The Past Is A Foreign Country.

There are many people in Britain today who will fail to recognise the above photograph. It is a ruined factory - a place where people used to go, make things and earn money. Young people who didn't have the aptitude to be a banker, a property speculator or diversity coordinator would get apprenticeships at such places, learn a trade and get a proper job at the end of it all. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher and her Tory henchmen decided that we didn't need manufacturing industry any more and that we could base our entire economy on banking and shopping. Apprenticeships in factories were replaced with training for a life of crime in banking and finance. The working class was essentially exported abroad to India and China where their votes don't count over here in Britain and the Tories looked forward to a new generation who would have no idea that an alternative to neoliberal economics was possible. And it worked. Even the Labour party, the traditional party of the working class, went along with this idea. The economic insanity of "trickle down" became orthodoxy and , in times of famine, it became normal to present the rich and greedy with ever-increasingly bigger meals. Those who didn't fit into this new world, the ill-educated, the sick, the disabled and the unemployed became "scroungers". Those who argued against it became "dinosaurs" or, as Liz Kendall recently put it, "a throwback to the past." That, apparently, would be a terrible thing. Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour party, or heaven forefend, as Prime Minister would reverse all the "progress" of the last 30 years. Just imagine it. Ordinary people with full time well paid jobs. Hospitals well funded by the taxes paid by these people in full time well paid jobs. Entire industries such as gas, electricity, water and railways dedicated to creating public services instead of ripping off their customers. A society more equal in which the rich pay taxes as well. A society in which the sick and disabled are treated with a measure of dignity and the unemployed are helped back into real jobs that pay real money. Awful isn't it? "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

Can The Tories Waste Any More Taxpayers Money?

It is the great political and economic dilemma of our times - how can the Tories waste even more taxpayers money while still benefiting themselves? Selling off RBS at a loss of £1 billion to the Tories rich mates in the City is a doddle. All George Osborne has to do is to stand up in Parliament and tell everyone with a straight face that this "is a good deal for the British taxpayer." Child's play for an accomplished conman like George. Explaining away the hundreds of millions lost to the NHS by Jeremy Hunt has proven a bit more tricky. Softening up the NHS for privatisation is, of course, the aim, but how to explain it? Cue Jeremy who now has the sheer brass neck to turn the argument on its head and suggest that the NHS cannot control its shrinking budget. "NHS spending is simply unaffordable" he tells the public while he gloats over the tax cuts for his £1 million mansion and congratulates his rich mates for their ingenious tax-dodging scams. Meanwhile, sniggering up his sleeve, George Osborne has asked public sector workers "for their ideas on how to deliver public services more efficiently" since he doesn't have a clue. "We need to save at least £20 billion if Dave and I are to get our next tax cut," George told our reporter. "Asking public sector workers to cut their own throats saves me the trouble and, when it all goes tits up, I can simply point the finger and remind them it was all their own idea. Brilliant! But its true that political scams and con tricks are becoming increasingly hard to pull off. In the 70's and 80's things were much easier when the world's most successful peadophile ring - Parliament - was bullet proof. Now we have the likes of Tom Watson and Jeremy Corbyn swanning around telling everyone the bloody truth. Thank God for offshore banking is all I can say."

Tories Unveil Plan To Solve NHS Problems.

Circle Holdings, the company that was the first to run an NHS hospital as a private concern, wants to withdraw from its contract because it is "no longer viable under current terms". In other words they cannot make a profit out of other people's misery unless they can get their sticky fingers on yet more tax payers money. The problem, Circle told the press, is that there are too many sick people wasting resources at Hinchingbrooke hospital. If only they could get rid of all the sick people, sack all the doctors and nurses and flog off all the medical equipment then tax payers money could go where it belongs - into the offshore bank accounts of Circle executives. The hospital itself has been put into special measures after it was revealed that the A&E department was being run so badly that patients were being put in danger while staffing levels were completely inadequate. Shocked by their revelations about the complete failure of a private company to run an NHS hospital David Cameron immediately swung into action and declared that, if he wins the next general election, then he will make it more difficult for public sector workers to go on strike. "The last thing this country needs," he told our reporter, "is doctors and nurses going on strike in protest at my complete mishandling of the NHS. Publicising the fact that private companies are not fit to run hospitals and are efficient only in diverting tax payers money into their own pockets is not in the national interest. People simply don't need to know this. It only makes them fearful and distrustful and I intend to come down heavily on anyone who spreads such despondency. What I want to see are patients cheerfully laying down their lives in dirty, underfunded and under-staffed A&E departments and declaring that is their patriotic duty to die for the greater good of the Tory party, the rich, the greedy and the over-privileged. Meanwhile doctors and nurses should get on with their job - providing profits for me and my rich mates to skim off the top. What else are doctors and nurses for?" Meanwhile the British public have remained completely apathetic since most of them don't work in the public sector and are content to work for starvation wages just as long as the unions are kept in check. "We don't want a return to the Winter of Discontent," one member of the public told our reporter. "I remember it only too well. There was garbage in the streets, pot holes appeared all over the roads and you couldn't get to see a doctor or a nurse. Ahhh - hang on a minute......"

