The site has to maintain a balance Peter, and I'm therefore obliged to counter the barrage of right wing bollocks that's posted on this thread by the 'usual suspects'.
I do indeed believe every word, though.
Off Topic The Politics Thread
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The site has to maintain a balance Peter, and I'm therefore obliged to counter the barrage of right wing bollocks that's posted on this thread by the 'usual suspects'.
I do indeed believe every word, though.
An interesting piece regarding the link between the Conservative Party, Islamophobia and the right wing media.......
https://bylinetimes.com/2019/12/05/reasons-to-be-islamophobic-profiting-from-the-politics-of-fear/
Comments are invited from my Tory friends on here, who must surely be as exercised by this as they are by Labour anti-semitism.
https://bylinetimes.com/2019/12/05/reasons-to-be-islamophobic-profiting-from-the-politics-of-fear/
Comments are invited from my Tory friends on here, who must surely be as exercised by this as they are by Labour anti-semitism.
i thought jezza had sorted this **** out
So far in 2019,
Irish republican extremists have; Committed murder
Detonated bombs
Thrown grenades
Issued threats
Mounted gun attacks
Attempted to kill police
Threatened dozens
So far in 2019,
Irish republican extremists have; Committed murder
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Detonated bombs
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Thrown grenades
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Issued threats
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Mounted gun attacks
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Attempted to kill police
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Threatened dozens
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Read in Full: Jewish Labour Movement’s Submission to the Human Rights Commission on Antisemitism in Labour
The Jewish Labour Movement’s closing submission to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has been leaked in full.
The conclusion – based on testimonies of 70 serving and former Labour party officials – damningly says “The Labour Party is no longer a safe space for Jewish people”.
100 additional testimonies from party members say they have suffered or witnessed antisemitism at party events. Labour were desperate to change the final election week’s narrative – this might make that difficult…
The Jewish Labour Movement’s closing submission to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has been leaked in full.
The conclusion – based on testimonies of 70 serving and former Labour party officials – damningly says “The Labour Party is no longer a safe space for Jewish people”.
100 additional testimonies from party members say they have suffered or witnessed antisemitism at party events. Labour were desperate to change the final election week’s narrative – this might make that difficult…
Frankly, I’d rather vote for Johnson and find him reneging one his election promises than vote for Corbyn and find him delivering on his.
Thankfully, I don’t think the Jews are as subjugating when it comes to women, or meander around London killing people as much as the Muzzims. As Islam isn’t a race, I’m happy to say that, on balance, I’m no fan.
There we go, Islamophobia doesn't really count.
People with black faces aren't a different race either, Ubes.
Nor are Jews for that matter.
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UK household debts see big increase
Debts excluding mortgages are on the rise in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Debts including credit card debt and personal loans rose 11% to £119bn in the two years to March 2018, according to the ONS study, which is published every two years.
Average household financial debt rose 9% to £9,400.
Much of the increase is a result of higher student loan and hire purchase debt.
"The figures are skewed slightly by the £32bn of student debts - which the vast majority of graduates will never pay back in full," said Sarah Coles, personal finance analyst at stockbroker Hargreaves Lansdown.
"However, even excluding that we're carrying £87bn in loans, credit cards, hire purchase agreements, overdrafts and arrears."
Median financial debt - taking the middle household as the norm, rather than dividing total debt by the number of households - grew 12% to £4,500. This figure excludes households with no debt and suggests these debts are not evenly spread.
The poorest 10% of households have debts three times bigger than the value of assets they own, while the top 10% have total wealth - property, pensions and other assets- worth 35 times larger than their debt.
"But if you're one of the 44% of people who see their borrowing as a burden, it's worth taking steps to deal with your debts."
Budgeting can tighten up finances, but there are many free advisers who can help find the best way forward.
Citizens Advice has specialist money advisers, while other organisations that can help include StepChange, Christians Against Poverty, Debt Advice Foundation, National Debtline and Shelter.
You must log in or register to see images
Image copyright PA MediaDebts excluding mortgages are on the rise in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Debts including credit card debt and personal loans rose 11% to £119bn in the two years to March 2018, according to the ONS study, which is published every two years.
Average household financial debt rose 9% to £9,400.
Much of the increase is a result of higher student loan and hire purchase debt.
"The figures are skewed slightly by the £32bn of student debts - which the vast majority of graduates will never pay back in full," said Sarah Coles, personal finance analyst at stockbroker Hargreaves Lansdown.
"However, even excluding that we're carrying £87bn in loans, credit cards, hire purchase agreements, overdrafts and arrears."
You must log in or register to see images
Median financial debt - taking the middle household as the norm, rather than dividing total debt by the number of households - grew 12% to £4,500. This figure excludes households with no debt and suggests these debts are not evenly spread.
