Prescott's employee is paid hush money

Mandrake understands that taxpayers will foot the bill of more than £50,000 for the deal, under which Mrs Morphet agreed never to speak about her time in Prescott's employ.

The deal was agreed just days before she was due to appear at the London Central Employment tribunal in Holborn.

Mrs Morphet, who is now a visiting professor at University College London's esteemed Bartlett School of Planning, had lodged a complaint of unfair dismissal.

In all, 13 members of staff in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister registered official complaints about harassment ...

Telegraph  17 Apr 2010

NHS targets and secrecy are hurting patients, doctor warns

Ramon Niekrash, in his first interview since winning a landmark case to salvage his reputation, said health professionals needed to think "very hard" before standing up against poor patient care, because it is "potential professional suicide".

"Your employer won't thank you; the law won't protect you. You're on your own," he says.

His story, which saw him suspended and his reputation in tatters after repeatedly raising concerns about the treatment and safety of patients following cuts at a London hospital, has raised disturbing questions about the legal protection of whistleblowers, 10 years after legislation was brought in by the Labour government ...

Mr Niekrash started raising concerns about patient care that same year. The urology ward was closed to save £1m, so patients were spread across the whole hospital. With too few specialist nurses and doctors spending so much time going from ward to ward, post-operative complications were sometimes being missed.

Outpatient clinics were bursting at the seams. New patients were prioritised which meant existing cancer patients sometimes had appointments cancelled several times, according to Dr Niekrash, something the trust has always denied ...

A fellow surgeon, Roy Isworth, recalls: "Patients would come in and ask me how I was feeling, or how my holiday had been, because that's what they'd been told when their appointment was postponed." ...

Independent  11 Apr 2010    'Dignity & Compassion' in the NHS    'Reforming the Regime'    Targets

The purpose of the BA strike is to oppose the airline joining the race to the bottom, in which, currently, Ryanair, is in pole position.

It's easy to demonise CEO Willy Walsh. He is working for shareholder 'value' which will not be enhanced by running the airline as though it were the once nationalised monopoly of long ago.

The era of 'social' working conditions was ended by Reagan's defeat of the air traffic controllers in 1981, and Thatcher's confrontation with the miners in 1984-5.

A return to pre-1979 working conditions - which would negate all the, er, 'reforms' of the globalised era - is strictly the stuff of dreams at the present time.

Messrs Wintour and Watt, blogging for The Guardian, place Unite in the same greed-driven boat with Byers, Hewitt and Hoon.

Their only 'crime' was to be caught supporting that cardinal 'ethic' of neoliberalism: Greed is Good, Greed Works.   GGGW

Given the revelations of the expenses saga, and the proximity of an election, even David Cameron has to be seen to be deploring Parliament's reputation for 'fat cattery'.

'Normal service' will resume on 07 May 2010.

Who is worse for Labour: Stephen Byers or Tony Woodley?

Is the former minister doing more damage to the party than the BA strike? ...

tomguard
23 Mar 2010, 8:54AM

What really intrigues me is this: are there really people around who would pay the likes of Byers £3,000 a day? Can't believe it. I wouldn't even buy the "Big Issue" off him (and I look forward to seeing him outside my local Tesco's trying to sell the very same soon).

Byers is a piece of worthless low-life and along with Hewitt and Hoon - the Gang of Three - has now been suspended from the PLP.

Tony Woodley is entirely a different matter. He is a reputable leader of a trade union who in calling the strike against BA management is obeying the wishes of his members.

Byers who was thoroughly incompetent as a minister is an unpleasant, scheming, amoral individual by contrast with Woodley who does his job conscientiously and seeks to pursue social justice a concept which Byers never understood much less pursued and which the so-called Labour Party long ago abandoned.

Guardian  22 Mar 2010    Bullies, Bullying    Pass the Prozac

'Dossier of disgrace'

Simon Jenkins

Labour rolls over for BA's bullies

Don't let BA cabin crew fight alone

Psychology: how to spot the bullies

Violence and abuse rife in food factories

Supermarket suppliers under fire as one-fifth of workers interviewed for inquiry report being pushed or hit ...

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said it has uncovered significant evidence of abuse among producers supplying Britain's big supermarkets ...

The inquiry includes reports from meat factory workers who say they have had frozen burgers thrown at them by line managers, and accounts of pregnant women being forced to stand for long periods or perform heavy lifting under threat of the sack.

It also contained reports from women with heavy periods and people with bladder problems on production lines being denied toilet breaks and forced to endure the humiliation of bleeding and urinating on themselves.

One-fifth of workers interviewed, from across England and Wales, reported being pushed, kicked or having things thrown at them, while a third had experienced or witnessed verbal abuse ...

Neil Kinghan, the EHRC director general, said: "We have heard stories of workers subjected to bullying, violence and being humiliated and degraded by being denied toilet breaks. Some workers feel they have little choice but to put up with these conditions out of economic necessity. Others lack the language skills to understand and assert their rights ... " ...

Guardian  13 Mar 2010    Agency Workers    Corporate Sociopathy Log

EHRC food factories report

Darling 'faced forces of hell' from No 10

Alistair Darling has described how the "forces of hell were unleashed" against him by Gordon Brown's aides after he predicted that the recession would be the most severe in 60 years.

In a frank interview, the Chancellor said that Mr Brown's close allies began to brief against him after he made the ominous prediction in the summer of 2008.

His admission follows claims made in a book by the journalist, Andrew Rawnsley, that spinners close to the Prime Minister attempted to undermine Mr Darling following his comments, which proved to be accurate ...