The NHS: The Beginning Of The End?

A & E departments across the country are so hard pushed that they have little choice but to declare a major incident and introduce emergency measures in order to cope. Doctors and nurses are at breaking point, patients are waiting up to five hours outside hospitals in ambulances and the government is failing to reach even its own pathetic targets. The crisis facing the NHS this winter is unprecedented and is the culmination of five years of Tory ideology which has inflicted untold damage on the service and brought it to the brink of extinction. So what have the Tories got to say about all this? Nothing intelligible. Cameron has accused anyone asking questions about this mess of "using the NHS as a political football" - as if he hasn't. He has also accused sick people of clogging up the system by having the sheer nerve to be sick and old people having the sheer nerve to be old. Not one word about the disastrous top-down re-organisation that he, Andrew Lansley and Jeremy Hunt have pursued for the last five years. Not one word about the cuts to spending on the NHS over the last five years. Not one word about the destruction of morale amongst NHS employees over the last five years. Not one word about the destruction of those ancillary services that support the health care system and have now left the NHS exposed. Just more of the favoured Tory trick of blaming the victims. Nothing could demonstrate more clearly the commitment of the Tory party to their core principle of killing people for money. The cuts inflicted on the NHS are designed to provide tax cuts for the Tories and their rich mates. The so-called re-organisation is designed to allow the Tories and their rich mates to get their hands on billions in assets that are actually the property of you and me - the tax payer. This is what Tory ideology means on the ground - more money for them and more misery for the rest of us.

Tory Plot To Murder The Poor And Elderly.

The Tory propaganda campaign to undermine the NHS and soften it up for privatisation has been revealed for all the see by the Channel 4 series "Despatches". Having set unrealistic targets for the NHS the Tories have then fined hospitals for not achieving them and, in the process, have effectively cut more than £1 billion from their budgets. Starved of funds these hospitals have even less chance of meeting the Tory targets and even more money is taken from them. This has provided the Tories with valuable propaganda as they manoeuvre the NHS towards the jagged rocks of privatisation and the waiting corporate healthcare sharks circling in anticipation. The Tories have already sold our most private healthcare records to their thieving corporate mates but their latest move beggars belief. The Tories are seriously suggesting that healthcare should only be available to those they deem "of benefit to society." The long-term sick, children, the unemployed and the elderly need not apply and, according to the evil Tories, should be allowed to die without the benefit of new drugs. This breaks the most basic principle of healthcare, "Primum non nocere" - First do no harm - recognised everywhere except, apparently, within the Tory party. Essentially the Tories are now openly proposing that only the rich should benefit from healthcare and, of course, they will be first in the queue since it is their most sacred principle that rich politicians are the most important people in the world. The Tories are already responsible for many deaths amongst benefit claimants and now look set to unleash the ATOS kangaroo courts on NHS patients as well. Murder might be too strong a word, but what other word can be used to describe this?

Cameron And Hunt - Still Ducking And Diving.

