Russia report: The government left us completely exposed to Kremlin interference
The security services were wary of getting involved in British democratic processes. That attitude, the committee found, was foolhardy. This is about protecting the democratic process, not interfering in it. But what was telling was that the government did nothing to protect against this problem before it emerged and then made no effort to find out what happened in the wake of it.
In fact, quite the opposite. This report was completed a year-and-a-half ago. It has sat gathering dust. Why? We thought for a while it was because it contained details of Russian donations to the Tory party. That appears to be wrong - the report doesn't go into that issue. Instead it seems to have been the result of Dominic Cummings, the prime minister's senior adviser, trying to kill it because it would have given a platform to Dominic Grieve, the former chair of the intelligence committee - the battle of the Dominics.
Cummings led the Vote Leave Brexit campaign, which is now installed as the organisational mechanism of British government. Grieve was a prominent Remainer. Brexit loyalty didn't just stop the government looking into what happened. It led it to try to stop people reporting that it wasn't looking into what happened.
In the build up to today's publication, the government went out of its way to try to limit the impact of the report by releasing material which took the focus away from Brexit. Confirmation of publication came last week after No.10 failed in an attempt to rig the chairmanship of the intelligence committee. As soon as it came, foreign secretary Dominic Raab confirmed for the first time that Russia interfered in British democracy through the "online amplification" of leaked documents in the 2019 election. That related to then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's use of leaked documents about UK-US trade deals and the effect on the NHS.
This was telling for two reasons. First, he sought to portray it as a Labour issue, rather than one which operates in British politics in general. Second, unless the timing was completely coincidental - which not even the most generous commentator could credibly claim - he was clearly acting to reduce the impact of the report. In other words, the government was using Russian interference in British politics for its own domestic political agenda.
Briefings to journalists overnight seemed to follow a similar pattern. "Kremlin 'tried to meddle in Scottish independence vote' - but did not target Brexit," the Telegraph splashed yesterday - a finding which does not tally at all with what is contained in the report.
This is a complete failure of basic patriotic and democratic responsibility. The Russian attempt to undermine the UK is based on exacerbating 'wedge' divisions in the domestic political debate. To our considerable shame, we have ended up with a government which operates by doing precisely the same thing. Vote Leave won the referendum by inciting and sustaining cultural division. It operates in government in precisely the same way. Instead of acting on the committee's demand that more be done to assess Russian interference and prevent it, the government tried to delay the report. Instead of taking its recommendations on board, it tried to use the issue of Russian interference as a weapon against the SNP, Labour and Remainers.
We don't know what an inquiry into Russian interference in the Brexit referendum would find, but there is good reason to assume that it would have two chief conclusions. The first is that it did interfere. This is in line with its well-documented tactics and priorities. The second is that it is impossible to know whether that interference swung the result. And yet even a report of that type would help give people confidence. It would show that the government cared about and was trying to protect British democratic processes. It would offer some degree of reassurance about the validity of the results.
Instead we are left with complete absence - an utter dereliction of governmental duty. And that corresponds to Russia's broader long-term aim: of creating a world in which no-one knows what is true, in which nothing can be completely trusted. They couldn't ask for a more useful British government than the one they have now.
Ian Dunt is editor of Politics.co.uk.
--oo00oo--
No matter what the big political story is, it always seems to have evidence of Dominic Cummings' disruptive handiwork all over it. We learn Boris Johnson continually lied over the reasons for not publishing the Russia Report mainly because of his adviser's disdain for the principled and prominent 'Remainer' Dominic Grieve.
No doubt the same 'career psychopath' hatched the unsuccessful plot to install Chris Grayling as Chair of the Intelligence Committee; arranged for the weekend Russia Foreign Office distractions; orchestrated yesterday's 'dead-cat' public sector pay award smokescreen and publication of the government's Russia Response perfectly timed as a spoiler for the Intelligence Committee press conference. It's all pure Cummings game-playing, but who does he actually work for?
