Remember the story of Matt Hancock and Alex Bourne, the publican turned medical equipmemt supplier, a photo of whose pub Mr Hancock kept on his office wall?
Well yesterday, Mr Hancock went on the attack. He said Alex Bourne "never got a contract from the Government" and that it was a "fabrication pushed by the Labour Party" and "a load of rubbish".
Well, in a funny sort of way Hancock is telling the truth. If you look for contracts that Bourne's company, Hinpack, won you won't find any.
But in another sort of way, he isn't telling the truth. And the truth is far, far worse.
Another company, called Alpha Laboratories, did win a contract with Matt Hancock's Department.
And if you look at the Alpha Laboratories contract you will see it says this: Alpha Laboratories agrees to sub-contract the manufacturing of the Goods to an entity which we can't know because it was blanked out before publishing.
But a small bird gave me a copy of the contract in its original form and it said this: the contract between the Government and Alpha Laboratories stipulated the manufacturing had to be by Alex Bourne's Hinpack.
Of course, had a contract worth tens of millions been given directly by the Government to a Minister's pal we would know (partly because @GoodLawProject successfully sued and forced Government to publish contracts).
So, instead, the Government gave the contract to their pal via Alpha Laboratories in such a way that you were supposed never to find out.
Ooft. Matt Hancock asked by @AnnelieseDodds to return to the Commons and explain why he misled Parliament.
Well, Matt Hancock has returned to Parliament to answer @AnnelieseDodds and he's now told a straight lie. He says "the Department of Health does not have a say in sub-contracting arrangements" but...
... in the contract that the Department of Health entered into *it specified* that the sub-contractor would be Alex Bourne's company Hinpack Limited.
Indeed, that is exactly the thing that the thread points out - that Bourne's involvement was shielded behind Alpha Laboratories.
First, I am not a Government MP. This matters because the Government has also sorts of powers to bully and coerce that normal citizens do not. That's why its conduct is subject to special safeguards and scrutiny - not that Hodges' bottom rag would know anything about that.
My second point illustrates the first. I did go to Court because the Met initially refused to investigate Partygate. It's a form of scrutiny that public bodies, like the Met, are rightly subject to, because of their enormous power.
A few points on the so-called tax gap, the difference between the tax HMRC actually collects and its estimate of the total tax due. 🧵
First, it does not even purport to calculate sums lost through what tax wonks call Base Erosion and Profit Shifting - broadly speaking, tax dodging by multinationals.
Second, as @RichardJMurphy has pointed out, there is a pretty big curiosity in that our economy is worth ~£2,300 bn; most estimates give the size of the shadow economy as ~10%+; but the tax gap for the shadow economy is washers. (Only some of that VAT gap is 'shadow'.)
Eighteen months ago, with a group of MPs, we wrote to the @ChtyCommission about the so-called 'Global Warming Policy Foundation', a pro global heating organisation you are forced to match fund with tax subsidies because it is treated as a charity. 🧵goodlawproject.org/mps-call-for-i…
GWPF has been described by the London School of Economics as "the UK’s main club for climate change deniers" which accused it of "peddling false claims." lse.ac.uk/granthaminstit…
The idea its sinister activities are charitable, for the public good, so that we must subsidise them through our taxes is absurd. In our letter to @ChtyCommission we pointed out that every one of its outputs including celebrating burning fossil fuels was pro global heating.
If you want to know how power works in the UK contrast the press interest in (1) the £1,500 of capital gains tax Angela Rayner is said to have evaded with (2) the tens of millions Lord Ashcroft denies having evaded. 🧵
Lord Ashcroft set up the Bermuda based Punta Gordon trust. A financial statement in the leaked Paradise Papers reported it as holding assets of $450m. But the Paradise papers didn't just reveal the value of the trust.
They also revealed that Appleby, a firm of solicitors that was acting as trustee of the trust, complained vigorously about the fact that Lord Ashcroft dealt with some of the assets in the trust and then invited the trustees to rubber stamp his dealings.
The Charity Commission has, with extraordinary haste, dismissed our complaint about the Institute for Economic Affairs. It said: "the Commission... will rarely intervene when allegations of political bias are made, from whatever angle" - a troubling gloss on Charity law which we are considering with our lawyers.
Imo, the Charity Commission cannot properly be understood as a regulator. Its purposes include the channelling of public money to organisations friendly to the Tory party. And the regulatory harassment of those whose activities are inconvenient to the Tory Party.
Found myself debating @benhabib6 on BBC on whether Reform is Far Right. He didn't repeat @TiceRichard's threat to sue those who said so. But he did intimate I might hear from Farage's lawyers for saying I thought he was anti-semitic (cited by me as a reason Reform is Far Right).
The other reasons I gave: Reform's desire that the UK join Russia and Greece after a military coup in becoming only the third country ever to find intolerable the international human rights norms in the Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.