The state of the UK

[Seabass]

It's funny because it's true.

[Scot Dutchy]

Johnson proposes hi-vis chain gangs as part of crime plan

Punishment for antisocial behaviour included in proposals that will also extend powers of stop and search


Offenders guilty of anti-social behaviour should be in “fluorescent-jacketed chain gangs” publicly paying for their crimes, Boris Johnson has said.

Launching the government’s crime plan, which has been criticised by campaigners for the extension of stop-and-search powers, Johnson also called the controversial tactic “a kind and a loving thing to do”.

Among the proposals, designed to relaunch the prime minister’s domestic agenda, was a pledge that offenders doing community service will wear hi-vis clothing as they clear canals or clean graffiti. The plan will also trial the use of alcohol tags, which detect alcohol in the sweat of offenders guilty of drink-fuelled crime, on prison leavers in Wales.

“If you are guilty of antisocial behaviour and you are sentenced to unpaid work, as many people are, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be out there in one of those fluorescent-jacketed chain gangs visibly paying your debt to society. So you are going to be seeing more of that as well,” Johnson told reporters.

It is not the first time Johnson has proposed using highly visible uniforms for those undergoing community service. During his mayoral campaign in 2008 he launched “payback London”, which advocated youth offenders losing privileges such as travel passes and having to undertake community service in hi-vis attire in order to have them returned.

Sounds familiar; the usual right wing crap.

[Scot Dutchy]

While at the other end corruption is rewarded;

Barclays raises size of its bonus pool to £1bn as Covid restrictions ease

Boss says its handling of bonuses is ‘prudent’ as pre-tax profits rise to £2.6bn in second quarter

Barclays has increased the size of its banker bonus pool by more than a third to almost £1.1bn after a rebound in profits, amid an improving economic outlook as pandemic restrictions recede.

Setting out the details of the bonus pool in a half-year update to the London Stock Exchange, the bank said it had ringfenced the cash to compensate its star bankers next spring when payouts are usually made. It means Barclays employees have another six months to build up their final bonus pot for the year, which is likely to come in higher than the £1.6bn paid out for the whole of 2020 when the UK was gripped by the Covid pandemic.

For the first six months of 2021, the bank set aside almost £1.1bn for its bonus pool, up from £785m a year earlier. The final bonus pool will also cover payouts for executives, including the chief executive, Jes Staley, who was given a £843,000 bonus last year.

The country for most is going down the plug-hole but Chumocracy rules.

[Scot Dutchy]

For some at the top of tree is total exemption:

Queen secretly lobbied Scottish ministers for climate law exemption

Monarch used secretive procedure to become only person in country not bound by a green energy rule

The Queen’s lawyers secretly lobbied Scottish ministers to change a draft law to exempt her private land from a major initiative to cut carbon emissions, documents reveal.

The exemption means the Queen, one of the largest landowners in Scotland, is the only person in the country not required to facilitate the construction of pipelines to heat buildings using renewable energy.

Her lawyers secured the dispensation from Scotland’s government five months ago by exploiting an obscure parliamentary procedure known as Queen’s consent, which gives the monarch advance sight of legislation.

The arcane parliamentary mechanism has been borrowed from Westminster, where it has existed as a custom since the 1700s.

In a series of reports into Queen’s consent in recent months, the Guardian revealed how the Queen repeatedly used her privileged access to draft laws to lobby ministers to change UK legislation to benefit her private interests or reflect her opinions between the late 1960s and the 1980s.

Corruption and Chumocracy go hand in hand.

[Scot Dutchy]

Crime always pays for the Tories – that’s why they turn to it again and again

The government’s law and order crackdown displays the performative cruelty that Priti Patel has made her own

It is not difficult to see why Boris Johnson’s first post-isolation photo op was to appear alongside the home secretary, Priti Patel, and talk tough about crime. Ministers are keen to wrench the political argument towards a post-Covid domestic agenda. Yet there are fierce internal arguments in government about public spending, taxes, health and social care. What better way, meanwhile, to signal a return to supposed political normality than to reprise that old Conservative favourite, a dose of law and order?

There is also an immediate reason for that choice. July’s opinion polls have not been as good for the Tories as those of the spring. The lead over Labour, which was often double-digit in June, is mostly in single figures now, and was down from 13 points to four in YouGov’s survey last weekend. The decline of the earlier vaccine bounce seems to coincide with the messy ending of England’s Covid restrictions. A crime crackdown is a way of reassuring the voters that, whatever the appearance otherwise, the government really is in control.

