Jeremy Hunt - PM contender and agent of privatisation

[TonyGosling]

The Coincidental World of Jeremy Hunt
April 6, 2016Peg
JEREMY HUNT
Let’s talk about Jeremy Hunt (with a silent c) who today is one of the nation’s most despised politicians.
https://scepticpeg.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/the-coincidental-world-of- jeremy-hunt/

Jeremy was born in 1966. Before entering politics, he was a failed marmalade salesman.

2005:

In the 2005 general election Jeremy turned his back on the failing world of marmalade exportation and was elected as MP for South West Surrey after the previous MP, Virginia Bottomley, was made a life peeress. Virginia and Jeremy just happen to be cousins.

Just-Call-Me-Dave Cameron must like marmalade, or maybe he was grateful for Jezza’s support in his bid to become leader of the Conservatives. Either way, once elected, he rewarded Jeremy by making him Shadow Minister for Disabled People, (even though 11 years later Jezza turned his back on people with disabilities and voted to cut their benefits instead).

During this year he also wrote a policy pamphlet entitled Direct Democracy: An Agenda for a New Model Party. Sadly he wasn’t referring to the kind of party where we all have fun – which maybe he should have done because

his party sounds like an utter bore-fest; and
democracy no longer applies in 2016 when he announced that he was IMPOSING a contract on junior doctors.
In November Jeremy gave his brother a loan for his company Peacock Blue Ltd. It went in to bust anyway.

2009:

Jeremy became Shadow Secretary of State for the Department of Culture Media & Sport and in September went on a paid trip for two to New York with money donated to his office by Mr John Lewis. The main purpose of this trip was to meet with NewsCorp.

Soon after Jeremy’s return, James Murdoch visited the UK and told David Cameron that NewsCorp would be switching allegiance and would be supporting the Conservatives. This whole murky issue was covered during the Levenson Inquiry and covered in this article from The Guardian.

Jeremy was put on the naughty step for his expenses. He paid half back for which we must be grateful.



2010:

Following the general election and subsequent coalition, Jezza became a more important person and was now called Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media & Sport. He just happened to employ the services of his former Parliamentary Assistant, Naomi Gummer. There are two problems with this appointment:

Civil Service recruitment must be done under fair and open competition; and
Naomi just happened to be the daughter of Lord Chadlington (aka Peter Selwyn Gummer), who himself happened to be a former director of Hotcourses.
gummer

Lord Chadlington

Also during this year, Jeremy was forced to publicly apologise for claiming that fans were partly to blame for Hillsborough disaster, which was inexcusably ignorant considering the position he was holding at the time.

2011:

Jeremy was given the power to adjudicate over the takeover bid of BSkyB by NewsCorp which he just happened to happily wave through and had nothing whatsoever to do with his trip to New York in 2009.

2012:

Jeremy had managed to save himself £100,000 by the shifting of company assets.



Companies:

Hotcourses Data Ltd 2003-2005
Hotcourses Ltd 1992-2009
Nyumbani UK & the Hotcourses Foundation 2004-2010
Heckler Ltd 1992-1997
Peacock Blue Ltd 2004-2005
Remone Ltd 2001-
Sheffield Data Services Ltd 2001-2005
One of Hotcourses main clients just happened to be the British Council.

In 2009 Hunt stated on his Register of Interests that Hotcourses Ltd had a 50% share in Sheffield Data Services Ltd and owned 100% of Schoolsnet Ltd. I reblogged a great blog post by John Ward on this subject: hat4uk

Charles “Charlie” Roland Nicholas Hunt

charlie

Charlie is Jeremy’s younger brother. He describes himself as an “entrepreneur”.

Companies:

Coast Production Ltd 2005-2006
Gadgetron Ltd 2006-2007
Kbo Associates Ltd 2006-2006
Peacock Blue Ltd 1996-2004
Peaslake Free School Ltd 2012-2015
Sehsel Ltd 2005-2006
Soak & Sleep Holdings Ltd 2013-
Soak & Sleep Ltd 2009-
Even though Soak & Sleep Ltd was born from Charlie’s original company – Duvet & Pillow Warehouse – it seems DPW still exists in it’s own entity with companies:

Bed & Mattress Warehouse Ltd
Coast Production Ltd
Gadgetron Ltd
Sir Stuart Rose

stuartrose

Sir Stuart Rose is the former chairman of M&S. It is said that he is very close to Just-Call-Me-Dave Cameron Huffington Post

18th November 2013

It was announced that Sir Stuart Rose (normally associated with M&S, Ocado and other famous names) had been appointed as Chairman of Soak & Sleep Ltd – an unknown, small company originally known as the Duvet & Pillow Warehouse. An article in Retail Gazette all about the new venture fails to point out that the company belonged to Charlie Hunt – the brother of Cabinet minister, Jeremy.