A fluent Russian-speaker, Cummings worked in Russia between 1994 and 1997 and last September the Moscow-based journalist John Helmer filled in some details:-
Cummings graduated in mid-1994 from Oxford with a degree in Ancient and Modern History; he was just shy of 23. In one of his authorized biographies, he claims that “on leaving university his adventurousness found its first outlet in going to Russia for three years. He helped set up a new airline flying from Samara, on the Volga, to Vienna. The KGB issued threats, the airline only got one passenger, and the pilot unfortunately took off without that passenger. Cummings is a Russophile, speaks Russian and is passionately interested in Dostoyevsky. In 1997 he returned to London.”
By the contemporary investigative standards for detecting Russian agents, sleepers and fellow-travellers set by the British Government’s Integrity Initiative, Cummings’ Russian connection ought to have attracted more attention than it has.
A month ago, the London Daily Mirror reported that it had found an American named Adam Dixon, currently living in Connecticut, who said he had employed Cummings in Russia, paying him to commute weekly between Vienna and Samara. According to Dixon, “I met Dominic Cummings in the 1990s, when I was working with a Russian partner to develop a regional airline Samara Airlines into an international carrier – in order to link the city of Samara (an economic and intellectual power on the Volga River) directly to Europe. For anyone who didn’t experience the total anarchy and fast-moving chaos of Russia in the ‘90s, it is hard to imagine now what it was like then – there was a deep fear that the country would descend into civil war or simply disintegrate, and it was a constant theme of conversation how, when, and by whom order would be restored.”
“Although he did not speak much Russian [sic], Dominic was fascinated by the anarchy and the potential for catastrophe, and willing to work in these bizarre and sometimes dangerous circumstances…Since we were a small team without much money, I gave him some responsibilities which he then quickly led me to regret, because he leveraged the fact that we now ‘needed him’ to sometimes behave as he liked, which included offending people that we needed to get on with – and this could be very counter-productive.”
“Left to himself, he would dress out of his laundry bag and had a silly objection to wearing a tie, and he was usually unshaven and often looked hung-over and unwashed. This was all an obvious liability when there was widespread concern that Russian airlines were negligent about maintenance. On the other hand, he was courageous, clear-thinking, and could really ‘hold his drink’, which, on several particular occasions, was much more of an asset than it should have been.”
“Although he did not leave us completely in the lurch, he certainly did go much too abruptly, and on his schedule, not mine. I made it plain that I felt I had been generous to him in every way, and therefore, that he should not think of me as a good reference for future jobs – and I never heard from him again. A few years later, I read in a bio-blurb that he had ‘started a Russian airline with a friend’, a distortion that was annoying, given the real circumstances.”
By the contemporary investigative standards for detecting Russian agents, sleepers and fellow-travellers set by the British Government’s Integrity Initiative, Cummings’ Russian connection ought to have attracted more attention than it has.
A month ago, the London Daily Mirror reported that it had found an American named Adam Dixon, currently living in Connecticut, who said he had employed Cummings in Russia, paying him to commute weekly between Vienna and Samara. According to Dixon, “I met Dominic Cummings in the 1990s, when I was working with a Russian partner to develop a regional airline Samara Airlines into an international carrier – in order to link the city of Samara (an economic and intellectual power on the Volga River) directly to Europe. For anyone who didn’t experience the total anarchy and fast-moving chaos of Russia in the ‘90s, it is hard to imagine now what it was like then – there was a deep fear that the country would descend into civil war or simply disintegrate, and it was a constant theme of conversation how, when, and by whom order would be restored.”
“Although he did not speak much Russian [sic], Dominic was fascinated by the anarchy and the potential for catastrophe, and willing to work in these bizarre and sometimes dangerous circumstances…Since we were a small team without much money, I gave him some responsibilities which he then quickly led me to regret, because he leveraged the fact that we now ‘needed him’ to sometimes behave as he liked, which included offending people that we needed to get on with – and this could be very counter-productive.”