Part-time PM David Cameron and the loathsome Jeremy Hunt have been giving a master class this week in the art of ducking and diving. "Call me Dave" was first up with his threadbare explanation for attending the Commonwealth Conference in Sri Lanka despite that country's dubious human rights record. Distracted from his busy round of flogging arms to various Sri Lankan government gangsters, Dave took time off to carefully explain why his presence at the Conference was all Labour's fault. "Ed Miliband, who as everyone knows was Prime Minister at the time, agreed in 2009 that the conference should be held in Sri Lanka despite the fact that his crystal ball was telling him that the government there would soon be guilty of human rights abuses. This left me with no choice but to attend the meeting since it was pencilled into my diary and my bags were already packed. I feel that, with good will on both sides and with the new guns I've just flogged to the Sri Lankan authorities, the problem will soon be resolved as the hard-working government finally gets rid of all the scrounging shirkers in the Tamil community." Meanwhile, back in Britain now officially renamed "Tory World", "Jeremy stop calling me C**t" has called for negligent doctors and nurses to be jailed for up to five years in order to cover up his own record of neglect and mistreatment of the NHS. While A&E departments continue to close for the winter and the incidence of postponed operations increased by 40%, Mr.Hunt felt he had no choice but to use the time-honoured Tory tactic of blaming the victims. "Despite all our efforts to persuade them otherwise," Hunt told the BBC, "doctors and nurses in the NHS still continue to deliberately kill patients for fun. If I could fully privatise healthcare in Britain then, of course, all these problems would vanish overnight. Doctors and nurses would then act in accordance with their oath to do no harm because they would be guided by the higher morality of the market place. I have to add, however, that the real problem with the NHS is all those selfish pensioners who resolutely refuse to die quietly so I can reduce my tax bill."

Tories Extend Principle Of Killing People For Money.

Having established the principle of forcing the disabled and unemployed into destitution to aid criminal bankers and killing pensioners to aid greedy energy companies, the Tories have now extended the principle of the euthanasia of plebs to the NHS. Our healthcare is now, in all but name, fully privatised and is now subject to competition law - the charter that allows greedy executives to ignore competition so they can fill both their pockets and the pockets of their shareholders. The NHS is now obliged to spend millions on competition lawyers to avoid being sued by the Competition Commission and avoid litigation by the corporate bloodsuckers who are also the recipients of lucrative contracts forced on the NHS by this so-called government. Two NHS hospital trusts in Bristol have already been stopped from rolling out a unified cancer pathway to save lives in order to follow the rules of competition. Meanwhile the wage bill for top NHS executives has exploded since the Tories got their snouts in the trough even as ordinary health workers have seen their wages frozen and their increments have come under threat. Essentially the NHS has been turned into a three-ringed circus in which the corporate clowns are the main beneficiaries. The Tories, having starved the NHS of funds and thrown it to the wolves, is now pointing the finger at failing A&E departments and trust managers desperately trying to hide the truth from the public and bellowing "See, we told you it needed reform." But make no mistake this is murder for money masquerading under an all too convenient ideological commitment to the "market place." Far from creating a new "market place" for healthcare the Tories have created their own version of Pol Pot's killing fields complete with a nice new shiny price tag.

Jeremy Hunt Plans Shrinkage Of The NHS.

Jeremy Hunt has now unveiled his latest move to soften up the NHS for privatisation. Not only does he plan to stop the promised and less than generous pay rise of 1% for NHS staff he also plans to dismantle the system of increments that reward staff for their growing experience over time and for staying in a difficult and challenging job. NHS pay and conditions for the vast majority are hardly generous in the first place - certainly not as generous as the inflation-busting pay rises and the "increments" that MP's allow themselves by cheating on their expenses. But, of course, Jeremy Hunt doesn't care about that. All he cares about is reducing the wage bill in anticipation of flogging off the NHS to his corporate bloodsucking mates. Nor does he care that the death rate is climbing steadily or that waiting times in A&E have trebled since the Tories seized power in 2010. Tory MP's in exposed marginal seats are already becoming rather nervous about their electoral prospects in 2015 but Hunt doesn't care about that either. He knows, as do Cameron and Osborne, that the Tories will only win a majority in 2015 if God intervenes and arranges a miracle. Hunt and the other criminals in the present coalition cabinet have to flog off the NHS and pocket the proceeds well before the 2015 deadline and wrecking it is the best way to achieve this. At first glance this might appear counter-productive. How can he sell off the NHS if it is near to collapse? The answer is simple. It doesn't matter if the NHS is in a state of collapse because Hunt and his rich pals don't use it. A NHS near to collapse will provide the necessary alibi for the Tories to sell the idea of privatisation to the electorate. And, even is this ploy fails, so what? The collapse will make it cheaper for the corporate bloodsuckers to acquire the NHS as they get their grubby hands on assets worth billions for next-to-nothing and increase the size of the potential "donations" for the Tory party. Jeremy Hunt is planning the world's most audacious smash and grab raid and, with so much money at stake, he doesn't care about anything else. Like all Tories he is nothing more than a squalid crook.

