NHSX Boss Matthew Gould makes no secret of the fact that he used Covid to tell NHS Staff to ignore data protection or information governance legislation.
In this interview at Future Med 2020, an Israeli Health Conference whose opening address was delivered by Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu, Gould, former UK Ambassador to Israel and assistant to Tony Blair, refers to a ‘one pager’.
Here are COPI (Patient Confidentiality) letters from the Health Minister to NHS England and Improvement Chief Sir Simon Stevens, to whom Matthew Gould reports, and to Sarah Wilkinson who runs NHS Digital.
For more on the looting of NHS data by private firms such as Google watch The Great NHS Heist which was released late last year.
Gould has form when it comes to spookery. He was UK director of Cybersecurity, UK Ambassador to Israel and worked directly for Blair, Brown and Miliband.
Though it would be extremely bad form to suggest that he was more loyal to Israel than to the UK, Gould is an enigma, no stranger to controversy and clearly in the employ of UK military intelligence but quite possibly also friendly with Israeli Military Intelligence as well. We may never know.
Paul Flynn had to apologise for extremely clumsy working of his critique of Gould whose Blairite credentials suggest he has something of the Common Purpose about him.
But back to the bigger issue, if the Government says it’s suddenly ok for NHS staff to break data protection rules, then why would those rules ever be respected in the future?
By referring to a can-do attitude and not “getting caught in knots about massive detail of the law”, Matthew Gould, like his friends George Osborne, Matt Hancock and Simon Stevens is accelerating the destruction of the NHS.
This morning a story about NHSX Chief Matthew Gould appeared on the Guardian / Observer website. It never made the physical paper.
The guy Matt Hancock put in charge of NHSX -and so responsible for the failed NHS Covid App – is a pal of George Osborne , appointed without interview ,on a 'temp' contract that's lasted a year so far https://t.co/Ayuyk3oUPh
In June at an Israeli health summit Gould, Zionist former UK Ambassador to Israel, was asked how he had managed to use Covid to bring about unprecedented ‘digital health adoption’ in the UK.
In his response Mr Gould appears to have told NHS workers to pay no attention to existing UK legislation. He goes on to suggest that this is a winning formula.
Journalist:
There’s a claim Matthew that Covid 19 was an exceedingly effective accelerator of digital health adoption, maybe the most effective one ever. And you’ve mentioned some aspects of this earlier on when you talked about the adoption of online care and alluded to some of the symptom checkers.
Could you tell us a little bit more about your experience in the UK and how which digital health transformation aspects were accelerated during Covid 19? And what actually changed that allowed it?
Was it regulation that changed? Was it acceptance by the physicians and by the unions that changed? Or maybe it was acceptance by the patients or just bare necessity?
Matthew Gould:
One of the things we did earlier in the crisis that i think made a massive difference was we produced a really simple one-page guide to information governance for people working in health and care saying essentially if you are in good faith trying to look after your patients and acting in sensible ways then you’re not going to get into trouble.
And that was endorsed by our information commissioner, by the national data guardian and it had a really positive effect.
Because it sent a signal: look just be sensible do the right thing, don’t get yourself caught up in knots over um sort of the massive detail of law – but just get on with it. And that was extremely positive and we need to capture that can-do spirit and sort of bottle it and keep it for the future
Who is Matthew Gould?
Matthew Gould is an old school friend of George Osborne.
He worked on foreign affairs directly for Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Miliband.
Gould’s friend George Osborne was on the advisory board of Atlantic Bridge which part-paid for Werrity’s travel expenses as he pretended to be a member of the Ministry of Defence.
Anti-Jewish Sentiment
Straight-talking MP Paul Flynn apologised for suggesting that Gould should not have been appointed UK Ambassador to Israel on account of him being Jewish.
Flynn said that Gould was vulnerable to accusations “of having Jewish loyalty” and that the position should be given to “someone with roots in the UK”. Flynn said, “there hasn’t been a Jewish ambassador to Israel and I think that is a good decision – to avoid the accusation that they have gone native.”
Cybersecurity
Upon returning from Israel Gould was UK Cabinet Office Head of Cybersecurity and then worked for Matt Hancock at the Media Department, specialising in the digital economy.
Gould was appointed Head of Cybersecurity by George Osborne after the Talk Talk cyber attack in 2015. Talk Talk was then headed by Conservative Peer Dido Harding who now runs Public Health England’s replacement organisation as well as NHS Improvement.
Horseplay
Gould’s Twitter profile mentions showjumping – a passion for horses that is shared by Dido Harding, Matt Hancock, & Owen Patterson – all of whom have done very well out of the Covid crisis.
Spooky
Sadly Owen Patterson’s wife died mysteriously on his birthday in June.
Harding also runs Track and Trace with Gould. She was also appointed without any interview process. Bizarrely Harding’s husband John Penrose, also a Tory MP, is the UK’s anti-corruption tsar.
Given that Matthew Gould has boasted of instructing NHS workers to ignore the law, perhaps he should be prosecuted for corruption himself.
Double Standards
But don’t hold your breath. The UK Government has shown no regard for international, human rights and employment law on so many occasions lately that we have to accept that normal laws simply don’t apply to them any more.
Maybe one day things will change, but certainly not without a fight.
The seasoned paedo enablers at the Sun could tap into their homophobic and racist side.