“Left to himself, he would dress out of his laundry bag and had a silly objection to wearing a tie, and he was usually unshaven and often looked hung-over and unwashed. This was all an obvious liability when there was widespread concern that Russian airlines were negligent about maintenance. On the other hand, he was courageous, clear-thinking, and could really ‘hold his drink’, which, on several particular occasions, was much more of an asset than it should have been.”
“Although he did not leave us completely in the lurch, he certainly did go much too abruptly, and on his schedule, not mine. I made it plain that I felt I had been generous to him in every way, and therefore, that he should not think of me as a good reference for future jobs – and I never heard from him again. A few years later, I read in a bio-blurb that he had ‘started a Russian airline with a friend’, a distortion that was annoying, given the real circumstances.”
--oo00oo--
Putin has officially denied that Russia has tried to influence any elections in another country, so it must be true and of course sowing discord and political chaos in the West serves Russian interests perfectly. As Cummings' wish for a no-deal Brexit becomes almost certain, the Kremlin must be feeling pretty pleased with itself for having successfully influenced several elections to its advantage, got away with it and still have such prominent dupes in both London and Washington. Incredibly, Trump is preparing the ground for election chaos in November by already questioning the outcome and still wants to cosy-up to Putin!
I can't resist rounding these reflections off without returning to the historical parallel of FDR and his 'rasputine-style' adviser Harry Hopkins in the 1940's. Basically there is still some discussion as to whether Hopkins was a soviet agent rather than merely a 'dupe', but what is clear is that Soviet interests were significantly assisted by both FDR and Harry Hopkins acting either deliberately or unintentionally.
For those who share my love of history as well as contemporary politics, there's much to be found on the internet including this gem from the CIA in 2007 with some very sobering contemporary echoes:-
In recent years, the statesmanship of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in particular his handling of Soviet affairs, has come under attack in historical studies. The situation has reached such a pass that even a psychiatrist who examined FDR’s medical records has opined that toward the end of World War II the US President ceded the better part of Eastern Europe to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin because he was “gripped by clinical depression.”
Certainly the President’s moves can be questioned, but questionable policy can be founded on factors other than low spirits—which, in point of fact, were not generally observed in FDR at the time. Rather, the operant factors were: the President’s supreme confidence in his own powers of persuasion, his profound ignorance of the Bolshevik dictatorship, his projection of humane motives onto his Soviet counterpart, his determined resistance to contradictory evidence and advice, and his wishful thinking based on geopolitical designs—mindsets supported and reinforced by his appointed advisors. Taken together, these factors produced a false view of US-Soviet relations and inspired policy that had only superficial contact with reality. As an instance in point, they induced the President of the United States to do the unthinkable: walk into a surveillance trap, not once, but twice, and willingly.
Politics Home - Boris Johnson has expanded the government’s team of taxpayer-funded special advisers, with some being paid more than £100,000 a year.
ReplyDeleteLee Cain, the director of communications, Sir Eddie Lister, the chief strategic adviser, and Munira Mirza, the director of the No 10 policy unit and co-author of the Tories’ 2019 election manifesto, are listed as the top earners, with a further four earning between £120,000 and £129,999.
Dominic Cummings, the chief special adviser to the prime minister, is paid between £95,000 and £99,999, according to details published in the Government’s annual report on special advisers.
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https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/854554/Annual_Report_on_Special_Advisers.pdf
Apr18 - Mar19: Total Cost £9.6m
GuidoFawkes' list of spads, trolls & minions:
Deletehttps://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16uVCBkk5npgyLIehZC4aup5I5MQN8Wa4aIZXuGN7zKI/edit#gid=1466138024
The Russians are paying him more.
DeleteInteresting that in recent months we've heard Boris Johnson speak of a 'new deal' for Britain with Cummings in his ear, just the same way Hopkins had the ear of Roosevelt for his 'new deal'.
ReplyDeleteI also find it interesting just how much Aaron Banks got his knickers in a twist over the publication of the Russia report.
