Liam Fox’s Atlantic Bridge linked top Tories and Tea Party activists

Liam Fox and wife Jesme (right) with former prime minister Baroness Thatcher at his 50th birthday party in London. Photograph: John Stillwell/Press Association

Courtesy of Jamie Doward @ The Guardian:

Twenty US business leaders assembled in Pittsburgh in October 2006 to pay court to the coming man of British politics. They could have been forgiven for thinking Liam Fox, with his neatly parted hair and clipped Scottish accent, resembled the GP he had once been, rather than a potential Tory leader.

But, although few of the business leaders knew much about the shadow defence secretary, they were familiar with his charity, the Atlantic Bridge. This was the organisation whose patron, Lady Thatcher, was lionised in the US for her support of the free market and American military airbases on British soil. It was the organisation whose members in 2004 were ushered into the White House to be briefed by Karl Rove, George W Bush’s special counsel. And it was the organisation whose cocktail parties in the Carlton Club in London and Charlie Palmer’s steakhouse in Washington were high points of the transatlantic social calendar.

Shortly after addressing the business leaders at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Club – “the finest city club in the country”– Fox explained that the Atlantic Bridge promoted the special relationship between the UK and the US by creating “a network of individual people who can know one another”. He declared: “We are trying to bring people together who have common interests and to recognise that in an ever more globalised economy, we will all be called upon to defend those common interests.”

Last week those interests came back to haunt not just Fox, whose fall on Friday rocked David Cameron’s coalition government, but also many Tory members of the cabinet, whose extensive links to the Atlantic Bridge are now under scrutiny. The irony is that it took a furore around Fox’s friendship with a relatively minor player in the saga – a lobbyist, Adam Werritty – to make these links apparent.

Admittedly, senior Tory cabinet ministers had been scrambling to distance themselves from the Atlantic Bridge long before the scandal brought Fox down. The organisation’s website – and that of its sister charity across the Atlantic – has been dismantled. But old caches of the site reveal that, while shadow ministers, George Osborne, Michael Gove, Chris Grayling and William Hague were all on its advisory council alongside Fox, its UK chairman. All four stood down as awkward questions over its political activities, which contravened charity laws, resulted in the organisation being wound up.

George Osborne faces backlash after branding charities ‘anti-business’

George Osborne addresses the Institute of Directors, where he urged business leaders to put their heads ‘above the parapet’. Photograph: Rex Features

Courtesy of Katie Allen & Rowena Wilson @ The Guardian:

George Osborne has triggered a backlash from charities after he urged companies to defend the economy against their “anti-business views” and those of pressure groups and trade unions.

The chancellor called on business leaders to raise their heads “above the parapet” and fight back against charities and others who he said were making arguments against the free market and standing in the way of economic prosperity.

Osborne told the annual convention of the Institute of Directors in London: “You have to get out there and put the business argument, because there are plenty of pressure groups, plenty of trade unions and plenty of charities and the like, that will put the counter view.

“It is, I know, a difficult decision sometimes to put your head above the parapet, but that is the only way we are going to win this argument for an enterprising, business, low-tax economy that delivers prosperity for the people and generations to come.

“There is a big argument in our country … about our future, about whether we are a country that is for business, for enterprise, for the free market.”

Osborne did not name any of the charities that had antagonised him, but his remarks are the latest in a string of comments by senior Conservatives suggesting they believe charities have got too political and leftwing.

UK Debt Is Actually £100 Billion Higher Than We Thought, Official Stats Body To Say

Courtesy of Huff Po:

George Osborne’s austerity message is set to be dented by the government’s own statistics body, as it prepares to adopt new calculations that mean the UK’s public sector debt will be £100 billion greater than estimated.

The Office for National Statistics will bring in the new calculation this autumn as part of sweeping changes that include estimating illegal activities like prostitution and drug dealing as worth £10 billion to the country’s national wealth.

The UK’s debt will effectively increase from well over £1 trillion by more than £100 billion, or 7.3% of GDP, as the ONS attempts to improve its accounting standards changes introduced by the US, Canada and Australia.

The ONS will bring Network Rail’s debt onto the UK’s books and also stop classifying the state’s stakes in the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds as liquid assets that can be sold off quickly.

But in good news for the coalition, the ONS will give the UK’s GDP a boost of up to 5% (£75 billion) by reclassifying research and development as capital spending rather than a cost of production

Deficit £185bn not £90bn committee of MPs warn

George Osborne is a liar and a treasonous one at best, through fraudulent accounting practices he is hiding the true debt and deficit of the UK. Has austerity worked, when the figures are skewed, of course not. He is leading this country to ruin, well it is his job and considering most economic indicators are lies, he is getting away with it. Don’t worry, he’ll end up with a cushy job and the debt will be hidden until its too late. Go back to sleep Britain, your leaders are in charge and care about you, go back to sleep Britain, everything will be ok…till it’s not.