But what prejudice can the white paedo nationalists evoke when duelling with heterosexual white male capitalist Phil Hogan?
If they want a spat, he’ll bring it.
Hogan and Murdoch have a lot in common.
Cold heartless Neo-Liberalism.
But Hogan used to be the EC agriculture commissioner.
He will want to protect Irish farmers from US hormone and chemicals crossing the border.
He has also pushed through laws in financial services and won’t want Ireland’s tech and tax avoidance rackets to be played with.
Even Steve Bannon would have little to say about Phil Hogan who is smarter, tougher, more Irish and more capitalist than the billionaire dependent US Rasputin.
But in as much as you can describe it, it can adhere to communicative principles, for instance:
This article appears in the Sun.
Pay Fury is efficient signalling. Pay is a short word and Fury is highly emotionally loaded. It’s words like this which earn tabloids their money. Fury is a brilliant word for a tabloid style article on anything you wish to highlight.
Pay Fury is a category, a genre in itself.
You can trot this out forever and it will always work.
Health Killjoys pocket £100k
Killjoy is loaded – it means meanspirited, no fun.
Pocket when used as a verb is like trouser – it means took home or earned but is more evocative of securing funds without really working for them, ie stealing.
More than 350 nanny state killjoys pocketed x for y.
The language is of sensation and excess. The emotion, morality, direction, size, certainty, outrage are all embedded in just a few words. That is what words can do. And if you know how to get words to do these things, then you can achieve big things. The tabloid press exist for agenda setting.
“For telling us what to do”
What do the top managers at the Sun earn?
They tell their readers what to think about. They don’t mention what they don’t want anyone to know.
They obviously underpay the underlings.
But the overall goal is to undermines public services and promote post-Brexit private healthcare.
All communicators should be monitoring this paper.
For uncut real time agenda setting you need to stick your head in The Sun.
What motivates UK-based “healthcare entrepreneur”, ex-Goldman Sachs investment banker, Ali Parsa to attend the Butchers without Borders investment conference in Saudi Arabia?
Since then the event itself has started and a full line-up has been published.
For some reason the Guardian hasn’t mentioned that Babylon Health CEO Ali Parsa was at the conference yesterday:
In Brief
Babylon Health is defunding GPs practices, cherry picking younger patients, handing over confidential medical data to Google Health, operating with an inevitable significant error rate (machine learning isn’t perfect), taking Saudi Money, Google money, US health insurance (Centene) money, Swedish venture capitalist money which specialised in 1990’s Russian disaster capitalism (New Vostok Ventures), doing deals with surveillance capitalists Tencent in repressive China, and in Rwanda thanks to Tony Blair and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Dr Murphy
Ali Parsa discusses the 'silly' unrealistic expectations that the public have regarding the safety of & accuracy of AI technology in healthcare.
— Lords Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee (@HLDemoDigital) October 28, 2019
More puff from Ali, this time at KPMG.
KPMG, the Big Four, and PFI
KPMG, PWC, Deloitte, Accenture are management accounting firms that are also known as the Big Four.
They offer more than just accounting services and, although they are referred to as mere Bean Counters, their work is often laden with conflicts of interest.
IPPR backed the part-privatisation of many of Britain’s hospitals in the 1990s and early 2000s. But the conflicts of interest in their promotion are now much clearer than they were then. The so-called left wing think tanks were funded by large private companies to push their privatising agenda.
IPPR has had a bit of a makeover in the last couple of years, since the 2017 election. Grace Blakeley, one of their economists, is on the TV a lot and Tom Kibasi, the soon to depart CEO, has become very close to the top of the Labour Party. But although Blakeley has written a book about Financialisation, I understand that she rarely takes on her former employers – like KPMG.
On the subject of PFI, IPPR now say that it was a disaster — conveniently forgetting their own role promoting it.
They say that the Government should bail out the hospitals by buying the debt and issuing (cheaper) government bonds to pay it off.
It goes without saying that the hospitals should have been funded using general taxation in the first place.
Apparently EU accounting rules forbade UK from running the type of deficits that such programmes would have required.
But the actual solution, going after the fraudsters that pushed PFI in the first place, doesn’t seem to get mentioned even in the Labour Party.
Why do you think that is? Maybe because IPPR have infiltrated Labour Party thinking and are doing the bidding of their friends, (some of) the fraudsters over at the City of London.
More on the NHS Privatisation from Dr Bob Gill, GP and producer of the Great NHS Heist.
Sell-Off
This film was made in 2014
Awareness
If we don’t have a proper media, the only way any good decision making will happen for this country is if we take back control of internal communication.
Lobbyists, Public Affairs and Public Relations execs will always be paid to serve the rich. But they need to be called out more frequently, if not they will carry on winning the war. The stakes are high. Please share this information, if you can.
Lord Letwin DeRegulator ((Dominator)) ((Der is no Udder))
Wanna Kiss Myself
It’s quite something to see Arch-Remainers parachute Arch-Thatcherite Oliver Letwin into his new emergency-stylerole as Lord Liberal of Remain.
But does this not slightly give the game away?
That we’re in for a Mandelsonian Blairite Johnson Miller Faragiste Zero Regulation Putin Trump Murdoch Roy Cohn-style Apocalyptic #TINA-style Brexit.
A fool & his attention are soon hacked.