14th February 2014

Jeremy Hunt announced that Sir Stuart would become a government adviser on failing NHS hospitals. An article in the Daily Mail sings the praises of Jezza and Sir Stuart, but fails to mention that Sir Stuart was chairman of Jeremy’s brother’s company nor a close friend of Cameron. Neither did Jeremy: Jeremy’s happy announcement!

17th September 2014

Sir Stuart was made a life peer.

November 2014

Jeremy comes under fire for refusing to release the details of Sir Stuart’s damning report on NHS management before the general election in May 2015. Link

February 2015

Sir Stuart joins forces with two other Tory-friendly businessmen and writes a damning piece for the Daily Mail attacking Labour leader, Ed Milliband.

October 2015

It’s announced that Sir Stuart was leading Cameron’s campaign to remain in Europe.



It’s now 2016 and at the time of writing this, Jezza is Secretary of State for the Department of Health and nobody likes him – especially junior doctors. And me.

[Celia_Moore]

Virginia Bottomley - Vice Chair of the British Council

"I had to start from scratch." He said. 😂😂😂😂

https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/revealed-at-last-the-hunt-bott omley-link/

[TonyGosling]

Jeremy Hunt’s new role ‘holding the government to account’ on health policy is a sick joke
https://www.thecanary.co/opinion/2020/02/06/jeremy-hunts-new-role-hold ing-the-government-to-account-on-health-policy-is-a-sick-joke/

Rather quietly, Jeremy Hunt has sidled back towards the political limelight, with a new role in parliament. But it’s one that says so much about the rot in our political system.

In 2016, Hunt declared that being health secretary was likely to be his “last big job in politics”. Since then, he’s been foreign secretary and run for the Tory leadership (and the accompanying keys to Number 10). Clearly over-qualified to fit into the current cabinet, Hunt has been grazing on the backbenches.

But now, Hunt has found something to do.

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Chair
A secret ballot of MPs has elected him chair of the Commons health select committee. There’s one of these committees for each government department and their role is to examine and critique the government’s decisions and performance. The committee chairs are allocated based roughly on the parties’ number of MPs. So there are now 17 Conservative, nine Labour, and two SNP chairs. Because of this, the vote for health chair was a straight fight between two Tories, Hunt and Anne-Marie Morris.

Hunt seems to be relishing the challenge. Describing himself as “honoured” by the appointment, he said:

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I look forward to working with my committee to provide a strong, independent voice that supports NHS staff [and] patients in a very pressured period.

Really?
The Guardian’s health policy editor Denis Campbell pulled no punches, calling the appointment a “conflict of interest”. The problem, as Campbell and others have observed, is that Hunt is responsible for much of the government health policy he’ll now supposedly be checking. He’s been away from the department since 2018, but before that he was the longest-serving health secretary.

Hunt had a six-year tenure that Dr Khailash Chand described when it was still only part way along as the “worst ever”. Chand said Hunt was turning “the NHS to NHS plc”. He summarised NHS management by Hunt as “a stunning example of how not to do things”. “Hunt has managed to insult and alienate NHS staff across the board,” said Chand. Tellingly, Chand characterised Hunt’s ‘policy roadmap’ as “leading to the complete privatisation of the NHS, a process that has deep roots in Thatcherite ideology”.



A couple of years of barely noticeable Matt Hancock as health secretary hasn’t made any significant difference to this roadmap. So the health select committee really needs a strong leader, not afraid to highlight the government’s flawed stewardship of the NHS. Instead, it’s got Hunt. Campbell reports a former committee member saying this arrangement will see Hunt “marking his own homework”. Judging by his own comments, Hunt is actually spotting an opportunity to fill in all the gaps he left before. And based on his track record, the idea of Hunt trying to do new things to the NHS is even more worrying than him simply applauding, or whitewashing, his past failures.