To protect yourself and your family, consider Gold, Silver and crypto-currency because the GBP as we know it, will finish with its value returning to its intrinsic value of…0. In the past 300 years there have been 700 fiat currencies, the longest lifespan was 50 years and we’re 42 years in on this global fiat experiment. If history does not repeat itself, it sure rhymes.

BY GEORGE, BRITAIN’S AUSTERITY EXPERIMENT DIDN’T WORK!

Courtesy of The New Yorker:

George Osborne, the patron saint of austerity enthusiasts on both sides of the Atlantic, was in the House of Commons on Thursday, reveling in the fact that the U.K.’s economy is finally growing again, and claiming that “Britain’s economic plan is working.” Delivering his annual Autumn Statement—he was a bit late—the Chancellor of the Exchequer pointed to forecasts from the quasi-independent Office for Budget Responsibility, which point to G.D.P. growth of 1.4 per cent this year and 2.8 per cent in 2014.

Workers’ overall pay has not fallen, insists George Osborne

Courtesy of The Guardian:

George Osborne is to claim that workers’ overall pay has not fallen, despite official figures showing that the wages of middle-income families have dropped by £5,000 over the past five years.

The figures, from the Office for National Statistics, showed a 6.4% drop in the annual wages of median households from £37,900 to £32,600 from 2007-08 and 2011-12.

But in a bid to defuse the ongoing row over living standards, the Treasury has drawn up its own figures, due to be published in Thursday’s autumn statement. They claim that workers’ pay has kept pace with growth if rises in employers’ national insurance and pensions contributions are included. The Treasury will blame the rise in national insurance introduced by Gordon Brown for the relative slowdown in wages – rather than companies siphoning cash into higher profits.

UK Housing Bubble…What Bubble?

The UK housing market is in a bubble. The OECD advised that UK home values have climbed 36.6% since 2004. The Bank of England said last week that mortgage approvals have surpassed 60,000 a month, 6 months earlier than predicted. I’m sure this will all turn out lurvely with lots of fluffy kittens included but a speculative real estate bubble validated as the key driver of nominal economic growth….what could possibly go wrong? Obviously this time, it will be different.

Tories Attempt to Delete All Pre 2010 speeches from the Internet

They’ve only gone and done it anyway but where are the journalists from the mainstream media, holding these corrupt and malevolent politicians to account? Orwellian doublespeak from Mr Cameron, the UKs treasonous premier and courtesy of The New Statesman:

How’s David Cameron’s pledge to be the “most transparent” leader ever working out? Not very well judging by an extraordinary story from Computer Weekly. The site reports that the Conservatives have attempted to erase all speeches and press releases issued between 2000 and until May 2010 from the internet. That’s right; not just from their own site but from the Internet Archive, the largest publicly available digital library.

The Hidden Welfare State

Posted on May 14, 2013 by syzygysue

The UK has two welfare states.  There is one that is reported and endlessly discussed, and another, which is rarely mentioned.  Whilst the first is suffering enormous cuts under the Tory/LD coalition, the other just keeps expanding.

Comedian, author and activist Rob Newman explains to the New Internationalist magazine (May 2013):

Governments on the left and the right can always justify welfare cuts by pitting, for example, mobility scooters against needle exchanges, or the soft-play area in children’s playgrounds against an old people’s home.  Who deserves it most, they say, students or cleaners?  Old or young?  But when we’re running not one, but two welfare states, that’s a totally fake scenario.  The real choice is between playgrounds or gas rigs; between Meals on Wheels or The City of London Currency Speculators’ Maintenance Allowance.

There’s a connection – never mentioned – between, let’s say, Britain’s eight new deep-water gas rigs and its 200 new food banks.  The connection is that the $4.5 billion subsidy package being doled out to transnational gas corporations is a very big slice of the welfare pie.  And to keep the gas transnationals on the benefits to which they are addicted, hungry humans have to queue for tinned food that is too close to its sell-by date to be kept on the shelves of supermarkets, many of which are themselves massive recipients of corporate welfare.

 Not only does the UK pay out unemployment benefits less generous than Romania, Albania and the US, but the wages of the employed have simply not kept pace with productivity over the last 30yrs.