Photo du Jour: Oliver Letwin MP is congratulated by People’s Vote supporters after forcing the government to delay it’s Brexit plans. By Stefan Rousseau/PA pic.twitter.com/Q5dchn4JxN
On the BBC yesterday he was made to look as though he was attempting to thwart Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal:
But on Andrew Marr today he said he would happily vote for it.
Propaganda-as-a-service
It is testament to the Billionaire BBC and Press Baron propaganda machine that Letwin was lauded by thousands in Central London for appearing to block Boris’ Brexit and all the deregulation that will come with it, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Crypto-Marxist
In June 2017 Letwin wrote this piece for Evening Standard Editor George Osborne. Note the use of the term Crypto-Marxist. Yesterday he relied on John McDonnell’s vote. I smell shenanigans.
Oliver Letwin: This is no time to be getting bogged down with new laws https://t.co/rzqDw7ADRb
The new EU / Boris withdrawal agreement is stuffed with deregulation. No wonder Letwin says he’ll vote for it. Interesting that they put a border around Ireland.
Drift to Union
In 1989 Oliver Letwin wrote Drift to Union: Wiser Way to a Wider Community.
In his autobiography, Hearts and Minds, Oliver Letwin admits to being hoist by his own petard in regard to Jenkin and the rest of the “bastards”.
Letwin of course didn’t invent Euroscepticism.
Paedo-Sceptics
Paedo Harvey Proctor was a eurosceptic long before Letwin came on the scene. He was an Enoch Powell fan. Powell, though a genius in the linguistic realm, was also said variously to be a racist, a eurosceptic, a monetarist and a paedophile. Proctor is well known to have been all of the above.
Tony Benn was a Eurosceptic too and bonded with Powell over their mutual disdain for the EU. Just as Corbyn has always been against the Bosses Union. God knows why he and John McDonnell have U-turned now!
Deregulate This!
Deregulation is the thing which has been the only political topic for the last forty years but which the BBC and other channels of course pretend isn’t actually happening.
Racist though they are, the executives at the BBC would prefer to talk about racism than deregulation!
“This isn’t about race, this is about impartiality. The BBC very clearly is against racism… What it can’t do is cross the line into opinion… & I think the two presenters did actually put a toe over that line”
The gargantuan effort of miseducating the nation would take years of deprogramming to eventually be remedied.
The BBC are happy to refer to unregulated sectors as being bad, but never to deregulation as a political choice.
Deregulation-as-a-service
Check out the spike from 2015 in the graph below. They pretend the stats over the decade are bad, but the inflection point is the deregulation bill of 2015. There was a clause in the bill about privatising and outsourcing children’s homes. I called the Children’s Society, who did this research, at the time, but they couldn’t care less. The graph appears in the video below it.
Again the stat below is for 2012 to 2019 but I suspect the bulk of the rise is from 2015. Some Tory donors will have made big money from the Deregulation Bill.
Deregulation Bill
The Deregulation Bill of 2015 passed almost without mention. Sponsored by Ken Clarke and Oliver Letwin. Both of whom featured in Iain Duncan Smith’s speech yesterday.
So Johnson, Clarke, Letwin, and Duncan Smith are all pimping vulnerable kids into prostitution, trafficking, drug addiction and misery for the sake of a couple of quid. And the BBC say nothing.
Matt Hancock signed off on the Deregulation Bill at the same time as he was talking up TTIP.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, a Labour Lord, represented Labour for the Deregulation Bill in the Lords against the coalition’s Lib Dem Lord Saltaire.
I watched Hancock and Hunt in Parliament on the same day in January 2015.
Little did I know that Britain would leave the EU and Trump torpedo TTIP.
Or that Hancock would become Health Minister.
Revolving Door
But weirdest of all was when I found out that Lord Hunt was on the books of Tory former health Minister Baroness Cumberlege’s lobbying firm : Cumberlege Connections.
How transparently fucked up is that? A leading Labour Lord being on a Tory’s lobby outfit’s payroll. And guess who else is on Cumberlege’s books?
Only Baroness Browning, the chair of ACOBA, the body that is supposed to police the revolving door. Browning is literally doing the thing she is supposed to be guarding against. Fox in charge of chicken house on a meta-fucking-level.
Speaking of meta, that is what the deregulation bill was. It took bits from pre-existing laws. Same as Brexit is doing to workers rights. Snipping them away in one go.
Post-Deregulation
After the Deregulation bill was passed Sajid Javid became Business Secretary and said he wanted to cut even more Red Tape. The Cameron One in Two Out and One in Three Out Deregulation policies were eventually copied in Brussels and by Donald Trump.
We are the kings of below the radar human rights violations.
And the BBC is key in disarming, disinforming, destroying modern Britain.
Paedo Protection Unit
Concealing deregulation debates from its audience has been as big a con trick as the VIP sex scandal it pulled with Jimmy Savile. It’s tried to pretend Westminster doesn’t have a paedo / rent boy / VIP sex ring problem but, again, it’s plain as day that the BBC is protecting paedos like Harvey Proctor.
Proctor’s winning the Paedo PR war with help from the likes of Stephen Fry, Craig Dillon, and Tarsh Consulting.
The associates on Daniel Janner’s Paedo pressure group FAIR look like they’re almost all evil. I would say Liam Allan has been utterly duped into joining.