The system sucks
Hunt won the chair against an unimpressive challenger, who was from his own party anyway. At least he had a challenger, though. Because Tory MP Caroline Nokes is now chair of the equalities select committee – despite her making no reference to LGBTQI+ issues in her supporting statement and voting against same-sex marriage for England and Wales in 2013. But she was the only applicant, and the position was only open to Conservative MPs.

Select committees, when they’re well run, can do a really important job in holding the government to account. But the system of appointing chairs disproportionately from the ruling party seems almost certain to reduce their effectiveness. And any system that allows Jeremy Hunt to return to the scene of his greatest crimes against competent governance is just wrong.

Featured image via YouTube – ITV News

[TonyGosling]

UK lockdown to last until MAY as coronavirus peak still more than week away
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1266925/lockdown-UK-when-will-lockdo wn-end-may-coronavirus-news-update

BRITAIN could remain on lockdown until May amid warnings that the peak of the coronavirus outbreak is still 10 days away. Senior politicians have raised the prospect that Britons now face being shut away in their homes for at least another month as the virus continues its remorseless onslaught.
By Martyn Brown, Daily Express Senior Political Correspondent
PUBLISHED: 06:35, Thu, Apr 9, 2020 | UPDATED: 07:18, Thu, Apr 9, 2020

As the number of deaths due to Covid-19 surged past 7,000 Downing Street confirmed the current draconian restrictions will be reviewed as scheduled. Officials said there will be a review “on or around” the three-week mark – with the law requiring a technical extension by April 16. The Prime Minister's spokesman said: "We said we would make further announcements in three weeks. There is no change to that."

But with a further 936 more deaths from Covid-19 announced on Wednesday, there are fears that the worst of the killer disease could last for several more weeks.

Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt suggested the lockdown could last until May.

When put to him that it could last for “another month, minimum”, he told Radio 4’s World at One programme: “I think that’s a reasonable assumption.”

Mr Hunt, who is now the chairman of the health and social care select committee in the House of Commons, said: "As we've seen from Italy and other countries, you don't get a peak and then an immediate reduction, you stay at that peak level for some time."

He added: "I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that the lockdown is going to need to continue for a while and we don't need to take this decision at the beginning of next week."

London Mayor Sadiq Khan yesterday warned that an easing of the restrictions could be a long way off.

“I think we are nowhere near lifting the lockdown,” he told the BBC.

“We think the peak, which is the worst part of the virus, is still probably a week and a half away.”

Officials in Wales have already confirmed the lockdown there will be extended.

First Minister Mark Drakeford has said stay-at-home measures in Wales will not end next week, with agreement on the nature of the lockdown extension to be announced "in the coming days".

Mr Drakeford told the Welsh Assembly: "The three weeks of stay-at-home restrictions provided for in the legislation, and which we have all faced, are due to end next week.

"I must be plain with all members, these restrictions will not end then. We will not throw away the gains we have made and the lives we have saved by abandoning our efforts just as they begin to bear fruit."

Pressed on when the UK's lockdown extension will happen, health minister Edward Argar told Radio 4's Today programme: “When the scientific advice is such that we appear to have gone over the peak and it is safe to do so.

"We couldn't want to judge or preempt that evidence. That isn’t a position we are in yet."

He added: "We will be reviewing it and we will be led by the scientific evidence when its the right time.

"We need to start seeing the numbers coming down and that's when you're in the negative.

"That's when you have a sense when that's sustained over a period of time, that you can see it coming out of that."

Both stand-in PM Dominic Raab and Professor Chris Whitty have stressed that Britain needs to reach the peak first before looking at whether the lockdown measures can be changed or relaxed.

It comes as the World Health Organisation has also offered a dire warning about the “dangerous” consequences of relaxing too early.

WHO regional director Hans Kluge said in an update that relaxing lockdown too early would be “dangerous”.

“We still have a long way to go in the marathon and the progress we have made so far in fighting the virus is extremely fragile,' he said.

“To think we are coming close to an end point would be a dangerous thing to do. The virus leaves no room for error or complacency.

“Any shift in our response strategy, relaxing of lockdown status or physical distancing measures requires very careful consideration.”

Despite the gloomy outlook Ministers have hinted that reopening schools should be one of the first moves in easing the lockdown.

Experts have said the closures are likely only to have a limited effect on the spread, and mean much of the workforce are tied up with childcare.

“We need to be led by the science, of course,” one minister told The Times.

“But if we can reopen schools after the Easter holidays things could begin to get back to normal. It could kick-start the economy.”

Countries like Denmark have signalled that schools there will reopen next week.