Alan Osler

Which MPs have shares in energy companies?

not sure ‘let’s starve british kids so we can blow foreign ones up!’ is the winning campaign slogan he thinks it is

Should be a huge story that forces resignations at the highest level in the UK Government. Absolute silence from the UK media. Utterly corrupt and complicit in genocide and ethnic cleansing for Apartheid Israel. Typically disgusting behaviour from our ruling classes.

Kick Palantir out of our NHS!

Let this sink in: £1.6 BILLION in private profit while waiting times soar, staff burn out and services are on their knees. Public money should never be catapulted into private hands. Our NHS is not a marketplace. It’s a lifeline. And under Labour, it’s being taken for a ride.

Your taxes for the NHS are funding profiteers! 👇

This one will require a stiff drink. In the early 1990s, the government came up with a clever idea. Instead of borrowing money cheaply to build hospitals, schools, and roads, it would get the private sector to build them and then pay the private sector back over 25 to 30 years. The Private Finance Initiative. PFI. The attraction was obvious. You got a shiny new hospital today. The bill didn't show up on the government's books. The cost was deferred into the future. Politicians got ribbon-cutting ceremonies without the awkward conversation about borrowing. It was, in effect, the nation's credit card. Buy now, pay later. Except the interest rate was extraordinary. The total capital value of everything built under PFI was around £50 billion. As of March 2024, there were 665 PFI contracts still running across the UK, with roughly £136 billion in remaining payments stretching out to the early 2050s. These are payments public bodies are contractually locked into. Hospitals, schools, councils, government departments. Paying for buildings that in many cases were constructed twenty or thirty years ago. And the terms are extraordinary. PFI contracts were structured so the private sector would not just build the facility but manage its services. Cleaning. Maintenance. Catering. Portering. These services are bundled into long-term contracts with built-in inflation increases that the public sector cannot renegotiate, cannot exit without paying massive penalties, and often cannot even fully scrutinise because of commercial confidentiality clauses. In one case raised in Parliament, a hospital was charged £333 to change a lightbulb. That isn't an urban myth. It was cited in Hansard. The NHS has been hit hardest. According to parliamentary analysis, the capital cost of NHS PFI projects was around £13 billion. The total repayments are estimated at around £80 billion. And the peak of NHS PFI annual repayments isn't even here yet. It arrives in 2029. The bills are still going up. In 2020-21, NHS trusts paid £457 million purely in interest charges on PFI contracts. Not services. Not maintenance. Interest. In the last five years, NHS trusts have handed over more than £1.8 billion in PFI interest alone. We Own It calculates that money would have covered the starting salaries of over 50,000 new doctors. One NHS trust, Essex Partnership, has reportedly paid back 27 times what was originally borrowed. Some hospitals are spending more on PFI repayments than on medicines for patients. And remember, these repayments come out of the same NHS budget that's supposed to fund patient care, staff, and equipment. Scotland got it just as badly. Audit Scotland reported that Scottish taxpayers will pay a cumulative £40 billion for PFI assets worth just £9 billion. North Ayrshire Council will have paid £440 million by 2038 for four schools that cost £83 million to build. Now here's what makes this worse. Many of these contracts are starting to expire. The buildings are being handed back to the public sector. And the NAO has warned of significant risks around the handback process, including cases where public bodies were dissatisfied with the condition of assets being returned to them. Decades of payments. And some of these buildings may come back needing significant further investment. So what actually happened? The government could have borrowed money at significantly lower rates to build these hospitals and schools itself. Sovereign borrowing has always been cheaper than private finance. Instead, it paid the private sector to borrow at a premium and passed the inflated cost on to the taxpayer. The private sector took the profit. The taxpayer took the risk. The buildings are now ageing. The debts are still being paid. And the services that were supposed to benefit are being squeezed partly because so much of their budget is locked into contractual obligations they cannot escape. PFI wasn't investment. It was an accounting trick. A way for governments to build things without the borrowing showing up in the national debt figures. It made politicians look fiscally responsible while loading future generations with obligations they had no say in and no ability to renegotiate. Both parties did this. The Conservatives created PFI in 1992. Labour massively expanded it after 1997. More than 700 projects were signed. The coalition eventually wound it down. The current government scrapped the latest version. But the contracts remain. The payments continue. And the damage is already done. This is what it looks like when a country chooses to buy its infrastructure on hire purchase instead of investing properly. You lock in above-market rates for decades. You lose control of the assets. You tie the hands of future governments. And when the bill keeps coming due, you're told there's no money for doctors, teachers, or social care. There was always money. It just went somewhere else.

@S0UNDK1LLAH66 They are definitely in the top three.

@alan_osler #twatstopten

Capitalism doing its thing.

21,000 NHS jobs cut while patients are waiting longer than ever for care. £1.6bn in profit being made by private companies through the NHS. Money is being taken out of the system while staff are being cut. How is this being allowed?

@Aadam_Aziz @Heccles94 This might be the third headline, added for good measure and balance.

@Aadam_Aziz @DrSteveTaylor Keep shareholders happy and prioritise them over the health needs of the uk people We know why

And this is the response from the government (also a headline from yesterday)

Two headlines less than 24 hours apart. Second‑worst in the developed world for avoidable deaths because of underinvestment and bad spending decisions. Yet private companies providing NHS services walked away with £1.6bn in profit. How has this been allowed to happen?

You know what might be a good idea for the future funding model for the NHS? END PRIVATISATION! Private firms made £1.6 BILLION profit from NHS services?! Meanwhile HCWs pay the price with suppressed wages & patients have sig poorer health outcomes Patients over profits!

So let’s get this right. £330m handed to Palantir, then a "success story" is used to justify it. That "success" now looks like flawed analysis, with trusts not using it improving in the same way. Now staff saying concerns are being shut down. Very concerning.

Why might Lord George Robertson* be lobbying the government to increase defence spending? 🤔 * Senior Counsellor for the Cohen Group

MERC is it

@I_amMukhtar Who’s that guy with the horns in the background? His boss?

Donald Trump deleted his posts depicting him as Jesus.

We’re told we can’t afford doctors. But we can afford £1.6 BILLION in profits for private companies. These are deliberate choices to move NHS money into private hands, not frontline care. The government's privatisation of the NHS isn't so secret anymore.

Phenomenal job here by Faiza holding Louis Mosley to account. Palantir should be no where near our NHS - and this Labour Government have serious questions to answer about Palantir, Peter Mandelson and Wes Streeting.