Teresa Cooper
For the link between privatisation, profit and paedophilia listen to this podcast from 2018 that connects upskirting scandal MP Sir Christopher Chope who used to run Wandsworth Council with the drugging and raping of Teresa Cooper and other women as part of the Big Pharma experiments that were conducted at Kendall House in the early eighties.
Teresa is an inspiration – do find out more about her. Amazing Woman.
Letwin’s wife, Isabel, was head of Legal Services at the Department of Work and Pensions and the Department of Health during the Health and Social Care Act of 2012.
The Act did more to open up the NHS to the Private Sector than any other.
Pushed through by Letwin’s wife and Lib Dem peer Tim Clement Jones while Letwin himself was the eminence grise of the then coalition cabinet.
Cameron had put Letwin in every Cabinet Committee and let him run the Country via the Cabinet Office.
Señora Clegg
Clement Jones was Miriam Gonzalez Durantez’s boss at DLA Piper as well as being the Lib Dems’ Treasurer & Health spokesman in the Lords.
Miriam Gonzalez Durantez is a trade and competition lawyer who worked for Chris Patten in Brussels. After working at DLA Piper she moved to the London office of US law firm Dechert. She is currently Vice Chair of UBS Europe and at the beginning of the year she moved to California with her family and joined Cohen Grasser.
Vicebook
Miriam Gonzalez Durantez is married to former UK Deputy Prime Minister and current Facebook Vice President for Global Affairs and Comms, Nick Clegg.
Clegg of course worked for reputed paedo Leon Brittan in Brussels.
Will Facebook’s new currency Libra be linked to UK DWP benefits payments?
AI & Govt Welfare Contracts
Tata Consulting Services have a contract to supply platforms for Aadhaar, the Indian biometric welfare system,
But they are still trying to make it look glam to attract “talent” to its Newcastle offices. Offering Datajams, Dojos, and hackathons. When in actual fact they are just persecuting, traumatising and often killing people who they should be helping.
Keir Starmer was the lawyer for the McLibel case that was so embarrassing for McDonalds. He went on to become Director of Public Prosecutions. A super political job. They say he’s a proper deep state man.
How funny that John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn, Tom Watson, Keir Starmer and OLIVER LETWIN all voted, against Boris, for the same bill.
Were they really all voting against a crash-out?
I am of the opinion that no deal would be better than the one that Boris has agreed.
The Meaning of Meaning
Here’s my mate Roger Lewis and I trying to make sense of events.
Great NHS Heist
If you liked the themes in this blog you would probably like the upcoming film by Dr Bob Gill and Drew McFadyen, The Great NHS Heist.
So I thought Skinner was the bad guy. The really mechanistic one. Or was it Watson?
Who said we are basically all the same and that our feelings and personal stories don’t really matter.
That there is no such thing as experience. That we are all automatons. The one who put his daughter in a box.
These guys were out of fashion when I learned about them in the early 90s.
But then there was a behavioural revival of sorts. Which in turn enveloped economics.
But behavioural economics said we are all predictably irrational. That classical economics is wrong but behavioural economics is right.
But there are assumptions in behavioural economics too.
Such as that we have limited time and limited information.
Gigerenzer shows that lifting the information and time caps leads to bad decision making – even for experts.
He says we all excel at fast and frugal decision making and that overthinking things induces a form of judgment paralysis.
So behavioural economics itself is quite wrong in terms of how it is applied outside the narrowest of conditions.
And refuses to admit it only thrives under controlled conditions.
But it’s about control.
Choice architecture. Avoiding decision fatigue. Favorably automating information flows. Forcing people into certain situations and pretending it’s both logical and exemplifying freedom.
Someone tell Oliver Letwin.
He’s kind of gone now. Still an MP but not quite the eminence grise he once was.
He spoke about his ideas at the institute of government in 2014, I think.
Outlining the Road from Mont Pelerin that his parents and he had trundled. And then he admitted that he now realised that Intervention does work.
What kind of intervention do you mean, Oliver?
Surely not state intervention in markets – not a liberal like you?
Nor QE, where central banks do the heavy lifting that austerity governments ought really to be doing.
Oliver Letwin revealed that he was taking about the nudge unit.
Though he didn’t mention the job centre – he was probably talking about over there too.
His wife Isabel was head of legal services at The Department of Work and Pensions and at the Department of Health. Oliver’s crackpot ideas will have been used on mental health patients and “under” & “unemployed” people who didn’t really need them.
Of course the machinery of government exists to prevent anyone really knowing the consequences of their actions.
Agnatology is another word for ignorance studies. Sociologist Linsey McGoey has a book out on the topic next year. The Unknowers. Watch out for it.
There is always a latest fad via which the old school asset stripping is masked.
Dark Pools
At book club we looked at Dark Pools. The rise of AI and high frequency trading. I couldn’t help but think when presented with these smart idealist insurgent American price scalpers – You Got To Pick a Pocket or Two!!!
So there. From Hangman on the High Street to Richard Thaler’s Nobel 2017 Prize for Nudging.
Cancer research UK has me thinking of the Crick Institute, big pharma and the next Goldman Sachs social impact bond. This a featured big under Cameron, Osborne and Letwin and was just an excuse to privatize the NHS and get volunteers to steer the handover.