Tory Ideology is all about Handouts to the Wealthy paid for by the Poor

Meanwhile, the corporate sector sits on a colossal cash surplus of £800bn but without investing because the real problem continues to be the lack of aggregate demand… and the richest 100 UK citizens, only 0.0003% of the electorate, now have wealth estimated at £257bn.

Nevertheless, George Osborne has been prepared to cut £18bn from benefits plus a further £81bn from public services in the name of unavoidable austerity, whilst at the same time providing huge subsidies, tax cuts and removing regulation for the hidden ‘welfare’ system that benefits the private sector.

No goods or services are directly returned to the government in exchange for these expenditures, although of course,  politicians will argue that they’re stimulating the economy, helping struggling industries, creating jobs or funding important research but actually this is just a corporate welfare system.

The Cato Institute estimated that in the US, $93 billion were devoted to corporate welfare in 2002. This was about 5% of the federal budget… and nearly twice the amount spent on social welfare ie. feeding people, housing the homeless, raising children out of poverty…

There is no reason to think the situation is different in the UK.  However, overall statistics for the UK corporate welfare budget are hard to discover .. and the variety of different subsidies are staggering.  Needless to say, our MSM focuses its attention on fraud and waste in the social welfare budget.

Welfare fraud and waste is never far from the top of the UK’s news agenda – but the real figures often bear almost no resemblance to popular belief. The British public, for example, think around 27% of the welfare budget is lost of fraud, according to TUC research.

The Department for Work and Pensions’ latest data on fraud and error in the benefit system shows a very different reality: fraud exists, but at a far lower level than the public believes – and is outweighed by errors from claimants and officials alike.

The overall figures show fraud and error are largely unchanged from last year. The DWP estimates £3.5bn has been overpaid due to errors and fraud in the system; 2.1 per cent of the overall benefit expenditure.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2013/may/13/welfare-fraud-error-universal-credit

The corporate welfare budget arises from four main sources:

Paying little or no tax – Tax havens

Tax breaks

Enjoying huge subsidies

Removal of employment and environmental protection regulations

The task of covering all these areas adequately is beyond the scope of this post so I offer these quotes which illustrate some of the ways in which the corporates are benefiting from political sponsorship of their welfare:

The UK’s 100 biggest public companies are running more than 8,000 subsidiaries or joint ventures in onshore and offshore tax havens, according to research published on Monday, raising fresh concerns about the full extent of corporate tax avoidance.

The figures, published by the charity ActionAid, show that only two of the companies listed on the UK’s FTSE 100 have no subsidiaries in tax havens – while companies such as Barclays and Tesco own hundreds. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/may/12/uk-companies-condemned-tax-havens

Could this be the same Chancellor who in his 2012 budget offered multi-nationals which opened a finance subsidiary in a tax haven a reduction in corporation tax from the then rate of 23% to an eye-wateringly low level of just 5.5%?   It could be, and it was.   Is this the same Chancellor who, whilst ultimately controlling the UK Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories which constitute up to half the world’s most frequently used tax havens, declined to take any action to close them down?    Yes, it was again.

http://www.michaelmeacher.info/weblog/2013/05/corporate-tax-scams-in-developing-countries-the-next-target/#more-5201

RICHARD MURPHY says:

May 13 2013 at 10:50 am

I say tax gap is £95bn

It was revealed recently that only one in four of the UK’s top companies pay their taxes, meanwhile they receive tax credits to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds funded by people who did pay their taxes.

http://scriptonitedaily.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/corporate-giants-arent-wealth-creators-theyre-parasites/

 … vastly profitable large chains of supermarkets … get an enormous subsidy to help with one of their major overheads, staffing costs. This is because many employees in these large and successful companies are paid only the minimum wage. And because the current minimum wage is not a living wage, nearly everyone on it has to claim tax credits to be able to make ends meet. Those tax credits are funded by the taxpayer…. Let’s stop calling them “wealth creators” and start calling them state subsidised industries.

http://www.searchingfinance.com/news-and-views/teresa-pearce-mp-a-living-wage.html?goback=.gde_1211737_member_236208402

 Currently, it is estimated that the government has already provided £43.5bn in various subsidies including the National Infrastructure Plan, the Equity Loan and Help to Buy schemes, the Enterprise Finance Guarantee and the Regional Growth Fund, with nothing to show for it.  Far greater sums are in the pipeline, up to £310bn.  

http://think-left.org/2013/05/11/despite-britains-new-thatcherites-only-the-state-sector-has-recovered/