I'm certain he fully expected to be named in it, and I'd love to know why.
From the New European.
Billionaire Brexit backer Arron Banks has called on the Commons intelligence committee to show him any references in the Russia report that reference his name before the document is published.
The Leave.EU founder has challenged the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee to give him sight of the document before it is published, should he be referenced.
Banks claims that he should be allowed to input into the report - reportedly completed last March - so that he can dispute any false allegations about himself.
Leaked reports about the document have concerned Banks that he may be referenced in the document, the Express claims.
Such a legal letter could lead to further delays of the publication, which was due to be published this week.
'Getafix
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2018/11/14/the-extent-of-russian-backed-fraud-means-the-referendum-is-invalid/
Deletehttps://www.croftsolicitors.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/239484-Grounds-for-Judicial-Review-and-Statement-of-Facts.pdf
DeleteThe panel that 'released' the report yesterday were very clear that no-one would be named in the published report - ALL names to be redacted. Kevan Jones was itching to name names but respected the decision. I don't doubt MunnyBanks *is* in the unredacted version.
ReplyDelete"We will follow the science" - remember that phrase? Its been a very popular saying of late. Also references to behavioural science & behavioural change - probation staff should know a bit about that.
ReplyDelete"Dominic Cummings explained at Ogilvy Change’s Nudgestock that because his campaign struggled to get big names or big businesses on board, he looked for an alternative strategy. The idea was to put data science at the heart of Vote Leave's digital operations as part of a constantly iterative process that tested and refined messages to different segments.... “They ran messages experimentally on Facebook to figure out what things work and don’t work," Cummings said.
"We basically dumped our entire budget in the last 10 days.. We aimed it at roughly 7 million people, who saw something like one and a half billion digital ads over a relatively short period of time..."
Ultimately, we can expect increasingly scientific levels of targeting in political advertising as it appears this approach fundamentally works"
https://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/06/13/we-dumped-our-entire-budget-the-last-10-days-inside-the-behavioural-science-strategy
And yes, Nudgestock, the meeting place of the 'creative minds' who sell lies & fantasy to the world, is a real event:
Deletehttps://nudgestock.co.uk/
cont:-
DeleteEarly polls conducted by the campaigners suggested public opinion was divided from the start, so the team put resources into targeting those whose vote could be swayed. One third of those surveyed said they disliked the EU and wanted to leave regardless of the consequences, another third felt positively about the EU and wanted to remain, while one fifth of respondents didn’t think the EU was a good thing but were scared of leaving, so would probably opt to remain for fear of change.
“So we had to motivate that third of people who’d actually turn out to vote [Leave], we had to try and demotivate that third who wanted to stay in and we had to try and persuade enough of that fraction of the fifth not to be frightened to vote,” Cummings said.
A key element of the campaign’s messaging was, of course, the ‘Take Back Control’ slogan. “The word ‘back’ triggering loss aversion, the feeling that something has been lost and we can regain what we’ve lost, which I think was interesting," said Cummings.
“It was also about taking back control of the system itself. For a lot of people it was take back control that made them think, 'yeah, these are the guys who screwed up the economy, who drove it off a cliff in 2008, whose mates are all Goldman Sachs bankers with hedge funds on massive bonuses.”
“'We’ll take back control from you lot in London'.”
As well as the £350m per week Vote Leave claimed could be spent on the NHS, another key campaign message was to to make staying "appear riskier" – an approach that was “fundamental psychologically”, Cummings explained. The campaign focused on the idea of "the next wave of recession countries", using as an example the possibility of Turkey's accession to the EU, and the fact that the EU would then have borders with Syria and Iraq.
Cummings used market research conducted early on in the process to ensure he could tap into the UK public’s key concerns through his messages.
“How politicians think, how the media think and how communications professionals think is not necessarily how the public think,” Cummings said. “Essentially I found that people didn’t know more about the EU in 2016 than they did 15 years earlier. However, three things had changed in the world during that time: the first was immigration – the scale of immigration and the fact that the EU was now blamed for immigration problems.