Will Davies looks at some of this stuff in Happiness Industry and Nervous States – links between neo-liberal policies, technology, happiness and “well being” discourse. I haven’t seen it yet but I’m sure big pharma has its place in there too.
There’s some great work being done on investigating all this but it’s pretty under the radar.
Let me know if you have any recommendations.
Once you start looking into any of this funny things start happening.
The Road from Mont Pelerin.
I met up with John Christensen of tax justice Network yesterday who told me about The Finance Curse, a new book out by Nicholas Shaxson.
There’s some research accompanying the launch, this Friday, which sheds light on the colossal cost to the UK of the Finance Curse.
Meanwhile check out his film The Spiders Web on YouTube and for updates on what the Tax Justice Network are up to check out the TaxCast with Naomi Fowler.
When discussing Mont Pelerin, I told John I once met Linda Whetstone, whose father, Anthony Fisher, set up the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA).
John asked me how a man who so frequently invoked freedom could make his money from forcing hens into cages barely big enough for them to even breathe.
The Macron Curse
It looks like Macron is going to copy Blair and go all out for neoliberalism.
God knows what that will do to the environment and the Paris Climate accord!
I’m meeting Chloé Farrand of DeSmogUK tomorrow and will report back where she thinks we are heading.
The finance curse has done nothing to improve the gender pay gap in London. So I wonder what the figures look like in France.
London Conversation
I’m planning on publishing more frequently.
The idea is that with heightened fluency might come some sort of style.
Health – Oral Evidence Session
Memorandum of understanding on data-sharing between NHS Digital and the Home Office
Yusef Azad, Director of Strategy, National AIDS Trust
Dr Joanne Bailey, Member of the Advisory Panel, National Data Guardian
Marissa Begonia, Coordinator, Voices of Domestic Workers
Dr Lucinda Hiam, General Practitioner, Doctors of the World
Professor John Newton, Director of Health Improvement, Public Health England
Lord O’Shaughnessy, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Health (Lords), Department of Health
Sir Ian Andrews, Non-executive Director, NHS Digital
Sarah Wilkinson, Chief Executive Officer, NHS Digital
Caroline Nokes, Minister for Immigration, Home Office
Jonathan Marron, Director General, Community Care, Department of Health
Hugh Ind, Director General of Immigration Enforcement, Home Office
Location: The Wilson Room, Portcullis House
What’s going on?
Potential parallels with the Indian Aadhaar Biometric ID card System & the Chinese Sesame Credit Social Credit Rating Agency (owned by AliBaba) — with a bit of deportation thrown in.
In China if you get a high Sesame Credit score you can get a visa and skip customs as you are trusted.
On the flip-side will you need a high UK social credit score just to stay in the UK?
Aadhaar and Sesame Credit link State, FinTech, Big Data, Health, Insurance, Surveillance & Privacy.
Sesame Credit is a good example of State and Corporations working hand in hand.
TenCent are another big Chinese firm that do Social Credit Systems.
Despite the American Committee for Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) recently blocking Ali Baba’s Ant Financial from buying MoneyGram for Security / Data reasons, in the UK we’re handing the Chinese Government the keys to our Nuclear Park — so why not all our data and (linked) healthcare technology too?
Why wouldn’t Home secretary Amber Rudd use such surveillance technology?
This session will look at how algorithms and AI are changing the nature of healthcare delivery. It will also consider the ways in which the NHS can harness the value of its data without compromising on patient privacy and consent.
(at 3:30 pm)
Dr Julian Huppert, Chair, Independent Review Panel for DeepMind Health
Ms Nicola Perrin, Head, Understanding Patient Data, Wellcome Trust
Dr Sobia Raza, Head of Science, PHG Foundation
(at 4:30 pm)
Dame Fiona Caldicott, National Data Guardian for Health and Care, Office of the National Data Guardian
Dr Hugh Harvey, Clinical Artificial Intelligence Researcher and Consultant Radiologist, Guy’s and St Thomas NHS Foundation Trust
Professor Martin Severs, Medical Director, NHS Digital
Rupert Murdoch prefers Marine Le Pen to Jeremy Corbyn as she is, like himself, a racist anti-EU campaigner.
But if you forget about race and look at international trade and financial markets — her views are much more like Corbyn’s than Murdoch’s.
She’s a protectionist.
This is the same direction opportunist Theresa May is now taking when she steals Labour policies.
But May is still a ruthless Tory – paying off her friends in the finance sector while saying she will protect the NHS and public services.
Populism
Nigel Farage was allowed to open the door to ‘populism’ in the UK and, having achieved his aim of getting Britain out of the EU, he is now openly supporting Marine Le Pen.
I wrote about his interview with Le Pen a few months ago which was remarkable because till Brexit he avoided being seen in her company for fear of being called a fascist.
The interview was also interesting because Le Pen referred to how much more similar Theresa May’s policies now are to the Front National’s — and not to Emmanuel Macron’s.
This was even more remarkable for Le Pen because Macron had just been invited to visit Downing Street and she hadn’t.
Downing Street failed to get friendly with Trump before November and now, yet again, they are slow to get to know Le Pen.
But either way, as alluded to in the previous post, Le Pen’s differences with Trump, Farage and Murdoch, and similarity with Corbyn can be summed up in one word: DEREGULATION
Murdoch
Today’s Murdoch-owned Times quotes Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean Marie Le Pen, who founded the Front National, as saying she must act like Murdoch’s friend — Donald Trump.