The poorest 10% of households have debts three times bigger than the value of assets they own, while the top 10% have total wealth - property, pensions and other assets- worth 35 times larger than their debt.
- What do you think about this story? Join our BBC News Affordable Living Facebook group here.
"But if you're one of the 44% of people who see their borrowing as a burden, it's worth taking steps to deal with your debts."
Budgeting can tighten up finances, but there are many free advisers who can help find the best way forward.
Citizens Advice has specialist money advisers, while other organisations that can help include StepChange, Christians Against Poverty, Debt Advice Foundation, National Debtline and Shelter.
Don't know if I'd use the word every, but I also have no interest in defending the Tories either.
We're in agreement on this, although I suspect perhaps not on Corbyn's personal role.
Fine with that, but I won't let one detract from the other, and Labour's issue is the more newsworthy today because of the quite damning report.
I don't think we're poles apart on this one!
I have no problem with people with faces that are black, gammon, yellow or purple with green spots, Strolls.
The Jews are a little different because they've been persecuted in Europe throughout the centuries. Think Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. I reckon the Left don't like them (1) because they blame them for the Palestinian problem - not without merit - despite the fact that the Arab world could easily have solved this by now themselves had their plight not generally suited the 'cause', and (2) because they are generally stereotyped as being conservative in nature, money lenders, capitalists, insular etc.
It's weird when you think of the Left's love affair with Islam when you consider that religion's record on sexual equality, homosexuality and racial and religious intolerance.
I'm sure you don't have a problem with the colour of people's skins, Ubes. I was referring to your suggestion that Islamophobia doesn't really count because Islam isn't a race. Persecution isn't necessarily about race - there's really only one race after all - it's about difference, whether it be skin colour, sexuality, religion or whatever.
I don't believe the Left has any love affair with Islam - I certainly don't, in fact I am anti all religions. The left would tend to support the persecuted, and where the line gets blurred is that their support for the Palestinian cause in the face of oppressive Zionism may spill over into anti-Semitism.
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Come on then Johnson. Do you want it?
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tip of the iceberg
NHS Fraud Squad: Catching the crooks stealing £1.3 billion from the system
As much as 1 per cent of the NHS budget is stolen by fraudsters each year
Every year, close to £1.3 billion is defrauded from the NHS. It is a shocking attack on an organisation that needs every penny for patient care. What may surprise those who don’t know about the scale of fraud against the health service is how much of that money is stolen by insiders.
Individual doctors, dentists, opticians, members of hospital senior management and administrative staff
have all been found guilty of substantial frauds, swindling hundreds of thousands of pounds out of the NHS.
In one case, investigated by Scotland’s NHS counter fraud service, a hospital worker stole surgical equipment worth £1.3 million, which was spent on lavish holidays.
But these crimes don’t go unchecked.
I myself have worked as an NHS fraud investigator for ten years. My organisation, the NHS Counter Fraud Authority, is the subject of five-part BBC documentary Fraud Squad NHS, being shown every day this week.
The NHS Counter Fraud Authority is responsible for gathering intelligence on fraud, bribery and corruption, and, wherever possible, preventing these crimes before they happen. Before joining the NHS, I was an investigator at the Department for Work and Pensions for 15 years. I dealt with everything from individuals claiming extra benefit money for themselves, to organised gangs defrauding the system with forged cheques and hundreds of fake identities.
At the NHS, the amount of money stolen can be just as significant, whether opportunists inside the organisation are behind it, criminals on the outside, or a toxic combination of the two. For the lowest paid, desperation can play a part, but highly paid professionals usually have no real reason to steal other than greed.
Gavin Heaton has worked for the NHS counter fraud office for 10 years, returning millions of pounds to its coffers Credit: Geff Gilbert /Telegraph
Over the years, the NHS Counter Fraud Authority has dealt with, for instance, the case of the dentist who wasn’t really a dentist. She had failed her exams overseas then purchased fake degree papers. To prosecute, we flew in witnesses who could testify she had lied.
Then there was the senior manager who tricked her hospital into paying for animal sperm for her private business, a stud farm, by disguising them as legitimate payments for NHS items including a “titanium skull plate”.
It is still surprising to see how senior staff members put their careers in jeopardy for relatively small amounts of money. Recently, one chief executive of a trust was prosecuted for stealing £11,000 by awarding a contract to her husband and trying to cover up that the work wasn’t delivered. She lost her job and was convicted of criminal offences.
Most of our cases come to us via tip-offs to our reporting lines from staff members (the majority being very honest and hardworking), or the public. A patient might let us know that they have received an NHS bill from a dentist who has already charged them for the work privately. We see a number of cases involving dentists, such as one who stole more than £1 million by charging for work she hadn’t conducted and making claims for people who were dead or didn’t exist.