Tory Corruption Rolls On.

The Tories are beginning to scent defeat especially over Ed Miliband's pledge to freeze energy prices. So far there hasn't been a peep out of them on the issue. The reason? Because they can't match the policy and if, as the energy companies are threatening, energy prices are hugely inflated in anticipation of a Labour victory in 2015 what can Cameron do about it? Nothing, he wouldn't dare. And there's the rub because if his wealthy mates in the energy sector do raise prices the question will be why don't you do something about it Dave? Heads Ed Miliband wins, tails David Cameron loses. Nothing loath, however, Tory corruption is still rolling on, grubbing as much money in bribes as they can before being turfed out of office. Osborne is busy challenging the EU's attempt to cap banker's bonuses in the European Court to protect his banking pals. BT has been handed £1.2 of taxpayers money despite having a virtual monopoly in the provision of broadband internet. As Margaret Hodge has succinctly put it; “The consumer is failing to get the benefits of healthy competition and BT will end up owning assets created from £1.2bn of public money.” Meanwhile the Tory "reform" of the NHS is now leading to ever more health rationing while the bloodsuckers who have muscled their way into Britain's healthcare system courtesy of the Tory party are offering a "self-funding" option that allows those with the money to jump the queue. And, if you want to know how the Tory party is directly benefitting from all this you just have to look at the scandal involving the City brokerage firm ICAP. They were run by an ex-Tory treasurer who "donated" millions to the Tories even as his company was fraudulently fixing international interest rates. Of course the Tories are refusing to hand back the millions they have received from this crook. And so the Tory money-making scheme of accepting bribes from criminals and laundering public money through the private sector rolls on. Makes you wonder why 32% of the electorate still support these spivs and conmen doesn't it? Maybe they are just plain stupid.

Tories Unveil Their Great Export Drive.

The Tories have proudly unveiled their plans to stimulate British exports by announcing that they intend to send the sick abroad to India for treatment. This will "save" money, they assert, without explaining exactly how British money flowing to India will do this. No do they explain what will happen to all of the "excess" medical staff in Britain. Presumably they will be offered retraining as domestic servants for the new fat cat elite that will be pocketing the "savings". Whatever their intentions one thing is for sure, the tax money intended for the NHS will find its way into the bulging wallets of the Tory's mates and British patients will quietly expire well away from the gaze of the British press. Remember Camerons's words "The NHS is safe in our hands"? Well it isn't and the Tories are busily dismantling and selling off piecemeal something that we have paid for and something that certainly doesn't belong to them or to the greedy money-grubbing crooks that finance them. While Cameron is sunning his flabby body whenever he gets the chance at our expense, he is also planning the greatest crime this country has witnessed since the last time the Tories stole something that didn't belong to them. This is an act of sheer premeditated malfeasance and if the British people stand by and allow this to happen they will rightly forfeit any reputation for the rule of law. It is a crime and, as such, the Tories should be prosecuted for fraud.

The Tories Unbalanced Economy.

The Tories are very fond of fairy tales - the unemployed are all feckless, the disabled are all benefit cheats, the economy is just like a household budget and they are all about saving money. But these so-called "ideas" are actually nothing more than half-baked prejudices that allow narrow-minded morons such as Iain Duncan Smith to declare that facts are nothing when compared to his "beliefs." In fact IDS unwittingly summed up the totality of Tory ideology and the extent of their blind arrogance. That is how the completely unwarranted "reform" of the NHS, far from saving money, has led to profligate spending amounting to £1 billion with no discernible improvements to the service whatsoever but with considerable damage inflicted upon it. Essentially this money is nothing more than the start-up costs for a new business provided by the taxpayer while the business itself is to be handed over to private enterprise with no charge. The same can be said for the new gas fracking industry which will benefit from tax breaks courtesy of the public purse. It would seem that not only are private losses to be covered as in the case of the banks, but so is the investment needed to get profitable businesses off the ground in the first place. Entrepreneurs are supposed to take risks and reap the rewards if those risks pay off, they are supposed to invest their money and be prepared to lose that investment if they are mistaken. When our government uses our money to invest in business and then uses even more of our money to cover any losses even as profits remain private, this is not entrepreneurship it is fraud pure and simple. The Tories claim that all they are doing is "encouraging" investment in Britain. But since when have energy companies needed any encouragement to help themselves to the Earth's resources in order to make huge profits or healthcare companies to profit from other people's misery? Little wonder then that since the Tories seized power in 2010 state borrowing has mushroomed while we get poorer and poorer and big business gets richer and richer. The British taxpayer has become an involuntary investor in business without any hope of reward but in the certainty that any losses will be covered by us.