Like Murdoch and unlike Corbyn, Le Pen uses immigration to divide.
Lots of people in the UK are now sceptical about Globalisation – many vote UKIP, Labour, Green, and SNP.
By stealing Labour policies and rhetoric the Tories are picking up plenty of ex-UKIP votes.
With the media’s help they try to convince voters that Blair, Cameron and even Corbyn are far too metropolitan and somehow un-British, and that we should all get back in touch with our socially conservative inner-Tory.
Many of these voters are against excessive immigration and open borders.
Which Corbyn and Lib Dems are seen as soft on.
We’re constantly told that we want a strong leader. Like May, Trump, or Le Pen.
Now is Le Pen’s time because she goes one further than Corbyn, Sturgeon, Lucas and even Theresa May.
For Le Pen is both fully racist and fully anti-capitalist — wanting total protection of both borders and markets.
She needs to solve France’s unemployment and lack of productivity without acknowledging that the EU has historically protected its borders and markets (often to benefit France!)
Is Le Pen more scared of the Eastern Europeans who’ve used free movement since communism fell; the refugees from US / UK / Coalition operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria; or of immigrants who’ve moved to France not because of the EU but because of France’s own kleptocratic African, Asian and Caribbean adventures?
Deregulation
Unlike Trump, Farage and Murdoch — and very much like Corbyn — Le Pen is fervently anti-Deregulation.
Farage ran a very confused Brexit campaign that focused on Brussels’ authoritarianism and ignored the degree to which Brussels had been infiltrated and in many ways captured by the City of London’s lobby group.
For evidence of this lobbying just look at the EU -US trade agreement TTIP.
This policy was announced by Obama and Cameron in Northern Ireland at the G7 / G8 meeting in 2013 and would have harmonised food, labour and environmental regulation on both sides of the Atlantic.
It’s precisely that model of Anglo-Saxon style capitalism that Le Pen and Corbyn both reject.
Farage just pretended to hate it. He is actually a big fan of the financial services lobby. It’s where he gets his cash.
But still, lots of Brexit campaigners, including Farage, jumped on the momentum that had been generated by the Anti-TTIP movement to push for Brexit.
In France, Le Pen used TTIP to push for her own election.
This is the most irresponsible manner in the way the French election is being covered here in the UK.
There is not enough parallel context being drawn with the UK political scene..
Is Le Pen being praised by the British press simply because our newspaper owners think she is a bit like Theresa May?
EU debate
The way the European Central Bank is run is severely flawed but little discussion of its policies are permitted to take place at any level.
Therefore even though many people know there is a problem, our media and politicians don’t permit us the space to discuss it.
Many Labour and Lib Dems seemed to have swallowed deregulation whole and by aggressively campaigning to remain in the EU didn’t permit debate of its flaws.
Jeremy Corbyn was an exception to that as he said he was against TTIP and deregulation. But he wasn’t given the platform that he deserved.
He was co-opted by the Remain camp.
His biggest failing on Europe was that he didn’t take more of a stand in public over TTIP.
Despite letting people know his views on Trident and Bombing Syria Corbyn never engaged in a public debate with his party about TTIP and so the deregulation lobbyists captured the entire debate.
They’re doing the same with the NHS and PFI.
So despite having some great ideas about taking back control, Corbyn’s project is being treated as a joke while Le Pen’s is taken seriously.
Corbyn’s patriotism is being rejected by the tax-avoiding foreign-owned media in favour of Theresa May’s lies which are designed to mask the looting of the UK public sector by the financial services sector.
Will Labour come up with a plan to save the NHS by prosecuting bankers for fraudulent PFI?
I asked them that very question this week and have been told Labour’s PFI announcements are due later in the campaign.
I suggested that we need ideas circulating asap in order to persuade people to ignore the spin. But so far no reply.
The following story about overcharging at private care homes appeared on page 2 of yesterday’s Daily Mail – before the announcement of the ‘snap election’:
This story has many similarities to the US Department of Justice’s investigation into US Health Insurer United Health’s pilfering of the American public purse in its Medicare programme.
The man who ran the Medicare programme when UnitedHealth allegedly overcharged the American taxpayer by hundreds of millions of dollars was Simon Stevens – current head of NHS England.
According to his current LinkedIn Profile, Stevens was Chief Executive Officer, UnitedHealthcare Medicare between 2006 – 2009
His CV goes on to say:
America’s leading seniors health company, with $30 billion revenues and serving one-in-five Medicare beneficiaries nationwide in partnership with AARP – the world’s largest voluntary organization. Launched the largest Medicare Part D benefits plan, also managing the largest Medicare-focused PBM.
So if Simon Stevens knew about the multimillion dollar fraud cases that took place on his watch – did he declare or disclose any of this to Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, or to NHS England?
It is now in the public interest for all correspondence between Simon Stevens, NHS England and Jeremy Hunt prior to his 2014 appointment to be made public.
Corporate Takeover
Stevens advised the Department of Health and Blair throughout the period when the NHS was using PFI to build hospitals. So he basically aided and abetted the bankruptcy of the NHS and now looks to be finishing off the job.
