Very pleased to hear that Labour have pledged to do this if elected.
On the face of it, using the VIP lanes during COVID was rife and cost the taxpayer billions. The fact that there was a significant theme of “there’s money to be made here!” during the pandemic is disgusting enough, but the lack of accountability afterwards is the aspect that I think rankles the most.
Some responses to the announcement are that the Commission will cost more than they can recover (because these crooks know what they’re doing re hiding funds) misses the point. Those that made money from the pandemic and then ran for the hills need to be identified and asked questions publicly. If they have technically broken no laws, then that’s fine – but I want to hear from them so that they can tell us what they did, what was paid to them and tell us why this was OK.
What baffles me is when we are told there is no way of finding out what happened to the money .surely there were contracts signed when they were being handed out and therefore a clear paper trail.
Paper trails can get confused and obscured. Especially if money is shifted in and out of outside jurisdictions with the aim of obscuring the trail.
Also the involvement of lawyers and threats of action for alleged defamation, injunctions etc. make investigation much more costly and stretch the timescale.
It’s likely to turn out to be an exercise in exposure of wrongdoing without any significant amount of the money ever being reclaimed.
It’s mostly a matter of how much effort you put into the search for evidence. Here in Germany they (aka the officials) labelled every claim of wrongdoing re. Covid as »fake news«, but now little by little things reach the courts. For example, the wife of a bavarian minister of health somehow was in the middle of deals with China and the import of masks. She recently was jailed because she failed to pay income tax of about 23 million euros for these deals. (You can imagine what kind of »income« landed on her bank account… and miraculously vanished without trace.)
Yes, very good news.
There were an awful lot of ‘companies’ during Covid who got govt loans who have never paid them back and who were not deserving of them in the first place.
Claiming govt money was apparently very easy. Likewise I am sure the large PPE contracts were awarded to friends in high places who would siphon off a little to reward the donors of the contracts.
Yes my accountant advised me to claim furlough money as I had my own company as a freelancer. Apparently within the rules and trivial sums, relatively speaking. It just didn’t feel right to me and I didn’t claim and I’m glad I didn’t. I know people who did though.
Glad you could afford to.
I’ve had an HMRC investigation up my arse before (nothing found, file closed) and it was such a PITA I had no desire to have another one.
In NZ the deal was that you could claim the money easily and be paid quickly but the details were on the public record on a searchable website. A few big companies that used it attracted publicity but then they made a big show of paying it back. In that sense I think it worked quite well.
I suspect many who swindled the country out of serious money would be the first to extol the virtues of the war time spirit, how we fought them on the beaches, how we stood alone (my own favourite), and yet this is how they acted when they had an all-hands-to-the-pump situation.
Fines, maybe, but isn’t it actually treason? And can’t you still be hung for that?
Well, that would be something the Commission would establish.
I think all capital punishment offences were abolished many years ago. When I was at school, I seem to remember high treason, piracy on the high seas and arson in a naval dockyard still being hangable offences.
Not any more, no.
“The offence of treason was created by section 9A(1) of the Crimes Act 1958. It is punishable by a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.”
Wikipedia
Not even for trying to kill the monarch, it seems.
From the Metropolitan Police’s website:
“A man who admitted treason after gaining entry to the grounds of Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow has been jailed for nine years, following an investigation by the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command.
Jaswant Singh Chail, 21 (17.01.02), from Southampton, was arrested by officers within the Windsor Castle footprint on 25 December 2021.
He was carrying a loaded crossbow, and wearing black clothing and a metal mask when he told officers he was there to kill Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, who was in a private residence on the castle’s grounds at the time.
Chail pleaded guilty to a Treason Act offence and other charges relating to the incident at an earlier court appearance.
He was sentenced on Thursday, 5 October, at the Old Bailey to a nine-year hybrid order, meaning he will serve part of his sentence in a mental health facility and the remainder in prison. He will then remain on licence for a further five years after his release.
Commander Dominic Murphy, who leads the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command, said: “Chail had been planning his actions for several months, and up until shortly before his arrest, his intent to cause serious harm to or kill the Queen was clear.”
I have just watched the Rachel Reeves speech. She was very confident. Dare I say it, Thatcher-esque in her resolve. Packed with policy detail and clear, unambiguous language outlining a vision and purpose. She absolutely smashed it.
Penny Mordaunt tried the rousing speech last week and it fell flat because there was no focus in her “stand up and fight!” speech. Against what? She just said it repeatedly, hoping the more she said it, the more momentum would gather. It just sounded silly.
Mordaunt left gaps for spontaneous applause when none was forthcoming, and then kept doing it. As for ‘when you stand up and fight the person next to you stands up and fights …’ she carried on in that vein when the most obviously thing to say was, ‘ … and then the whole fucking lot kicks off.’ As job application presentations go I found it lacking in detail.
They will struggle to get any money back. It may well cost more attempting to retrieve than they actually obtain.
I wouldn’t surprise me if the intention is to demonstrate that the Conservatives shovelled vast sums of money to friendly individuals and businesses without due diligence, if that was the case, rather than retrieving it.
Yes indeed.
Let me get this right. Labour are intending to waste money proving that the Tory government wasted money?
No.
Labour are intending to waste money proving that the Tory government were at the centre of financial corruption, abuse of power and office, lining the pockets of friends, donors, Michelle Mone – and piracy on the high seas. In plain sight.
It’s similar – but not quite the same. Tiggs…🙂
I see.
And no-one will be punished and it will al be forgotten by the time of the next election.
Oh, we’ll all be punished in the end, Tiggs – and I do know what you mean. But I’m just not sure that ignoring it all is an option, when it’s been such a blatant abuse of power and privilege
The tactic is always to kick into the long grass. look at the actual Covid Inquiry going on now. How many members of the public are paying attention? It is buried at the very bottom of a news cycle and is almost totally ignored, even though the incompetence it is exposing is dreadful.
A new Labour government will have so many more important things to spend their energy & money on. An inquiry into Tory ‘corruption’ is unlikely to impress the electorate.
I know, Tiggs, I know – gimme a break, man. First comment last night was just a knee-jerk response – too tired, not well, not sufficiently considered. Second comment, I’d just woken up, no drugs, no coffee, no sleep.
Note to self: stay off the political threads.
Relax.
I’ve really enjoyed this exchange. I think we are both right. They shouldn’t get away with it but they will.
🙂
When the Covid Enquiry eventually concludes, there will be a “Damning Report” followed by a week or two of hoo-hah in the news media. Then it’ll all be forgotten about. Until the next time.
The greedy bastards will carry on being greedy bastards and carry on lining their pockets at everyone else’s expense.
Both can be true and both are fine with me.
There is the thick end of £7bn out there. Worth chasing, surely?
Did anyone watch Partygate, the C4 Docudrama thing.
Interesting that the average fine for regular people breaking lockdown was
UK£6K. The fine for those in Downing Street was a trifling £50
While I agree that the money-grabbing bastards may well get away with it, I am hoping that the Inquiry does at least make crystal clear who you can trust in a crisis.
I remember how uncertain and frightening the early stages of the pandemic were and how important a calm, stable government presence was. The UK had a pack of grifters who let it be known to their friends that there’s money to be made ‘ere. Don’t worry about regs – we can wave it through under a VIP lane.