My most significant case to date was the investigation of a group of perfusionists, specialists who operate heart-lung machines during certain types of surgery. The group was employed full time at Basildon University Hospital, but during their paid NHS hours, its members were working off-site on private contracts at other hospitals. They billed the service for 14,000 hours of work that they didn’t conduct, cheating it out of more than £1 million pounds.
When the case landed on my desk, I didn’t expect a conspiracy of this scale. I could imagine one or two people being involved – but this was a large part of the team, led by the manager, John Mulholland. He was a well paid, world-renowned perfusionist, hired to set up the unit and decide what staff and resources it needed.
John Mulholland was jailed for conspiracy to defraud the NHS after he set up a service through which permanent staff could moonlight privately Credit: PA
As the case built, staff members gradually revealed how fearful they were of Mulholland, who some believed had the power to make or break their careers in the UK and beyond. He was a controlling person, but he could also be quite charming. Under his peer pressure, these intelligent perfusionists acted illegally. Had they been in another hospital, I don’t know if they would have turned to crime.
We trawled through car park records and building swipe card data to see who was in the hospital when they were meant to be. We discovered Mulholland and three other members of staff were running a private company called London Perfusion Science, which employed Basildon staff to work at two other NHS hospitals on top of their full-time salaries.
In some instances, staff would be on call at multiple hospitals at once. In others, they would lie about where they had been working.
We brought in Essex Police and raided Mulholland’s home, where we found a wealth of incriminating information: spreadsheets listing which hospital each member of staff was at every day; an email that said: “We’re the villains, aren’t we?”
The result of our investigation was the return of £577,000 to the NHS and four technicians – Mulholland, Ann Clements, Tom Cumberland and Martin Oliver – being jailed for a total of nine years.
In a recent case I worked on, a fraudster was caught out when he went on holiday. Andrew Taylor was a locksmith at Guy’s Hospital, London, who cheated the NHS out of £600,000, which he used to fund private school fees and a car worth £27,000.
;
Andrew Taylor was found guilty of fraud by abuse of position after he swindled £600,000 from the NHS Credit: PA
Taylor seemed to act largely with impunity as the hospital’s sole locksmith from 2006, ordering new keys, padlocks, key chains and fobs without sufficient oversight. He was the first to work, last to leave each day.
But when he was away on holiday, an urgent order came through, which led his colleagues to look up the main supplier that Taylor used: Surety Security. There was no answer from the number listed for the company and then, with a bit of digging, we discovered Taylor had once been listed as a director of the company.
My team was brought in to look through Taylor’s company’s invoices, and found that he had marked up the price the hospital paid for supplies by up to 1,600 per cent, on hundreds of occasions. He bought toilet locks for £11.82, but created invoices to charge the hospital £78. Thousands of key blanks that cost him 17p each from a wholesale provider were billed at £1.70.
As soon as Taylor returned from his holiday and discovered that he was being investigated, he resigned and shut down Surety Security. In court, he tried to justify his mark-ups, saying had enhanced each product to make it more secure. These included a 1,000 per cent mark up on a key chain. The judge didn’t believe his defence, and last year he was sentenced to six years in prison in March.
It amazes me how people can be so greedy and steal from an organisation that is designed to save lives. That said, it is always satisfying to see them prosecuted for taking money from the NHS health system, which belongs to you and me.
NHS Fraud Squad: Catching the crooks stealing £1.3 billion from the system
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As much as 1 per cent of the NHS budget is stolen by fraudsters each year
- Gavin Heaton, Investigator for the NHS Counter Fraud Authority
Every year, close to £1.3 billion is defrauded from the NHS. It is a shocking attack on an organisation that needs every penny for patient care. What may surprise those who don’t know about the scale of fraud against the health service is how much of that money is stolen by insiders.
Individual doctors, dentists, opticians, members of hospital senior management and administrative staff
have all been found guilty of substantial frauds, swindling hundreds of thousands of pounds out of the NHS.
In one case, investigated by Scotland’s NHS counter fraud service, a hospital worker stole surgical equipment worth £1.3 million, which was spent on lavish holidays.
But these crimes don’t go unchecked.
I myself have worked as an NHS fraud investigator for ten years. My organisation, the NHS Counter Fraud Authority, is the subject of five-part BBC documentary Fraud Squad NHS, being shown every day this week.
The NHS Counter Fraud Authority is responsible for gathering intelligence on fraud, bribery and corruption, and, wherever possible, preventing these crimes before they happen. Before joining the NHS, I was an investigator at the Department for Work and Pensions for 15 years. I dealt with everything from individuals claiming extra benefit money for themselves, to organised gangs defrauding the system with forged cheques and hundreds of fake identities.