Election Issue
This ought to be an election issue. I hope Shadow Health secretary John Ashworth raises this conflict of interests during the campaign.
Can such an individual be trusted to look after the NHS?
This story has many similarities to the US Department of Justice’s investigation into US Health Insurer United Health’s pilfering of the American public purse in its Medicaid programme.
The man who ran the Medicaid programme when UnitedHealth allegedly overcharged the American taxpayer by multimillion dollar was Simon Stevens – current head of NHS England.
America’s leading seniors health company, with $30 billion revenues and serving one-in-five Medicare beneficiaries nationwide in partnership with AARP – the world’s largest voluntary organization. Launched the largest Medicare Part D benefits plan, also managing the largest Medicare-focused PBM.
If Simon Stevens knew about the fraud case – did he declare it?
But since “quitting politics” he’s already backed Trump in the US election and now he’s doing the same for the leader of the French National Front.
Double Standards
In the tenth minute of this 40 minute interview Farage asks Le Pen if she feels British Prime Minister Theresa May snubbed her by inviting her rival Emmanuel Macron to Downing Street.
Farage himself never let UKIP enter Le Pen’s nationalist grouping in the European Parliament.
Theresa’s Judgment
In this 30 second clip Le Pen refers to Macron as not being the sort of person she thought Theresa May would want to meet as, in contemporary French politics, he’s the key salesperson of deregulation and Globalisation.
Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage bond over Theresa May’s terrible judgment.
They correctly point out that it makes no sense for Theresa May to say she stands for Brexit and threatening immigrants but then roll out the red carpet for Macron and not Le Pen.
Farage points out that Theresa May wanted nothing to do with Trump until some days after he was elected – despite the supposed similarity in their agendas.
Deregulation
Farage and Trump, unlike Le Pen, strongly back deregulation.
They refer to it as cutting red tape.
But Le Pen talks about protecting French workers from deregulation.
Trump and Farage pretend to rail against corporate power but their loyalties lie with the uber-rich.
Could it be a similar story with Le Pen?
A former top lawyer and daughter of a multimillionaire, her party also needs big cheques but courts and delivers a mainly working class vote.
The only things they really agree on are the threat of open borders and Islamic terrorism.
Economic Patriotism
Le Pen shows solidarity with May and Farage against the vindictiveness of the European Union.
She says the EU wants to punish Britain.
Farage asks her about how she wants to protect French businesses and whether there is room for trade with Britain.
Le Pen says her Economic Patriotism means ensuring French Local Authorities buy from local suppliers.
She also says further measures should be taken to protect french industries from ‘dumping’ – where foreign firms sell their products cheaper because they are able to produce more for less due to weaker labour and environmental laws.
I feel China and Germany are being alluded to here but there’s no mention of British and American exporters and the huge deregulation going on in the USA which they plan to use to boost exports to France.
On the other hand she says she also wants France to “conquer the world” and therefore favours trade.
She concludes that for some industries you need protection but not for all.
This is similar to Steve Bannon’s assertion that he is not a White Nationalist but an Economic Nationalist.
America already had a Buy America policy under Obama.
And while France’s local industries obviously ought to be protected, there are massive inconsistencies in Le Pen’s argument.
But Farage doesn’t point them out.
How can global waves of economic nationalism and protectionism help French exporters?
But we can still sell to each other with minimal taxation, right?
Farage asks if by threatening to impose tariffs on Britain, the EU is ultimately making French workers pay to protect the EU project.
Conversation moves on to talk of migration, borders, Calais and suspending the Schengen agreement.
Brits living in France are reassured that they will not be threatened.
Le Pen says many of the French in London will return to France.
Taxes will be cut as unemployment falls and public spending is cut.
Le Pen says being a Muslim in France is not a problem – it is sectarianism she says she objects to.
She says she is against Islamist Fundamentalism.
When asked about anti-semitism in her party Le Pen says she doesn’t tolerate it and would prefer not to be judged by the words of all her supporters.
Farage says he knows how it feels to be judged by one’s supporters.
Conversation then goes to Putin.
Le Pen argues Russia and US are both as important as each other and that Russia has done a lot of good in Syria.
Farage asks if borrowing from Russian banks compromises her.
Le Pen says she couldn’t borrow elsewhere but that her lender doesn’t choose her policies.
On Trump – Le Pen says she too opposed TTIP and is glad he wants to be a President of the US and not of the world.
Global Revolution
Le Pen says there’s definitely a global revolution going on.
She points out that it is funny that the Anglo Saxon creators of neoliberalism are now the ones who reject it.
Farage says that it was Brussels who created this neoliberalism and not the Anglo Saxons.
Le Pen replies that the Anglo-Saxon world implemented Liberalism and the EU has turned it into Ultra Liberalism.
She says that either way, they are both now on the same side.
This doesn’t feel unlike rival football hooligan firms enjoying a friendly beer before resuming normal service and beating the crap out of each other.
The Spice Girls, The Sex Pistols and even the Jimi Hendrix Experience were all put together by their management teams.
So why not UKIP or the EDL?
Kassam, a self-defining ex-muslim and product of intellectual PC-friendly culture, shifted to the alt-right and now runs Breitbart London which is controlled by Steve Bannon.
Tommy Robinson changed his slightly Irish and double barrelled name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon to head up the English Defence League with an alias taken from a notorious Leeds United football hooligan.