“The other big thing was the financial crisis in 2008,” he continued. “It undermined confidence in government, in Whitehall, in big business, in the banks and also in the European Union.
“The third big factor was the euro.”
Cummings explained that he believed the culmination of these three factors gave the campaign a fighting chance from the get-go, despite the fact that ‘status quo votes’ tended to have a bigger advantage.
Much like Labour’s recent digital strategy, which focused heavily on targeting effectively with data, Leave won out by looking closely and strategically at the numbers. By coupling data with behavioural science-led insight used to capitalise on genuine public concern, the campaign was able to deliver their message to the people who mattered most to them: those on the fence.
DeleteBoth campaigns also spent considerable portions of their ad budget in the final crucial days. Labour put some serious spend behind promoting #forthemany on Twitter on polling day, for example, while by contrast Theresa May’s former adviser Nick Timothy has even acknowledged the Conservatives' failure to utilise modern campaigning methods to target specific voters.
Ultimately, we can expect increasingly scientific levels of targeting in political advertising as it appears this approach fundamentally works, but given the levels of media outrage at the rise of so-called ‘dark ads’ from major parties, there’s the possibility we’ll also see a real crackdown from advertising and internet watchdogs.
https://fedtrust.co.uk/why-putin-wanted-johnson-to-win-brexit-and-end-up-in-no-10/
ReplyDeleteThere is a ticking time-bomb that keeps Boris Johnson awake. It connects the prime minister’s finest hour with Vladimir Putin’s dislike of Britain.
DeleteIt is widely recognised that Putin authorised the attempted murder in 2018 of Sergei Skripal because the former Soviet-Russian intelligence operative had betrayed his country by accepting bribes from MI6 in exchange for cash and ultimately an offer of a home in England. He and his handlers chose the dull cathedral town of Salisbury.
The Skripal killing was bungled though the nerve agent killer was left behind and killed a harmless woman. In the old days, a Russian leader would teach a lesson by killing someone with a revolver or in the case of Trotsky, an ice pick. Today the preferred murder weapon is Novochok or radioactive Polonium in the case of Alexander Litvenenko,.
Putin however wants to do more than punish MI6 or MI5 for suborning one of his agents from the security agencies he was promoted from to begin his rise to the Kremlin. He is keen to see his friends like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orban and other populist nationalists opposed to international rule of law, and open societies and economies, do well.
For Putin, the entry of ex-Soviet colonies like Poland, the Baltic states, East Germany or the Czech Republic into full membership of the European Union meant the final expulsion of the Russian state as central to the ruling system in half of Europe.
As long as the EU was there and attracting the support and participation of all of Europe up to the borders of Belarus and Ukraine, Putin knew his hopes of restoring Russia to its post-1945 or even 19th century might and presence were forlorn.
That is why he so strongly welcomed the prospects of the UK leaving the EU and weakening the strength of European unity which had proved so attractive to European citizens who no longer wanted to live by the Kremlin’s rules.
In a powerful new book Shadow State. Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West, the journalist and playwright Luke Harding burrows into the details of Putin’s support for Brexit. The connections are extraordinary. More than 25 years ago the leading Daily Telegraph, anti-EU propagandist, Liam Halligan, shared a flat in Moscow with Dominic Cummings. It is not known what Cummings was up to, or what contacts he made. No 10 has always refused to say what vetting Cummings had to go through to get access to the highest secrets of the British state as Johnson’s closest aide.
Putin hates Britain even if the UK is full of what Lenin called “useful idiots” – the unwitting promoters of Russian state interests. In modern times this has been the City, corporate lawyers who hide wealth of oligarchs, arrange their divorces and the luxury end of the British economy which welcomes Russian money with open arms to buy £10 million flats in Kensington, football clubs, or keep Eton and other private schools afloat.
