It is entirely understandable that the public should be outraged about the partying in Ten Downing Street, when the big majority of the population were trying, despite hardship and heartache, to abide by the lockdown restrictions of the past two years.
The culture of booze and partying at the very centre of government is a slap in the face for all those who were unable to visit vulnerable family members in care homes or hospitals, and in some cases who were unable to be with them in their last hours.
Since the revelations about partying in Downing Street have multiplied, support for the government has nose-dived and it looks like the Tories will lose a lot of council seats in the local elections in May. It is for this reason and this reason alone that some Tory MPs are now considering ditching Johnson, a man they all knew was a professional liar and dissembler, but whose faults they tolerated as long as he seemed to be a ‘winner’.
The whole Tory cabinet in complicit in milking the taxpayer
But it would be wrong to lose sight of far more important matters in the activities of this corrupt government. It is not a question of replacing one man: the whole of the Tory cabinet and many MPs have been complicit in milking the taxpayer through corrupt practices that would have been called out in the national press if they had been carried on in Russia or China.
We have carried articles on many occasions about the disgraceful manner in which the government threw lucrative contracts at their friends, supposedly in the interests of ‘expediency’ during the pandemic. The ‘VIP lane’ established for the award of government contracts for PPE was explicitly set up to allow ministers, MPs and top civil servants to push their friends and associates to the fore. Companies were awarded rich contracts where they had no experience whatsoever of PPE provision. The National Audit office has revealed that those firms referred via the VIP lane were ten times more likely to get a contract than those not referred.
It now transpires that one Tory peer, Lady Mone, was even lobbying for a fast-track contract for a company, PPEMedpro, five days before it was incorporated. In other words, it was explicitly set up to fleece the taxpayer. Needless to say, it got a £200m contract, half of which were for gowns never used, according to a BBC investigation.
The person on whom Lady Mone used her lobbying skills was the Tory peer, Lord Agnew, at that time in charge of procurement. The same noble lord, perhaps seeing which way the wind is blowing, now seems to be trying to distance himself from the dirt by resigning his position as a Treasury minister, over rampant fraud that has taken place during the pandemic.
Money handed out willy-nilly to all kinds of fraudsters
In Lord Agnew’s new role as the minister responsible for ‘countering fraud’(you couldn’t make it up), he has discovered that during the first major pandemic lockdown, money was handed out willy-nilly to all kinds of fraudsters because there were no effective checks on who got government money, (much like the PPE procurement).
In April 2020, the government set up the “Bounce Back Loan Scheme” (BBLS), supposedly to stop small businesses going bust during the pandemic lockdown. Since then, an eye-watering total of £47bn in loans has been given out, using the government’s own banking facility or private sector banks. Altogether, one and a half million loans have gone out.
The idea was that loans of up to £50,000 – interest-free for a year – were handed out with no questions asked…or at least only questions like, “what are your bank account details?” There were no credit checks, no ‘due diligence’. The government guaranteed the loans, even those given out by the private sector, if the companies were to go bust. By last September, of £2b given out through the British Business Bank, two thirds had already been defaulted on.
The most basic checks would have revealed fraud
According to the Financial Times, (January 25) “a judge in Manchester called for a probe into how a drug dealer and car thief with 48 convictions was given a £50,000 loan. “The most basic of checks would have revealed the fraud,” he said…In a separate case a few days earlier, two men in Yorkshire were banned as directors after claiming £50,000 loans”.
“…In one instance, the insolvency service found that a company that claimed an annual turnover of £200,000 was actually making less than £700 a month…According to a Freedom of Information Act request published by the Insolvency Service, this week, 9,733 companies that entered insolvency between May 2020 and October 2021 had taken out loans from the scheme.” At £50k a time, that’s £480m right there.
The government’s own estimate of fraudulent loans is put at around £4.9bn or 11 per cent of the total given out. But this is likely to be a considerable underestimate of the losses to the taxpayer, when tens of billions was being spirited away into the bank accounts of businesses.
“Fraud in government is rampant” – Tory peer
In his own opinion piece in the Financial Times on the day of his resignation, even Lord Agnew wrote, that “Fraud in government is rampant. Public estimates sit at just under £30bn a year. There is a complete lack of focus on the cost to society, or indeed the taxpayer.” What he didn’t highlight, of course, was his own role in procurement at an earlier stage, in giving out lush contracts to the friends of the Tory Party.
It comes as hardly a surprise, given all this free money for businesspeople, that sales of Bentley cars are soaring. The British luxury car maker reported yet another bumper year in 2021, selling nearly 15,000 cars, after having broken its previous sales record the year before.
This jaw-dropping largesse is in sharp contrast to the miserly attitude the government adopts towards the least-well off in society. Whereas the government shrugs its shoulders at the fraudulent loss of more than a tenth of its loans, a far smaller degree of fraud in welfare benefits has led to screaming headlines and major ministerial speeches. Those unfortunate enough to be on benefits have to jump through hoops and face ritual humiliation to get their rights, with the whole draconian process ‘justified’ as a means of reducing ‘fraud’.
The £20 uplift in Universal Credit cost much less
While generous welfare of a far more lucrative kind is handed out to businesspeople and fraudsters, those who really are in need of financial support are sent to food banks. The government’s temporary uplift in Universal Credit – costing far less than the likely losses from the BBLS money-hose – has been reversed on the grounds of ‘economy’, where no such economy is ever exercised when it comes to giving money to businesses.
By whatever yardstick one chooses to measure the morality of this government, it is clearly one that operates only in the interests of the rich and super-rich. It is a government that has never had any moral compass, one whose prime goal has been to enrich the associates and supporters of the Tory Party.
It is not enough, therefore, to call for Johnson to go. Anyone from the Tory benches who is drafted in to replace him would have been complicit in the corruption, sleaze and hypocrisy which have revolved around the Johnson administration and they deserve the boot as much as Johnson himself.