Death By Tick Box.

You hear a great deal about "the tick box culture" nowadays and how it diverts people away from their proper concerns and squanders their time. But how does a tick box culture develop in the first place? It comes about because someone, with no idea as to how a job should be done, decides that the person doing that job cannot be trusted and need to be told exactly how their working day should be structured. Usually this is because some customer or service user has complained often because they are impatient know-alls who think they are the most important person in the universe. Management, afraid that they may be criticised and with no real operational experience themselves, now introduce a questionnaire that is designed to control the behaviour of their staff and micro-manage their working day. Often this is very successful, inasmuch as the staff now have to spend so much time collecting proof that they are doing their jobs that they no longer have time to actually do their jobs. In the NHS this means that patients are neglected while doctors and nurses begin to believe that their work actually consists of ticking boxes. As a consequence complaints multiply and management, convinced that they were right all along, introduce yet more tick boxes. Eventually things become so insane that patients actually begin to die, the government steps in and - you guessed it - introduce yet more tick boxes to collect the same information that management has already collected. In other words you have tick boxes to make sure that the tick boxes are being completed correctly. Tick boxes destroy the ability of people to do their jobs properly and, in the case of the NHS, actually kill people but remain popular because incompetent managers and ignorant politicians believe that doctors and nurses cannot be trusted to do their jobs without close supervision. The question is who is supervising the incompetent managers and ignorant politicians? Perhaps they need to start ticking boxes of their own.

Yet Another Fatcat In Smash And Grab Raid.

You might be forgiven for believing that the rise in the value of stocks and shares means that the economy is finally beginning to heal. Forgiven, but given no prizes for common sense. The truth is that the economic system that pauperised the vast majority in order to benefit a small elite is struggling to survive a fatal wound after being treated with a sticking plaster. The fatcats who inflicted untold misery on hundreds of millions in order to line their own pockets are still out there, counting their ill-gotten gains and figuring out their latest confidence trick. One such is Sir David Nicholson whose tick-box approach to the NHS led to the death of several hundred people and a knighthood for himself. Revealed as an unimaginative an immoral money-grubber of the worst kind he has finally decided to leave his post as the Chief Executive of the NHS before a lynch mob catches up with him. Having earned over £200,000 a year for turning the NHS into a circus he is now set to walk away with a pension pot totalling nearly £2 million. Just another corporate pirate then, except this one put at risk thousands of lives in order to line his own pockets and many patients, such as those at Stafford Hospital, paid the ultimate price to assure his comfortable retirement. It is a stark as that. Criminals have been in charge of the corporate world for over 30 years now and, after being found out, are avoiding punishment to enjoy their stolen millions in the lap of luxury. We, on the other hand, have been handed the bill for their greed and dishonesty and are now expected to meekly accept austerity as a price worth paying to save an economic system that didn't benefit us in the first place.

Tories Set To Vote Against Their Own Queen's Speech.