Except that actually the government is not exercising control over crime. This week’s package is for show. To dignify it as a real anti-crime strategy is to miss the point of it, which is rhetorical. The object of the exercise was to create headlines and to frame public debate. Johnson duly obliged with his racially freighted remark that antisocial offenders should be “out there in one of those fluorescent chain gangs visibly paying [their] debt to society”. The headlines and the argument duly followed.


The plan hasn’t even been discussed with the police, which is a giveaway about its lack of seriousness or content. On Tuesday, chief constables queued up to give the Guardian’s Vikram Dodd some scathing private judgments. “It is like there has been an explosion in a strategy factory,” said one. The Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers and which last week expressed no confidence in Patel over the latest police pay freeze, dismissed the whole thing as a gimmick.

More smoke and screens.

[Brian Peacock]

Vote Leave chief awarded £580k Covid deal after call from Dominic Cummings

Dominic Cummings personally called a former colleague on the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and asked if his company would work for the government on its response to the Covid pandemic, leading to the award of a £580,000 Cabinet Office contract with no competitive process.

In an email on 20 March 2020, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser asked the most senior civil servant responsible for contracts to sign off the budget immediately, and that if “anybody in CABOFF [the Cabinet Office] whines”, to tell them Cummings had “ordered it” from the prime minister.

The company, Hanbury Strategy, was founded by Paul Stephenson shortly after the 2016 Brexit referendum, during which he worked alongside Cummings as the Vote Leave director of communications. Hanbury also worked for the Conservative party on the 2019 general election campaign, with Cummings and Ben Warner, a data specialist who worked for Vote Leave before becoming an adviser at No 10.

The contract with Hanbury, to conduct opinion polls on the public’s view of the government’s Covid response, is subject to a legal challenge by the Good Law Project (GLP), which argues that it shows “apparent bias”, particularly given the company’s close connection to Cummings and the Conservative party....

Yep. Chumocracy!

[Seabass]

Yep. Chumocracy!

YYYEEESSS!!!

[Scot Dutchy]

Millions of destitute Britons rely on charity handouts, yet ministers feel no shame

A government that leaves its citizens unable to even eat or wash has, by any definition, fundamentally failed

A decade ago, the emergence of mass food banks in the UK could genuinely be described as shocking. The image of families queueing in their local church for a box filled with pasta and beans has not only since been normalised, it has spread.

This does not simply mean the number of food banks has grown in recent years – there are now more than 1,300 such places in the Trussell Trust’s network, compared to fewer than 100 in 2010, as well as hundreds more independent ones – but also that these have opened the door for other types of donation centres, each set up by community groups and charities in response to growing need.

As squeezed social security, low wages and high rents have left 2.4 million people in destitution, everything from clothes banks to hygiene product drop-off points have cropped up nationwide. When your zero-hours contract doesn’t pay out, you get your shampoo from a donation bin instead of Boots. If you have cancer and have been rejected for disability benefits, fruit and veg comes not from Tesco but your local food bank. Nowadays, Britain has an entire ecosystem of charity to meet our basic needs: donated dignity filling in where the state once stood.

Such a lovely country.

[Sean Hayden]

That sucks, especially since they hate charity so much. Seriously, I'd never heard a bad word about charity till I heard a brit talk about it. Obviously everyone knows about fraud and how awful so many charities are. But I'd never heard anyone dislike charity on principle. It took me awhile to get my head around it.

[JimC]

I suspect that some conservative governments use the existence of certain charities as an excuse not to work harder to eliminate poverty and disadvantage.

[aufbahrung]

The point of the charity system in the UK is to keep the charity workers (AKA do-gooders) busy rather than being outside Parliament with a protest mob. Changes too the benefit system are about increasing the complexity and keeping people busy - costing more whilst doling out less. It's the logic of the decline to fall of The Soviet Union. Then all they teach at Oxford these days for the future leadership cadre is cultural Marxism.

[Hermit]

...all they teach at Oxford these days for the future leadership cadre is cultural Marxism.

[rainbow]

...all they teach at Oxford these days for the future leadership cadre is cultural Marxism.

Quite Plebeian. One goes to Cambridge for an education.

[Svartalf]

Tolkien was an Oxford man, I won't hear such hogwash.

[aufbahrung]

Tolkien was an Oxford man, I won't hear such hogwash.

He allowed the ring to be destroyed, the ring being the supreme token of individual power, the rot had already set in even then.