Independent  24 Feb 2010    Broken Forms of Democracy

Brown denies ordering aides against Darling

Darling defends economy warning

Allegations of bullying

A Whitehall survey last year found that seven per cent of Cabinet Office employees – covering No 10 officials – said they had been bullied or harassed in the past year.

Of these, 20 per cent said their being bullied or harassed was age-related, the Civil Service People Survey found.

A further 13 per cent said they had been discriminated against because of their sex and seven per cent said the bullying was due to their ethnic background.

Almost a third of the employees who claimed they were bulled said their manager was responsible for the harassment, while 11 per cent said colleagues were involved.

Another 28 per cent of respondents said the bullying or harassment came from another manager or “someone who works for another part of the organisation”.

One third of Cabinet Office officials said they disagreed with the statement “I think that my performance is evaluated fairly”.

Across the whole civil service, 10 per cent of employees – out of 340,000 staff involved in the survey – said that they had been bullied.

At the Foreign Office, 16 per cent of staff reported being bullied or harassed.

Meanwhile 48 per cent of civil servants agreed that “the amount of stress I experience in my job seriously reduces my effectiveness.”

In 2007, a leaked internal Treasury report by independent consultants Talent Drain showed that one in ten staff leaving the department said “harassment or bullying” played a part in their resignation.

Telegraph  23 Feb 2010

Behind the bullying

Brown's Control Freakery is Paralysing Government

Brown's prima donna

Brown's St Helena moment

Brown’s victory was a classic stitch-up

Clarke on Brown

Control Freaks and Civil War

Gordon Brown attacked by anti-bullying chief

Grim realities of living in the Brown bunker

Livingstone 'bullies'

Marsden quits, tired of control freaks and spin

Rage, despair, indecision

Several Downing St staff 'have called anti-bullying helpline'

The sure sign of a 'faith' is that it's followers have problems with evidence that challenges its core beliefs.

Janet Daley, writing in the aftermath of the destabilization of the stock markets variously blamed on (a) the "credit crunch" and/or (b) the activities of Jérôme Kerviel, attacked state interference with 'the market':

The Something-Must-Be-Done merchants did what they do: they tried to control the market. Result: they made things temporarily worse.

And unless the S-M-B-D mentality is actually permitted to take over - as it very nearly did in this country from 1945 to 1979, the kind of damage that it can do will always be temporary.

Because The Market, which seems to have a life and a logic of its own, is nothing more nor less than the sum total of all the inclinations and judgments of everyone who has a stake in it.

When Margaret Thatcher said you couldn't buck it, what she meant was that once you understood this principle - that a free market was simply the cumulative expression of all human wants and needs - you realised that it could not be made to do what you or anybody else wanted on the basis of some theoretical or ideological imperative.   [JS]

Core axiom Number One of 'free' market believers:

" ... The Market ... [has] ... a life and a logic of its own ... "

which only functions when it is free from state interference, and the 'real' problem is that markets are not yet truly 'free'.

Governments should only provide what the free market cannot (e.g. a united armed forces for defence of the realm, a co-ordinated police force, a free and fair judiciary, and access to free primary health care for all). The rest, education included, should be left to the market.

Collective pay bargaining should be abolished - the size of the state reduced, all regional (market distorting) development agencies should be abolished, all subsidies scrapped, all loopholes closed, all public transport sold, all crown lands and properties incorporated into a trust and every elector issued with an equal number of shares in that trust to hold or sell as they desire.

There should be a flat income tax so that no one pays more than 20% in total tax - and a statutory limit on the tax take (a maximum of 25% of GDP) and a maximum for government borrowing (another 25% of GDP) - if they haven't got the money they shouldn't be allowed to spend it.

Posted by Huw on January 28, 2008 10:24 AM

The Social Darwinist strand in neoliberalism has a distinctly Ubermensch - Untermensch view of humanity:

The market works like Darwinian theory - the weak die, the strong survive, so it is very much like human nature.

Posted by Reasoned View on January 28, 2008 9:20 AM

... Nature shows what can be achived with freedom - incredible flora and fauna, some of which excel at speed, agility, attractiveness...others get killed very early on, or die in infancy, or never develop...that's freedom.

We can try to meddle, to 'level the playing field' but when you do this you inevitably upset the dynamic that produces such winners in the first place. If the price you pay is to reduce the suffering of the losers, then can you live without the winners?

Will some other entity be created that overtakes you (as a race or a country) because you have lost your competitiveness? ...

Posted by FRSA on January 28, 2008 9:34 AM

James Smith 12:13 PM

"If the free market worked, there wouldn't be people with 150+ IQs sitting in call centres making 12 grand a year or less."

A lot of people make this mistake. Intelligence is almost unimportant when it comes to making money. Discipline and willpower - the inner strength to keep trying, even when the cause seems lost - are far more important.

"Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I'll give you a man who will make history. Give me a man with no goals and I'll give you a stock clerk."

J.C. Penny

Posted by Eric Worrall on January 28, 2008 12:38 PM

I stay away from anyone that uses the word "Fair". They are weak little parasites.

Posted by Jen on January 28, 2008 1:39 PM

Objectivism (Ayn Rand)

... the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness or rational self-interest; that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights, embodied in pure laissez faire capitalism ...

Wikipedia 

Eugenics

In Galton's view, social institutions such as welfare and insane asylums were allowing inferior humans to survive and reproduce at levels faster than the more "superior" humans in respectable society, and if corrections were not soon taken, society would be awash with "inferiors." ...

Wikipedia 

Eugenics

Social Implications of Darwinism

Francis Galton