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Establishment networking, sleaze and corruption. A handy compendium.



Under cover of Christmas, with less than a day for scrutiny, and with No Deal as the only alternative, Parliament passed the European Union (Future Relationship) Act 2020. The process was described by the venerable Hansard Society as “an abdication of Parliament’s constitutional responsibilities to deliver proper scrutiny of the executive and the law” and a “farce”.

Worse even than the absence of scrutiny – of legislation published less than a day before Parliament voted on it – is what that legislation does. It gives incredibly broad powers to Ministers to make laws and override Acts of Parliament. It has been described by the doyen of academic public lawyers, Professor Mark Elliott, as “the hoarding of power by the Government at the expense of respect for any part of the constitution that threatens its hegemony.”

Section 31 of the Act gives a Minister power to “make such provision as [he] considers appropriate to implement… or otherwise for the purposes of dealing with matters arising out of, or related to, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.” These are incredibly broad powers – given to a Minister not Parliament – to reshape every aspect of national life the EU previously touched on.
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Have we had the Nadhim Zahawi changing the name of a family company that his wife & sons are directors of? He is in charge of the vaccine distribution.

Eq5YCXzW8AApA9E


Watch out for Warren Medical getting contracts.
 
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Pickman's model said:
priti patel has removed the tudor executioner's axe from the tower and is reported to be practising with it at home
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Well, given her propensity for fucking it up, with any luck she'll decapitate herself. Although I am doubtful as to whether that will have any profound effect on her thinking skills.

ETA: the prospect of that razor-honed smirk operating from ground level is quite an attractive one, though :hmm:
 
existentialist said:
Well, given her propensity for fucking it up, with any luck she'll decapitate herself. Although I am doubtful as to whether that will have any profound effect on her thinking skills.

ETA: the prospect of that razor-honed smirk operating from ground level is quite an attractive one, though :hmm:
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i wonder whether the description of pp as footloose by one of her civil servants this afternoon suggests an unintended amputation
 
And along a similar line:

We know that poorer and BAME families are exposed to higher Covid-19 risks. But now, because of Government’s continuing failure to arrange for the children of those families to be educated online, they will be exposed to further health risks. Their children will have to attend school but wealthier families, who can afford devices and broadband access for their children, can remain at home.

Back in April last year, we launched legal action to force Government to ensure all children could learn online. We pulled that litigation because Government gave us assurances it would provide laptops and wireless routers to disadvantaged children. However, 10 months later, hundreds of thousands of children are still without. The Education Secretary says he’s ordered a million laptops - of which only 560,000 have been delivered. And even when the remainder are delivered, there will still be a significant shortfall - Ofcom estimates there are 1.7m children without devices and 880,000 of them live in a home with only a mobile internet connection.

To cover his own failure, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson issued new Guidance saying children who cannot learn remotely “due to a lack of devices…should attend school or college".

It might be cheaper and more convenient for the Education Secretary, but by forcing poorer kids to go into schools he is putting families and communities in danger. Parents should not have to choose between the education of their child and their family’s health. We have launched Judicial Review proceedings to challenge the following ongoing Government failures:
  1. to ensure adequate devices are provided to those who require them, in a timely fashion.
  2. to set out clearly in its new Guidance that bringing children into school during the current period purely because of a lack of devices (or data) should be a last resort, and make clear that the cause (lack of device/ data) should be tackled first.
  3. to ensure that educational websites, including the taxpayer-funded Oak National Academy, are exempt from data charges; and to address data charges in relation to home learning for school children more generally.
  4. to conduct adequate assessments of the impact of school closures upon disadvantaged children, and to put in place resulting in contingency plans and mitigating
Thanks to this Government’s ineptitude, the children who were most likely to have lost out on education in previous lockdowns are once again finding themselves slipping further behind their classmates. According to the National Federation for Educational Research, the average learning lost by all pupils in the first lockdown was three months, but at schools in the most deprived areas, the majority of pupils lost four months or more. The impact will last for years.

We all saw the second wave coming - and we cannot understand this continued failure to make provision for the most vulnerable. Forcing working class and BAME kids to go into school at the height of a pandemic because Government can’t or won’t provide devices for them looks suspiciously like sacrificing their health to protect its reputation.
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Badgers said:
A current news issue but this is not new

goodlawproject.org

Private companies maximise profits as the young and the vulnerable suffer - Good Law Project

You will have seen the shocking photos of the food being provided to children on free school meals who are stuck at home during the current lockdown. The provision of these meals was contracted out – in this case to Chartwells, a company owned by the catering giant Compass Group. They, as you...
goodlawproject.org goodlawproject.org
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Holy moly - re the shielding boxes..
"And worst of all, Government paid £44 per box – which we calculate as being nearly double the retail value – to private contractors"
 
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