He makes his money running a tanning salon in Luton.
Yes, that’s right.
From people in a multicultural area who pay him money to look less white.
Everybody’s looking for something. And you have to make a living, right?
There’s a beautiful symmetry here.
Where were we?
The French Presidential Election
Farage asks why Le Pen should be French President.
She says because she is profoundly French.
The other candidates just want to represent the Insurance, Banking, and Drug Companies.
Le Pen is asked if, having won the first round, she can win the second round.
She says it is a choice for the French.
It’s no longer a left-right split.
Do we want France to remain France?
She says if voters really want French values such as secularism, equality of race and religion, and not sectarianism, then they will vote for her.
Le Pen says the other candidates have a post national vision.
Are all Americans deserving of the right to healthcare?Yes — Universal healthcare systems should mean free access for all at the point of delivery, focused on protecting public health, and funded via general taxation. No — No-one should ever be forced to pay for services they will never use and no-one should be allowed to use services they could never afford.
America outspends the developed world on health care, but Americans are less healthy https://t.co/mZJX5vLf2X
The US health care debate on CNBC this morning started with EVERYONE AGREEING that EVERY AMERICAN DESERVES COVERAGE.Discussion quickly moved on to whether IMPROVING ACCESS to HEALTHCARE is best achieved by MAKING IT MORE AFFORDABLE.It was then pointed out that the only way you could make healthcare more affordable would be to force all taxpayers to subsidise the health system.Finally there was talk of the injustice of taking money off citizens whose belief systems prevent them from ever using the health system in the first place.
When Sqwawk Box presenter Andrew Sorkin pointed out that this was an absurd line of argument his co-presenter stated that though he agreed with Sorkin he still thought the point of view deserved mentioning.
Check the buzzwords in this recent MSNBC video:
What is the difference between Receiving Affordable Care, Unaffordable Coverage & Insurance, & Access to Healthcare?
What is the difference between Classic Republicans, Democrats and Trump’s people?
Back to the UK
Looks like Brexit has been brought about to Deregulate the Labour Market and get rid of the minimum wage.
Linked to LIBOR. Is there something we’re not being told?
At the end of this article, The Times claims the government is turning to Post War tactics to ease the housing crisis and hit its construction target.
The housing minister in 1945 was Nye Bevan, who built the NHS.
Will the Times now nostalgically call for the ejection of private companies and re-nationalisation of the NHS — as a return to post war tactics?
Hmm. All these contradictions. So much engineered confusion. How do we even manage to get out of bed in the morning?
Will Corbyn and McDonnell get treated with respect if they frame their NHS reforms as a return to post war tactics and not as an attack on the City of London?
No newspaper mentioned her U-turn on TTIP at the time. One political journalist told me he remembered the pathetic Demarty assurance she received from the European Commission on how TTIP would not affect the NHS.
Political Pirouette
Wollaston has now performed a perfect political pirouette and gone back to Remain.
Like a blend of Clare Short leaving the Blair administration only after the Iraq War had been declared, and Iain Duncan Smith leaving the government after destroying so many lives through austerity, Wollaston has jumped ship, on both occasions, after doing the British people much more harm than good.
Fox is a well known Thatcherite along with his colleagues John Redwood, John Whittingdale, and Oliver ‘Privatising the World’ Letwin.
Brexit & TTIP
TTIP is bad for the NHS as it is designed to open it up to US Health Insurance firms.
And the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission are heavily captured by the City of London Corporation. Liam Fox is right to say that it doesn’t look as though they will change path.
But it would be very dangerous to put the Brexit camp in charge of the country.
The fact that Fox thinks the City of London Corporation and the EU are not Neo-Liberal enough is a fair sign of what he has planned for the NHS.
Attempting to reform the undemocratic EU from within will be hard – but much easier than negotiating with Fox.
In March 2015 George Osborne handed Manchester’s unelected interim Mayor full control of its £6bn a year health budget as part of his flagship Devolution for Cities policy.
.@cpeedell George Osborne signs Manchester & NHS over to Vampire Capitalists just before the 2015 Election. Sneaky. pic.twitter.com/ss01FUSBLu
This gave the Manchester Metro Mayor the right to divert funds away from GPs & hospitals and spend it on Social Care instead — as of April 1st this year.
George Osborne has stated he wants all UK cities to follow the same model.
John McDonnell has referred to this as ‘outsourcing the cuts’.
Campaigners are asking whether Osborne will allow Sadiq Khan the chance to do in London what the Chancellor is advocating for every other UK city.
Khan’s campaign team were asked to address this matter in November:
a. Do you believe the entire Health Budget for London should be devolved to the Mayor’s portfolio — or do you believe there are some things which should remain the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Health, DCLG, DWP or local council?
b. Please could you state which aspects of the Health Budget & Other Health-related responsibilities such as for example Land Ownership you think ought to be devolved to the Mayor, and which aspects retained by the relevant Secretary of State or local council?
Despite reminders and assurances they never responded.
Deregulation doesn’t stand still.
Paxo blissfully unaware of the media and especially Newsnight’s role in all this. 
Check out Clive’s case. It’s shocking!
www.thetimes.co.uk 
Fortune 
The Independent 
the Guardian 
London Conversation 
LBC 
www.thetimes.co.uk 
www.standard.co.uk 