At the NHS, the amount of money stolen can be just as significant, whether opportunists inside the organisation are behind it, criminals on the outside, or a toxic combination of the two. For the lowest paid, desperation can play a part, but highly paid professionals usually have no real reason to steal other than greed.
Gavin Heaton has worked for the NHS counter fraud office for 10 years, returning millions of pounds to its coffers Credit: Geff Gilbert /Telegraph
Over the years, the NHS Counter Fraud Authority has dealt with, for instance, the case of the dentist who wasn’t really a dentist. She had failed her exams overseas then purchased fake degree papers. To prosecute, we flew in witnesses who could testify she had lied.
Then there was the senior manager who tricked her hospital into paying for animal sperm for her private business, a stud farm, by disguising them as legitimate payments for NHS items including a “titanium skull plate”.
It is still surprising to see how senior staff members put their careers in jeopardy for relatively small amounts of money. Recently, one chief executive of a trust was prosecuted for stealing £11,000 by awarding a contract to her husband and trying to cover up that the work wasn’t delivered. She lost her job and was convicted of criminal offences.
Most of our cases come to us via tip-offs to our reporting lines from staff members (the majority being very honest and hardworking), or the public. A patient might let us know that they have received an NHS bill from a dentist who has already charged them for the work privately. We see a number of cases involving dentists, such as one who stole more than £1 million by charging for work she hadn’t conducted and making claims for people who were dead or didn’t exist.
My most significant case to date was the investigation of a group of perfusionists, specialists who operate heart-lung machines during certain types of surgery. The group was employed full time at Basildon University Hospital, but during their paid NHS hours, its members were working off-site on private contracts at other hospitals. They billed the service for 14,000 hours of work that they didn’t conduct, cheating it out of more than £1 million pounds.
When the case landed on my desk, I didn’t expect a conspiracy of this scale. I could imagine one or two people being involved – but this was a large part of the team, led by the manager, John Mulholland. He was a well paid, world-renowned perfusionist, hired to set up the unit and decide what staff and resources it needed.
John Mulholland was jailed for conspiracy to defraud the NHS after he set up a service through which permanent staff could moonlight privately Credit: PA
As the case built, staff members gradually revealed how fearful they were of Mulholland, who some believed had the power to make or break their careers in the UK and beyond. He was a controlling person, but he could also be quite charming. Under his peer pressure, these intelligent perfusionists acted illegally. Had they been in another hospital, I don’t know if they would have turned to crime.
We trawled through car park records and building swipe card data to see who was in the hospital when they were meant to be. We discovered Mulholland and three other members of staff were running a private company called London Perfusion Science, which employed Basildon staff to work at two other NHS hospitals on top of their full-time salaries.
In some instances, staff would be on call at multiple hospitals at once. In others, they would lie about where they had been working.
We brought in Essex Police and raided Mulholland’s home, where we found a wealth of incriminating information: spreadsheets listing which hospital each member of staff was at every day; an email that said: “We’re the villains, aren’t we?”
The result of our investigation was the return of £577,000 to the NHS and four technicians – Mulholland, Ann Clements, Tom Cumberland and Martin Oliver – being jailed for a total of nine years.
In a recent case I worked on, a fraudster was caught out when he went on holiday. Andrew Taylor was a locksmith at Guy’s Hospital, London, who cheated the NHS out of £600,000, which he used to fund private school fees and a car worth £27,000.
;
Andrew Taylor was found guilty of fraud by abuse of position after he swindled £600,000 from the NHS Credit: PA
Taylor seemed to act largely with impunity as the hospital’s sole locksmith from 2006, ordering new keys, padlocks, key chains and fobs without sufficient oversight. He was the first to work, last to leave each day.
But when he was away on holiday, an urgent order came through, which led his colleagues to look up the main supplier that Taylor used: Surety Security. There was no answer from the number listed for the company and then, with a bit of digging, we discovered Taylor had once been listed as a director of the company.
My team was brought in to look through Taylor’s company’s invoices, and found that he had marked up the price the hospital paid for supplies by up to 1,600 per cent, on hundreds of occasions. He bought toilet locks for £11.82, but created invoices to charge the hospital £78. Thousands of key blanks that cost him 17p each from a wholesale provider were billed at £1.70.
As soon as Taylor returned from his holiday and discovered that he was being investigated, he resigned and shut down Surety Security. In court, he tried to justify his mark-ups, saying had enhanced each product to make it more secure. These included a 1,000 per cent mark up on a key chain. The judge didn’t believe his defence, and last year he was sentenced to six years in prison in March.
It amazes me how people can be so greedy and steal from an organisation that is designed to save lives. That said, it is always satisfying to see them prosecuted for taking money from the NHS health system, which belongs to you and me.