In 2012 Putin told the Russian Embassy to set up a group of MPs called “Conservative Friends of Russia”. The Russian Ambassador held a launch party in the Russian embassy attended by Carrie Symonds then a Tory party press officer now mother of Johnson’s latest baby. The former Foreign Secretary, Sir Malcolm Rifkind was conned into being president of the group. The Kremlin organised an all-expenses paid junket to Moscow and St Petersburg for the latter-day useful pro-Moscow idiots amongst anti-European Tory MPs. On the junket was another Cummings associate, Matthew Elliot, who set up anti-European fronts before emerging as one of the chief ideologues of the Johnson-Cummings-Farage campaign for Brexit in 2016.
Harding details the Kremlin’s efforts to support Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU Harding is careful and rightly so not to attribute the Brexit vote to Putin. As I foreshadowed in my book of 2014 called Brexit. Why Britain Will Leave Europe, blaming Putin for Brexit is inappropriate even if at the margin of what was a 50-50 vote he had real influence.
A great deal of the details of Russian meddling in British Tory politics and support and involvement in the Brexit campaign are in a report compiled by the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC). As soon as he became Prime Minister, Boris Johnson and his “nodding dog” Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, moved to find reasons to stop the report’s publication.
DeleteThey succeeded in delaying it until after the December election arguing it would be inappropriate to publish a politically explosive report in the election weeks. Since then they have adopted other delaying tactics. The easiest is to stop the formation of a new ISC which depends on nomination from party whips and agreeing on a consensual acceptable chair.
Johnson has proposed as chair Chris Grayling, a minister of a generally low political reputation. Downing Street first briefed that Theresa Villiers, the former Northern Ireland Secretary and obsessive Europephobe MP, would not be on the committee. Then the news was reversed as for Ms Villiers obtaining a hard crash-out Brexit is a top priority and Johnson wants as many Brexit hardliners on the ISC as possible as he manoeuvres to prevent the report being published.
The ISC membership tends to be ex-ministers and privy councillors, those who have had some interplay with the security services. Villiers as a former Northern Ireland Secretary ticked every box. She sailed through her vetting.
Tory whips can spin out for as long as possible the full constitution of the ISC until after the summer recess and almost certainly until after the US election. Harding’s book is mainly about Trump with a clear and convincing, evidence-based narrative, on how Putin played Trump and the illegal activities of the White House in Ukraine or covering up Trump’s financial and property dealings in Russia.
Putin’s political annus mirablis was 2016 when his bets on Brexit and Trump paid off handsomely. He may lose Trump but with Cummings now dominant in Downing Street Putin wins Brexit and a weaker Europe.
But as more and more questions are asked about Johnson’s fitness for office and his judgement on so many key issues, the ISC report while it may not land a killer blow will be powerful new evidence of the core dishonesty underlying Brexit.
Link to a rather deranged Spectator article, but quite funny if you set aside the not-very-subtle political imperative:
Deletehttps://www.spectator.co.uk/article/exclusive-dominic-cummings-s-secret-links-to-russia
"Russia didn’t just hack the referendum, these paranoiacs say: the Kremlin may now be running Britain. Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, recently wrote to Dominic Raab to express her concerns over Boris Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings’s connections to Russia. She asked about his links to ‘Oxford academics’ who knew about Russia, his relationship to the Conservative Friends of Russia Group, and his time working in Moscow between 1994 and 1997.
It’s worse than you think, Emily. The Spectator can further reveal that Dominic Cummings didn’t just live in Moscow during those years — he shared a flat with Liam Halligan, the Sunday Telegraph journalist and author of Clean Brexit, that influential pro-Leave tract. ‘It was the mid-Nineties,’ Halligan admitted this week. ‘I got a fax from [the late Oxford Professor] Norman Stone about a brilliant young graduate who was looking to come to Russia. So I gave him a sofa to sleep on in my old, Brezhnev-era flat. The next thing I knew he was running a bond desk and trying to launch an airline.’"