It is more important to [the Tory/LD coalition] to privatise everything they can in pursuit of their real objective of a fully marketised State rather than to compel these banks, of which the taxpayers own 82% of RBS and 39% of Lloyds, to prioritise lending to industry to kickstart the economy and get growth going at last.   Even more significantly, an enforced sale before the election will at their current share value lose taxpayers £24 billions!   That is truly staggering when Osborne has been prepared to cut £18bn from benefits plus a further £81bn from public services in the name of unavoidable austerity.   Yet at the same time he is now disposing of assets which will gratuitously lose the public coffers £24bn.

http://www.michaelmeacher.info/weblog/2013/05/osbornes-smack-in-the-face-for-all-benefit-spending-cuts-victims/

It is arguable that without the state’s support the banking sector would have collapsed entirely.  But even on the most favourable comparison from the low-point of the recession the subsidy has been hugely inefficient.  A £1,020bn hand-out to the banks has yielded an increase in output over that time of approximately £40bn.  It would have been far more efficient if the state had directed its own capital into the production of banking services, via fully nationalised and controlled banks. 

http://think-left.org/2013/05/11/despite-britains-new-thatcherites-only-the-state-sector-has-recovered/

114 year Workers Rights Scrapped by Coalition Government.

For the Benefit of the Conservative Party – “FOR SALE – Local Hospital and Schools “

.. if you spend £100 on healthcare in the NHS you get one hundred quid’s worth of healthcare less about 5% management costs. In the private sector you’ll get a hundred quid’s worth less 3% management costs, 5% profit, 12% to pay bank loans and charges, plus a chunk for bonuses, dividends and return for investors. And, no provision for what happens if they go broke or get fed up.

http://www.hsj.co.uk/comment/opinion/andrew-lansley-competition-is-critical-for-nhs-reform/5041288.article

I will conclude with the 2011 nef briefing,  ’Feather-bedding financial services’, which asked, in addition to the unprecedented public support for the financial sector over the past three years, how much are the big banks benefitting from hidden subsidies? They identified at least three significant hidden subsidies:

• The ‘Too Big to Fail’ subsidy: The government now provides a public guarantee, effectively insurance against banks going bust. This gives banks a huge commercial advantage over other firms in a market system. It means banks are able to borrow money much more cheaply than if they were not ultimately underwritten by the public. Exchanges with leading auditors in front of the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs in January 2011 confirm this. A conservative analysis reveals that this hidden subsidy could be worth £30 billion annually. It means that bonuses to senior staff for ‘performance’ and dividends to institutional investors are at least in part a straight transfer from the taxpayer.
• The quantitative easing windfall subsidy: When it was decided that the economy needed more liquidity, the Bank of England pumped money in using the technique called ‘quantitative easing’. To meet various, and sometimes self-imposed, requirements, it did by purchasing government bonds through investment banks. Merely for being passive conduits for this ‘risk free’ arrangement the banks took a cut of every trade. Here nef analysts found that banks enjoyed a significant windfall, but that lack of transparency keeps the likely amount hidden.
• The ‘make the customer pay’ subsidy: Looked at sympathetically, the banks have been put in a difficult position. At the same time as being required to rebuild their capital, they are also under pressure to lend. In response, the banks have tried to manage this by increasing the gap between what they have to pay to borrow money, and what they charge people to borrow from them. This is the so-called interest rate ‘spread’. But the banks have a choice. They could recapitalise by reducing or eliminating bonus and dividend payments until their capital base is rebuilt. As it is, the taxpayer is subsidising the banks twice over: once through taxpayer funded public support to the banks, and secondly through paying much higher interest to borrow than the banks do. This hidden subsidy to retail banking and one part of the investment banking world amounts to at least another £2.5 billion each year.

http://www.neweconomics.org/press/entry/are-british-banks-getting-billions-in-hidden-subsidies-asks-nef

As James Galbraith wrote:

The Predator State…. The state as monopoly collector of taxes and corrupt distributor of the spoils to the private sector…

There is no common good, no public purpose, no shareholder’s interest; we are the prey and governments as well as corporations are run by and for predators.

Furthermore, none of this is likely to get any better under the rules of the US-EU FTA (Free Trade Agreement) which the Tory/LDs are wanting to get signed by 2014.  Part of the secret negotiations are the transfer of sovereignty from nations to private corporate tribunals who will be empowered to compel governments to change their laws or pay unlimited fines.

UK Government….scrounges and scum

Half a million in the UK use food banks and being the 7th richest country in the world, when is ENOUGH…ENOUGH? Blaming a section of the population for a countries problems didn’t work well in Nazi Germany, it will fail here as well.