illiberal and barmy idea (to assume guilt on the part of suspected Jihadist returnees to Britain) shouldn’t be expanded to include the celebrity dissemblers too….given that in their cases we can see the guilt onscreen.

One example from five years ago was Dan Hannan going on the slimeball Hannity show (it’s Fox, which is Murdoch – what else would it be?) and spouting half-truths and drivel about the Special Relationship – but particularly about the NHS. Of course, at that time his best friend was Jeremy Hunt….with whom he wrote a paper about burning the NHS to the ground. But like most of his kind, Dan Dan the Friedman Man has never considered mutualisation of the service. Why would he? He just wants the insurance boys in, because he comes from the usual smug, wealthy Oxbridge/public school background that can afford such things.

Peel away the heinous propaganda that emanates from the likes of Cameron, Osborne, Fallon and Hunt, and the empirical reality bears no relationship whatsoever to the reality now, or the outlook for the future.

The Barclaygraph was at it again this morning, asserting that ‘Millions of workers are already enjoying above-inflation pay growth, according to a new report that showed more than half of UK companies plan to hire over the next 12 months’. But as always with the fantasies they trot out, this is not an audit: it’s self-perceived pay awards to people in full-time jobs, plus inaccurate self-assessed estimates of future action. The fulltime job sector’s obvious and disturbing decline has been central to the Coalition scam. But even in this increasingly unrepresentative sector, the assertion bears zero examination: ’34pc of all businesses increased pay above inflation last year, while 25pc uprated worker pay in line with prices.’ Er, so that means 41% of businesses either gave no pay rise or a rise below inflation. Which, research proves, is a higher figure than, um, 34%.

Or in brief, over two thirds of businesses are cautious or downbeat about the future. The headline is, quite simply, a lie. Go to the Bank of England/FT graph in this Guardian article, and you will see the relentless 7-year plummet in wages getting steeper since 2010.

No matter how dire the current sentiment is, the Establishment media will continue to polish the turd; but their nonstop attempts to gloss over past perfidy and fraud by privatisers are even worse.

For instance, when it comes to disability management, if you thought Atos Healthcare were bad, then sit down while I explain about the company about to take over from them.

It’s now an open secret in Whitehall that US sheisters Maximus have been awarded the contract to test claimants re eligibility for out-of-work disability benefits under the ESA banner.

Handed a contract just four months ago to manage the government’s new health and work service outside Scotland, Maximus is already mired in scandals relating to cursory examination and overcharging. Waydergo IDS….let’s cut benefit cheating by increasing private supplier fraud…result!

The Maximus track-record is there for all to see….in fact, as Hannan spends so much time in his mythical American ‘Anglosphere’ rubbishing the world’s first health service based on compassion rather than greed, I’m surprised he didn’t notice it and tip his mate Iain Dummkopf-Shit off. Last year alone, US government auditors found that all but $2 million of $41.4 million claimed by the state of Wisconsin – on advice from Maximus – had been “improperly claimed” under Medicaid, the US healthcare insurance programme for those on low incomes. Maximus was reportedly paid a fee based on how much additional revenue the state collected. Ah yes – that’ll be the braindead target motivation bollocks peeping out of the trousers again.

And do you know what the real irony about all these rentagob neoliberals is? Scarcely any of them have any commercial experience whatsoever….and Whitehall has rather less, aka none. Which is why, of course, the private sector in a culture where the business ethic is “do what it takes but don’t get found out”, these snakes run rings round the bureacrats and the Westminster theorists….none of whom ever consider the immediate or long-term ramifications of what they’re about.

Snakes can’t run rings because they haven’t got legs, but that’s not important right now. What’s central to all this is a drum I’ve been banging ever since the Two Eds Miller Band was ‘elected’ to run the Labour Party: where are they while all this is going on? And as usual, they’re on the Twitter trite tripe tweet Tour: