SINCE GREENSILL Capital collapsed last month, all that is rotten throughout Parliament has been stirred up and has bubbled to the surface. The collapse of Greensill puts the future of companies like Liberty Steel on a knife edge, threatening thousands of steel jobs.
The scandal surrounding Greensill Capital, the role of ex-Tory PM David Cameron, and a ‘culture of cronyism’ throughout Parliament along with the general stench of sleaze has filled the air. Cameron was employed by Greensill – the finance company that acted as a massive lender to companies including the UK steel company GFC alliance owned by Sanjeev Gupta.
It turns out that as Greensill became more and more drowned by debt, and unable to pay off massive loans from the banks, Cameron was phoning and texting Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak to be given access to the Bank of England’s Covid Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF) to bail the company out.
Meanwhile, Topwood, in which Health Minister Matt Hancock and his sister have shares, has won contracts from NHS Wales. NHS Wales gave £300,000 of business this year to the company, which specialises in the secure storage, shredding and scanning of documents. But the register did not mention that Hancock’s sister Emily Gilruth owned a larger portion of the shares and is a director of the firm, or that Topwood has links to the NHS – as first reported by the Guido Fawkes blog and the Health Service Journal.
Labour’s shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said it was ‘shocking’ that a company linked to Hancock’s family was given a place in the NHS framework as a potential supplier. ‘Sadly I suspect no one is surprised any more at the cronyism at the heart of this government,’ he said.
The Unite union said on Thursday: ‘The revelations over scandal-hit Greensill Capital and the role of David Cameron should set alarm bells ringing about the accelerating pace of NHS privatisation and sleaze. A culture of Tory cronyism is rapidly enveloping the NHS.’
Unite alleged that Health Secretary Hancock met former premier David Cameron and financier Lex Greensill for a private drink in 2019 to discuss a new payment scheme for the NHS which shows the NHS being lined up for further privatisation.
Unite said: ‘This follows on from the vast sums splashed out in controversial contracts for PPE to those with close links to the Tory establishment and the £37bn spent on the flawed private sector-led “test, track and trace” programme that was heavily criticised by the cross-party Public Accounts Committee which said that the costs were “unimaginable”.’
At the height of the pandemic, when doctors, nurses and NHS staff were literally dying for want of getting their hands on Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), the Tory government was busy handing out vast sums of public money to companies with connections to the party, some of which had never had any experience of producing PPE. Many companies sent millions of items of gloves, aprons and facemasks which were of inferior quality and had to be binned. Other companies, despite receiving millions, produced not a single item of PPE.
According to the Audit Office, suppliers with political contacts with the Tories were ten times more likely to be awarded these contracts.
Julia Patterson, founder of EveryDoctor, said: ‘It is quite simply heartbreaking to NHS staff to see this mismanagement of public funds exposed. Over 1,000 of our colleagues have died of Covid-19, many of whom were not supplied with adequate lifesaving PPE.’
The stink of corruption and cronyism is so widespread that we can only infer that there is something rotten at the heart of Parliament.
The debauchery and sleaze surrounding the political scandals engulfing Cameron and the Tories, the degeneration of the Tory Party and of the entire political order of capitalism are being driven by the fact that British capitalism is in its death agony, drowning in an unprecedented national debt of over £2.2 trillion – debt that can only be repaid by driving the working class into the gutter of mass unemployment and wage-cutting starvation.
The working class must put an end to this death agony of the capitalist system with a socialist revolution. Now is the time for masses of workers and youth to join the WRP and the YS to provide the leadership to carry out the rapidly developing British socialist revolution.