A couple of weeks ago a 53-year old woman killed herself in Birmingham by throwing herself into the path a truck hurtling along the M6. Her reason for this desperate act of self-destruction? She could not afford to pay the £20 per week demanded by the government's bedroom tax and couldn't find alternative accomodation more suited to her needs. She was caught between a government completely unconcerned for her welfare and a housing market designed to benefit the few at the cost of the majority. She was a direct victim of neoliberal economic policy that puts greed at the centre of its entire philosophy. The government is now hell bent on privatising the NHS for the same reason even as ambulance waiting times are climbing faster and faster and nurses find themselves trapped on wards where a lack of staff is a greater threat to patient's health than their illnesses. Meanwhile, in true Tory fashion, Lord Young has reacted to these tradegies by pointing out that the Tory engineered recession is just the time to exploit cheap labour. The Tories are quite happy then to stand by as the people they are supposed to protect, whose interests they are supposed to govern in, are exploited and driven to despair even as criminal bankers and moronic executives plunder the economy and enrich themselves at the expense of us all. With such an uncaring, selfish and utterly incompetent government in power it is perhaps unsuprising that the Tory party is in disarray and is threatening to vote against its own government's Queen's Speech. Any self-respecting and humane MP would be hard-pressed to support it. However, the Tory party is not about to rebel against its own leadership out of any feeling of humanity or fairness. No, they are rebelling because the Speech contained no pledge for a referendum on Europe. While people are killing themselves over government policy, while the vulnerable and disabled are being persecuted, the unemployed are humiliated, patients are told to pay for private medicine or die and our children are denied a decent education, this disgusting collection of spivs, conmen and thieves are obssessed with thumbing their noses at Johnnie Foreigner. Not only are these people little better than criminals with no moral compass whatsoever, they are also completely and utterly brainless. What in God's name are they doing running this country?

G4S Efficiently Kill NHS Patient.

G4S, the company famous for earning millions after failing to provide security at London's Olympic Games, have finally succeeding in killing a patient in one of their ambulances. The company, whose humerous tag line is "Securing Your World", failed to secure the wheelchair of a double amputee and then killed him when the wheelchair tipped over. We asked a Tory party spokesman for their reaction to the news; "G4S have an outstanding record in delivering a very efficient, if also completely nonexistant and very expensive, service to the public. We don't regard this unfortunate accident as indicative that a privatised ambulance service will be an unmitigated disaster. Indeed we believe that killing patients during the ambulance journey to hospital will cut down waiting times and free up health staff for more important things such as book-keeping and list ticking. Useless sick people, especially crippled ones, should be grateful for our new streamlined euthenasia programme delivered free at the point of need by such an efficient private company. Killing people within a nationalised service has always been difficult, what with adverse publicity linking the government with such deaths, and we mean to prevent attracting such blame in the future. G4S have kindly offered to take the flak for a derisory £10 billion a year or so, which is a great deal for the tax payer and even better for the Tory party."

Hunt Makes Last Ditch Attempt To Flog The NHS.

Jeremy C..., sorry, Jeremy Hunt, the slimiest individual in the Tory swamp, has stepped up his campaign to soften up the NHS so he can flog it off to the criminals who bankroll his party. As the member of the government most closely associated with the atempt to strangle the finances of the NHS, C..., sorry, Hunt has had the sheer brass neck to warn that 'The weeds of failure grow more quickly in a garden of mediocrity." As a Tory he would naturally know all about that. What C..., sorry, Hunt, is doing is to blame the victim for a policy designed to bring the NHS into disrepute even as it kills people. The Tories have spent decades slavering over the NHS, itching to privatise it so they steal as much money as they can get their grubby hands on. Staffordshire was a symptom of this process and not an example of why privatisation should gather pace. The Labour party, frightened by the bogeywoman, Margaret Thatcher, actively encouraged it and the result has been disaster. While both parties are eager to pour billions into the armed forces and the aid programme so their leaders can stut the world stage pretending they are important, people have been dying in Britain for want of a properly funded NHS. There is no case for the disgraceful idea that the NHS should make a profit. It is not a business, it is a service funded by us for us. There is no place in the NHS for politicians on the make or businessmen hoping to plunder it. It is ours and should have a sign on it saying "HANDS OFF." C..., sorry, Hunt, is a mediocre little spiv, like his predecessor Andrew Lansley, whose only qualification as the Minister for Health is that he managed to screw up the BSkyB confidence trick. He, like the entire coalition government, are not fit to lick the boots of the lowliest hospital porter.

It's Not Easy Being A Tory.

