Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Political Party Funding
Tory donors’ firms landed lucrative government contracts

by Alice K Ross
Published in: All Stories, Political Party Funding

Not-so-risky business: Iain Duncan Smith’s department outsources work programme contracts.

Two separate stories over the weekend link prominent Conservative Party donors and government contracts worth millions of pounds.

The Guardian reports that an investment firm set up by two donors has seen a training company it owned awarded contracts with the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) worth £73m, for helping get the unemployed back into work. Until it was sold last Monday the training company, Employment and Skills Group (ESG), belonged to Sovereign Capital, an investment company set up in 2001 by John Nash and Ryan Robson, among others.

Robson left Sovereign in March 2011 but was a director of ESG when the firm was awarded its contracts. Sovereign also has significant interests in healthcare, another area that stands to benefit from government schemes, the Guardian notes. The DWP notes, ‘All our contracts are awarded in fair and open competition.’

Nash, who with his wife has donated a reported £182,500 in the past six years, is a member of George Osborne’s Independent Challenge Group. The group is tasked with ‘thinking the unthinkable’ about where budget savings could be found, the Guardian reports. Michael Gove appointed Nash to the Department for Education board.

Meanwhile, Robson has donated a reported £267,000 to the party and has run for parliament as a Conservative candidate. He is a director of Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice, which comes up with ways to cut the benefits bill.

Last year the Bureau revealed that over a quarter of all Tory donors were from the financial sector.

Click here to read the Bureau’s investigation into Conservative Party funding.

Elsewhere, Labour blogger Dr Eoin Clarke claims on his blog The Green Benches that a nursing staffing agency that is making big profits from NHS cuts is linked to former Conservative Party treasurer Lord Ashcroft.

Medacs Healthcare is providing millions of hours of agency staff to the NHS, where hiring freezes mean many trusts are unable to fill vacancies and must rely on temporary cover. Medacs is owned by the Impellam Group, a company in which Ashcroft and his family own an interest.

Clarke points to TUC figures showing Medacs earns a profit of £31,902 per employee each year – much of which is coming from cash-strapped NHS trusts that are being forced to turn to expensive agency staff. NHS contracts have ‘rocketed’ in the past two years under the tough new budget conditions, he says.

‘The conflict of interest is clear, Tory donors are profiting directly from the dismantling of our NHS’, Clarke claims.

stewth
you guys should take lessons from those who understand advertising .....
in principal, less is more

all this garbage and detritus you throw on here is not worth the effort to read, whatever you may choose to think

you should be able to condense your maelstrom of silage into no more than say 150 words

TORY..........sleaze sleaze sleaze sleaze sleaze sleaze sleaze sleaze sleaze sleaze sleaze

could have been condensed to 2 words!

labour party tenure ...... snow white and wonderful??????
remind us why they were kicked out

I am interested in the probable hoardings before the next election.
Tories destroying the NHS.

Tories inept management of floods, protecting and dishing out money to rich friends.

Angry Scots tell tory toffs to get lost.


Tories Taxing the poor to pay for tax cuts for the idle rich.

Tory unemployment figures exposed as fraudulent.

Housing bubble burst.

Students leaving University with debts of £50000 and have no prospect of owning own homes.

While some toffs moving into parents gravy trains.

Two aircraft carriers sink in Thames.


==

Torrid party renames itself the Sleazy Party and nominate Redwood as Leader and Moggy as deputy.


Cameron decides to spend the rest of his life working for the Green party and penitence for his cockups.

I think the list would be a lot like longer for Labour and I am sure we can all think of items for it.

Cyners no you remind us why the Tories werent elected with an overall majority.

simple - they didn't win enough seats .....
and of course labour won even fewer or lost an awful lot, if one wants to be a little more brutal

but more importantly, in my not at all humble opinion, will be the likely very low t/o at the next election ..... that just allows the activists (aka zealots and loonies) of any hue to garner more power than they warrant

Notice how the Tory front bench had women on at PMQs, and four women strategically placed behind fat Dave.

electionista ‏@electionista
UK - YouGov/Sun poll:

CON 34%
LAB 39%
LDEM 10%
UKIP 11%
Expand

Today
The Bank of England revised up its growth forecast for 2014 to 3.4 percent from 2.8 percent, a more bullish forecast than most other economists, and one which the Bank said was due in part to its belief that the Office for National Statistics had underestimated fourth-quarter gross domestic product growth.

The Bank says room remains for more growth without stoking inflation, despite a record number of people in work and business surveys that show bottlenecks in factories.

Inflation has fallen unexpectedly rapidly to its 2 percent target and the Bank said it expected it to dip further to 1.7 percent by March, before hovering close to 2 percent for the next couple of years.

As Andrew Neil and Nick Robinson both said just now, those figures are a potential game changer for the economy and politics.

More chance now of a Conservative victory.

Polls now showing UKIP potentially in 3rd place in EU elections.

And still we have Food Banks opening at record levels and Loan pay day merchants booming.

Dream on Hays do you really think the ordinary Joe Soap on the street cares about economic growth.

Its the pound in the pocket that counts and people have long memorys they wont forget the 4 years of nil pay award or pay cuts and hours cut.

Growth at that level is almost a boom. That will put cash in people's pockets. It will produce a feel good mood. The choice will be for people to vote for Labour, who the public doesn't trust on the economy or vote for the Conservatives who would be bringing good times and a boom. The public just love a boom and wouldn't want Labour to spoil it.

From the BBC teletext service "But Mr Carney WARNED that the recovery was NOT SECURE" .............

Hays your beginning to lie like the the two at the top Fat Dave and Sir Giddeon.

No recovery is secure. He is just hedging his bets. The likelihood is that it will bring an overall Conservative majority.

I wouldn't be surprised if we had another hung parliament at the next election. Labour aren't nearly as far left as they used to be and voters are generally totally fed-up with these idiot politicians - it doesn't matter which party they represent. The latest flood fiasco is pretty typical of the blame game that goes on whenever something goes wrong in this country.

!!!!!! Potential !!!!!!! Burst.

Typical tory con.


Money "NO OBJECT"!!!!!!!!!!!

Lying B.

Unless it is going into his backers' pockets.

Money "NO OBJECT"!!!!!!!!!!!

he'l come to regret saying that will Camoron.

You mark my words.