West Midlands Greens

In 2012, George Osborne claimed he wouldn’t personally gain from cutting the 50p higher tax rate because his income was less than £150k. His 2014 tax return, published yesterday, shows his income was actually £198k. So changing the rules did reduce his own tax bill, pushing it instead onto the poor.

Hundreds of patients including people with cancer and kidney failure have missed important appointments for treatment because ambulances did not arrive to take them to hospital, after privatisation of NHS non-urgent transport services in Sussex this month.

Some elderly patients have had to wait more than five hours for ambulances and been stuck at hospital for long periods after their appointments because the transport service, now run by the private firm Coperforma, has proved so unreliable.

Patients, relatives, NHS bodies and local MPs have severely criticised the service’s performance, and a trade union representing ambulance crews said it was an “absolute shambles”. The NHS organisations that awarded the four-year, £63.5m contract have now launched an investigation.

A host of problems have arisen since Coperforma replaced the NHS’s South East Coast ambulance service (Secamb) as the provider of non-emergency patient transport services on 1 April.

Cancer patients have missed oncology appointments after ambulances failed to turn up to collect them.

Patients with kidney failure have not been able to receive scheduled sessions of kidney dialysis for the same reason, with some missing two of their three treatments in a week.

So many patients have become stuck at the Royal Sussex County hospital in Brighton because their transport has not arrived that it has paid for taxis and other private vehicle suppliers to take them home.

Staff there have had to stay until midnight to ensure kidney patients arriving hours after their scheduled start time have received vital dialysis.

Coperforma crews have been left doing nothing, despite patients’ need to get to hospital, because poor mobile phone reception in parts of Sussex has meant they did not receive details of calls to attend via an app the firm saw as pivotal to the service’s smooth running.

Patients, relatives and NHS staff have faced waits of 45 minutes and more to get through to the firm’s phone lines, which have been unable to cope with demand.

Coperforma vehicles have turned up to collect patients who have already died.

“A fitness for work assessor for Government contractor Capita boasted he “flew through” vital welfare disability tests – earning himself £20,000 a month.

And another derided a disabled claimant as needing “help to wipe her a*** because she’s too f****** fat to do it herself”.

The footage was filmed for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme by a reporter who went undercover to expose the hated tests, which have seen thousands of disabled people wrongly stripped of benefits. …..read on

‘Girl Meets World’ star Rowan Blanchard speaks out about the importance of intersectional feminism

The Panama Papers leak, explained with an adorable comic about piggy banks

It’s easy to get confused by all the headlines about the Panama Papers, a massive 2.6-terabyte leak of documents that reveals a global web of corruption and tax avoidance. But Vox’s German Lopez uncovered a great explanation of what’s happening, and it’scourtesy of brilliant redditor DanGliesack.

He uses piggy banks to help explain the main (and complicated-sounding) thing that was happening in Panama: foreigners setting up Panamanian shell companies to hold financial assets that obscure the identities of their real owners. We thought this analogy was quite fitting for a comic, so we created these illustrations to explain the key issue at the heart of the Panama Papers scandal. 

The austerity programmes administered by western governments in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis were, of course, intended as a remedy, a tough but necessary course of treatment to relieve the symptoms of debts and deficits and to cure recession. But if, David Stuckler says, austerity had been run like a clinical trial, “It would have been discontinued. The evidence of its deadly side-effects – of the profound effects of economic choices on health – is overwhelming.”