Life as a Tory has never been easy. You have to be prepared to be so nasty that real human beings can't stand to be in the same room as you. Most Tories can cope with that because the rewards - a chance to be as nasty and vicious as you like, scrounging from the public purse and the overwheening sense of entitlement - are so, well, rewarding. But what makes life almost unbearable as a Tory is that you also have to be completely incompetent. Not the simple bumbling incompetence that marks out the moron, but the truly mind-numbing and totally brainless incompetence that marks out the true Tory. This week has seen some outstanding examples of classic Tory incompetence. Ian Duncan Smith has finally discovered that his nasty little scheme to make benefits unavailable to those who actually need them cannot be implimented because the science fiction IT programmes he hoped could be developed are sadly impossible. Worse yet he has now found out that his cherished "bedroom tax" is so vicious that it can't even pass muster by the legal profession - people who regularly run laboratory mazes on the basis that there are some things that even rats won't do. David Cameron, meanwhile, has discovered that food banks, unlike many Tory policy wheezes, are not so easy to hide from the public, while his plan to flog off the NHS while nobody was looking has been spotted after all. Then, to add insult to injury, Tory opposition to capping banker's bonuses has been scuppered by EU leaders who do have some idea what the word "fair" actually means. Fortunately for the rest of us the Tories are now busily engaged in the pastime that eclipses even their lust for damaging the country - stabbing each other in the back. Cameron's days seem to be numbered, happily so are those of the Tory party in general.

GP's Discover They've Been Lied To.

GP's are now waking up to the fact that the Tories have sold them a pig in a poke over the NHS "reforms". The much-vaunted Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG's) are powerless to do what they are supposed to do in the face of private healthcare companies who are busily buying up "bankrupt" Health Trusts as their hospitals are starved of funds by the Tories. The "reforms", it seems, were nothing more than cover for the privatisation of the NHS after all the "Guardian" reports today. Surprise surprise. What the GP's failed to understand is that when you sup with the Devil you need a long spoon and, when you sup with the Tories, you need an even longer one. Having a posh accent does not mean that you can be trusted and, when it comes to the Tories, it simply means they are nothing more than common spivs with an expensive education. Tories, as previous stories in the News In Shorts have pointed out, are expert scroungers and there is no tactic they won't use, no lie they won't tell to get their hands on someone else's property.

Tories To Exempt Healtcare Companies From Paying Tax.

The government is considering exempting private healthcare companies from paying tax as they forge ahead with the privatisation of the NHS. And profits, once the NHS is privatised, are set to climb significantly as nurses wages and their subsequent pensions are to be forced down. Nurses pay is already under threat, ahead of privatisation, as weekend and unsociable hours enhancements are stopped so that Healthcare companies can cash in. Many hospitals are already running services on little more than skeleton staffing levels in order to make ends meet as the government deliberately starve them of funds while the Care Quality Commission has admitted that 17 hospitals are already operating at less than safe levels. In the meantime 999 control room staff are being paid bonuses of up to £250 to avoid sending ambulances out in order to save yet more money. The message is clear. The Tories are going to privatise the NHS and will reward their rich healthcare pals with juicy tax-free deals even as they withdraw healthcare from all but the wealthy. They are stealing our NHS and making us pay for the privilege.

Tories Plan To Close Beds For Non-Paying Patients.

With the NHS under increasing pressure and the Tory party unwilling to raise taxes on the super-rich and their corporations, they have decided to square the circle by closing down thousands of beds. Those of us who have paid for the NHS all our lives will soon find ourselves locked outside though, of course, the number of private beds will remain unaffected. In a plan described as ‘shockingly irresponsible’ by Dr John Lister, director of the campaign group London Health Emergency, the Tories intend to close down 25% of all hospital beds with no clinical rationale for the move whatsoever. Essentially they are doing it so that they and their rich mates don't have to pay tax, resoning that their greed is more important than some peasant's life. And, of course, once the NHS has been privatised the price of hospital care will be all the more expensive because of a restricted supply and unlimited demand. Less in tax and the opportunity to cash in on other people's misery - its a Tory dream come true. We asked a Tory party spokesman for a comment; "We have looked at the problems of the NHS and come to the conclusion that we'll never have a better opportunity to cash in. There are many sick people out there who are simply begging to have their cash lifted while they're too weak and vulnerable to do anything about it. Its nothing personal, you understand, its just good business. Essentially we've had your money now f**k off. And don't forget, the NHS is safe in our hands, we'll cut the deficit not the NHS and all the other rubbish we have to mouth to get anyone to vote for us at all."