#Thread

Private equity firms spent £33BILLION buying up British firms in the first half of this year!

£530m takeover of 178yr old LV, founded to help Liverpool’s poor bury their dead, by US private equity firm Bain Capital means LV would no longer be owned by its 1.2m members.
Private equity refers to investment funds organised as limited partnerships that buy & restructure companies not publicly traded on a stock exchange.

Private equity predators have become notorious for taking quick profits while slashing jobs & leaving behind long-term problems.
There is a debate around the distinction between private equity & foreign direct investment (FDI), and whether to treat them separately. The difference is blurred on account of private equity not entering the country through the stock market.
Private-equity investments in health care & related services, such as nursing homes & hospitals, are alleged to have decreased the quality of care while driving up costs.

Back in 2014, @unitetheunion released a list of 70 MPs with proven links to private healthcare providers.
Private equity ownership leads to pressure to increase profitability, which in the health & care sector, means concerns about patient safety.

In the US, researchers found that private-equity ownership of nursing homes increased short-term mortality of Medicare patients by 10%.
Some claim that private equity *captures* wealth rather than *creating wealth*, & this capture can be "zero-sum, or even value-destroying, in aggregate: assets get shuffled & reshuffled, profits get made, but relatively little flows toward actual productive uses." - Oren Cass.
Private Equity contributes to #inequality: it offers investors higher returns than those available in public stocks & bonds markets.

Yet, to enjoy those returns, it helps to already be rich high-net-worth individual investors or institutions such as endowments.
Private Equity also puts pressure on the lower end of the wealth divide. Companies can be broken up, merged, or generally restructured to make "efficiency saving" & "increase productivity", which in reality, inevitably means job cuts, & too often, lowering working conditions.
Back in August, Reuters reported that this year's unprecedented private equity buying spree in Britain was causing unease among politicians, trade unions & investors, about potential job losses & rising debt.

Free-market capitalism is destroying Britain.

reuters.com/business/uk-sa…
John Redwood earned £5,000/year for 12 hours work on the advisory board of Epic Private Equity.

In 2017 then environment secretary Michael Gove was one of many MPs disclosing payments from private investment firms.

#ToryCorruption

fnlondon.com/articles/micha…
Tory MP Andrew Mitchell has SIX ‘second jobs’ earning more than double his MP’s salarym including a "corporate intelligence" firm & one named in the Pandora Paper leaks, along with several high-paying investment firms.

nationalworld.com/news/politics/…
Mitchell's jobs include Investment firm Kingsley Capital Partners employing him as a senior adviser on £50,000/year for an annual commitment of eight days per year, equating to £83,151 since January 2020.

#ToryCorruption
Mitchell also has advisory & consultancy roles with Ernst & Young, Archway Emerging Partners & Investec, which net Mitchell a combined £57,000/yr.

He held another role as advisor to UK Global Health Care until February 2020, earning £30,000/yr.

The FT raised concerns in 2019:
Private equity sharks have now set their sights on Britain's banking sector - is Metro Bank next? If so, this would see yet another company disappear from the stock market & fall into the hands of a profit-hungry private equity firm based overseas. 🇬🇧

thismon.ee/a/10167023
Keep calm & carry on? No. Get angry & change the system!

Or alternatively...
Original picture from the film Threads, additional design: @teacherdude.

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More from @docrussjackson

10 Nov
IMPORTANT NEW REPORT from @botsentinel:

'Journalists and Royal Commentators Interacting with Hate Accounts Targeting Meghan and Harry, Duke and Duchess of Sussex'.

botsentinel.com/newsroom/repor…
"During our initial investigation into Twitter hate accounts targeting Meghan and Harry, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, we observed an unusual number of hate accounts interacting with journalists and royal commentators who are frequently cited in the media as "royal experts"."
"The hate accounts we monitored appeared to follow and interact with certain prominent Twitter accounts that primarily cover the royal family."

"Moreover, several prominent Twitter accounts covering the royal family followed some of the more active and well-known hate accounts."
Read 10 tweets
10 Nov
Tory MPs have been writing “sponsored content” online for the Betting & Gaming Council, a lobbying group campaigning for the gambling industry.

Of course they have.

They are unfit to govern.

We need to #ChangeTheSystem

#ToryCorruption

theguardian.com/politics/2021/…
They include Jack Brereton, MP for Stoke-on-Trent South and a government aide who wrote an article published on the ConservativeHome website on Monday urging ministers to make sure the gambling review does “nothing to put the industry’s competitiveness at risk.
Mark Jenkinson wrote one of the sponsored pieces in July. He declared an Ascot hospitality box in June worth £1,400, paid for by the BCG.

ERG member & ex-UKIP candidate Jenkinson, along with Ben Bradley, is often in the news for his grotesque views:

Read 4 tweets
9 Nov
Harry says ‘Megxit’ is a misogynistic term aimed at his wife Meghan.

Again, he's not wrong.

If only we had more (any?) British politicians brave enough to call out the harmful influence of sections of our divisive regressive press.

theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/n…
Prince Harry: “I warned him (Jack Dorsey) his platform (Twitter) was allowing a coup to be staged. That email was sent the day before. And then it happened and I haven’t heard from him since.”

He wasn't wrong then either.

theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/n…
Read 5 tweets
9 Nov
#THREAD

Keep Calm & Carry On was part of a motivational poster campaign designed by the Ministry of Information in 1939. Intended to raise the morale of the British public, the campaign was cancelled following criticism: people regarded the message as 'patronising & divisive'.👇
2.5million copies were printed but only a handful ever appeared in public. In 1940 stocks were pulped. Design historian Susannah Walker regards the Keep Calm campaign as "a resounding failure" & reflective of a misjudgement by upper-class civil servants of the mood of the people.
'Keep Calm & Carry On' is evocative of the antiquated & largely mythical upper class Victorian belief in long departed British stoicism – the "stiff upper lip", self-discipline, fortitude, & remaining calm in adversity – a cliché of British sensibility.

Read 13 tweets
8 Nov
Shortly after a Tory MP was first elected in 2005, a business which he owned 72% of was sold for £13million - yet now he's facing bankruptcy proceedings over unpaid taxes that could result in him having to step down?

How do you burn through TEN MILLION?

theguardian.com/politics/2021/…
I (clearly) don't know how bankruptcy works, & the article doesn't really explain. So you can run up £5k of debt - even though you have enormous wealth, & you just get to keep it? Can someone explain it to me please?
Vibes. ImageImage
Read 4 tweets
8 Nov
“My freedom doesn’t care about your fear. My freedom doesn’t care about your feelings”: Postmodern and oppositional organizing in the hashtag OpenAmericaNow - Caitlyn M Jarvis, Sean M Eddington, 2021.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…
Are the alt/hard/far-right, along with COVID conspiracy theorists (NOT people having rational, fact-based/well-evidenced discussions of eg the pros & cons of lockdowns) utilising the postmodernism they associate with "wokeness" & "identity politics" & which they claim to despise?
"Postmodernism is inherently oriented against power structures and institutions, with more recent literature highlighting how the new conservativism movement within the United States draws on and invokes postmodern logics, particularly within the alt-right movement."
Read 10 tweets

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