Even the Aussies are concerned about Cummings. This from the Sydney Morning Herald:
Delete"Labour's foreign spokeswoman Emily Thornberry accused the government of withholding the [ISC] report's publication because of the questions it would raise about Cumming's time in Russia.
"Questions about the Prime Minister's chief aide Dominic Cummings, his relationship with the Oxford academic Norman Stone and the mysterious three years he spent in post-Communist Russia aged just 23," she said.
"And the relationships he allegedly forged with individuals like Vladislav Surkov, the key figure behind Vladimir Putin’s throne," Thornberry told the Commons.
Surkov, personal advisor to Putin, is widely regarded as the creator of post-truth politics where facts are relative."
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But Boris aint bovvered.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/902438/CCS0420455368-001_PSPRB_Executive_Summary_Web_Accessible.pdf
ReplyDeletehttps://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/902437/CCS0420455368-001_PSPRB_2020_Web_Accessible.pdf
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/902440/Letter_from_PSPRB_Chair_to_the_Lord_Chancellor_-_PSPRB_2020_EW_Report.pdf
"The PSPRB are very disappointed that the Government has not accepted our recommendation on the £3,000 increase in pensionable pay for all Band 3 Prison Officers. As I set out when we met last week, the PSPRB is an evidence-based body and we reached our recommendation based on clear evidence about the market position of Band 3 Prison Officerpayand excessively high leaving rates especially among new recruits. We believe it is crucial that significant steps are taken now to improve the relative pay position of Band 3 Prison Officers."
Anyone ever seen anything similar relating to probation pay awards?
I suspect not.
Guardian - "Both the JBC [Joint Biosecurity Centre] and local authorities will have to rely on the various private companies that have been contracted to deliver aspects of the testing and contact-tracing strategy in England, including Randox, Deloitte, Serco, G4S and Sodexo. The detailed specifications of their contracts are not public, and the division of roles and responsibilities between the centre, local authorities and the private sector remain unclear."
ReplyDeleteR4 Inside Health - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000l0k0
Public health doctors don't dash around hospitals wearing white coats brandishing stethoscopes. The work of this medical specialty is mainly outside of hospitals and it has a very long history. It has a local, national and global reach, an international skeleton charged with the care of populations. And in this pandemic, it is public health which is doing the heavy lifting.
In this special edition of Inside Health Dr Margaret McCartney investigates the serious questions being raised about the UK's public health response to trying to stop the spread of the virus, and how tension, over the performance of the government's Test and Trace programme, has spilled out into the open.
Margaret hears from Directors of Public Health who feel that their role and expertise in local communities working closely with local Public Health England teams has been overlooked. Instead a new national Test and Trace system has been set up using private companies outside the traditional public health infrastructure. The DPH for Wigan and lead director of public health for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Professor Kate Ardern, tells Margaret she believes government didn't understand the role and the experience of local public health teams and so instead of empowering them to oversee test, trace and isolate services, set up a new national system, from scratch, using private companies without public health experience. And the data needed locally to identify and deal with Covid cases, she tells Margaret, just hasn't come through. This is despite the fact that the law is clear; Covid is a notifiable disease and local directors of public health should receive the information.
Margaret explores the history of public health with Professor Martin Gorsky from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and hears from Professor of Global Health at Queen Mary, University of London, David McCoy, who believes the very structure of public health institutions after the 2012 Health and Social Care fragmented the service, leaving the country vulnerable (as he and 400 other experts warned at the time) to a pandemic.
Public Health England's Medical Director, Professor Yvonne Doyle, rejects suggestions that PHE is insufficiently independent from government and insists that both national and local public health teams have pulled together in these unprecedented times.
_____________________________________________
(You will have seen Mrs Doyle standing on the tea trolley at some of the daily Covid Briefings).
"Instead a new national Test and Trace system has been set up using private companies outside the traditional public health infrastructure."
DeleteShitloads of luvverly public dosh being handed out to those favourite & familiar pirateers (including Randox, Deloitte, Serco, G4S and Sodexo).
Test & Trace? More like Stand & Deliver!