If you’re a regular (esteemed) visitor, you’ll know that I’ve written frequently about the NHS and I’ve written at length about the government’s attacks, current and future, on it. I don’t work in the NHS, but I do recognise the enormous importance to our society of healthcare ‘free at the point of need’ and the doctors, nurses and other staff who provide it. I also recognise that it’s a prime target for the Tories’ state-stripping ideology.

In the course of my research for various articles over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading through some of the written evidence submitted to the Commons Health Select Committee on NHS funding. It’s in the course of this research that what I’m going to tell you now really came to my own attention, and I keep a close eye on NHS-related developments, so it’s entirely understandable if you weren’t aware of it until now.

I’ve written recently about the readiness of Tory MPs, including Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and treasury minister Sajid Javid, to lie in Parliament or to the electorate via their websites, about NHS funding. I’ve also noted how my prediction that Hunt’s next attack on the NHS would be based on prioritising funding on (wealthy) areas with more elderly people has unfortunately started to be fulfilled, and how the Treasury is quietly stealing (they call it ‘clawing back’) a massive amount of money that the NHS has saved, and which the government had promised to reinvest in frontline health services:

If you’re a regular reader, excuse me repeating all these points, but I try to consider first-time readers and the importance of context for properly understanding what this government is up to.

Hunt’s and the Treasury’s measures are aimed at eroding the performance of, and therefore public affection for, the NHS in order to prepare it and us for the break-up and sale of our health service to private interests on the (carefully-created) grounds that the NHS needs to be ‘saved’, and that it’s all for our good. And they do it, by design, in ways which give them ‘plausible deniability’ – that allow them to say ‘the NHS is safe in our hands’ and ‘we’re protecting NHS spending’.

The extent of the Treasury’s clawback in the last full financial year was at least £1.4 billion – 15 times more than the total deficit of all the NHS’ financially-struggling hospitals – even if you don’t offset the surplus that the remaining hospitals generated against it. The NHS does not have a financial problem, and no hospital has to be allowed to struggle and fail. There is plenty of surplus to cover the debts of a few, to pay the salaries of each of the 7,000 nurses that have lost their jobs under this government, and still to have most of it left over. The government chooses to treat each hospital trust in isolation and make it swim, or sink.

But that’s not the limit of the government’s back-door robbery. The same amount again – in fact more – is being quietly bled off by the Dept of Heath (DH) to very partially mitigate the effects of swingeing cuts in another area.

In evidence presented to the select committee the DH itself, as well as various other bodies, advised that funding of around £1 billion a year is taken from NHS funding and allocated to local authorities to spend on social care. Here’s a table, from the evidence presented by the Local Government Association and the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services, showing the details:

As you can see from the table header, this money is supposed to be spent on measures which will support social care and benefit health. The DH’s own report underlines this:

The new funding will further support and promote more joint working between health and social care. This will enable local areas to transform their services and to deliver better integrated care that saves money across the two systems.

But this isn’t happening at all. The NHS Confederation – hardly a defender of true NHS principles – gave evidence that says the money is merely being used to ‘paper over the cracks’ caused by cuts to local government funding. They’ve even written a book with the title of ‘Papering over the cracks: the impact of social care funding on the NHS’.

The RCN, meanwhile, noted that local authorities do not even have to spend the money on social care at all:

since social care funding is not ring-fenced there was no guarantee that this allocation would be spent on social care, particularly in light of the pressures of local authorities’ budgets

But the government isn’t content with stealing just £1 billion from NHS funds. In its evidence, the DH advised that it will be taking:

a further £300 million over and above the funding set out at the Spending Review for the period 2013–15. The new funding will further support and promote more joint working between health and social care. This will enable local areas to transform their services and to deliver better integrated care that saves money across the two systems.

Again, these funds are supposed to save the NHS – and us – money, but as both the NHS Confederation and the RCN pointed out, this just isn’t happening.

So, we’re up to £1.3 billion so far – almost as much as the Treasury euphemistically ‘clawed back’. But the government isn’t finished yet.

In spite of the theft – let’s be kind and call it a ‘re-direction’ – of funds that should be providing treatment for sick people to offset massive budget cuts imposed on local government, the cuts are so massive that local authorities are still being forced to make huge cuts in spending on social care, even after they’ve made every possible cut in less essential services. The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS) reported that – in spite of the £1bn ‘windfall’ from NHS funds:

£1.89 billion has already been taken out of adult social care budgets over the last two years

The pressures caused by these massive budget cuts in social services have resulted in a phenomenon of ‘delayed discharges”, where patients who do not really need hospital treatment are left in hospital beds because local authorities either can’t find a care place for them, or else are using delaying tactics to eke out their budgets by shifting the cost of caring for these stranded people onto their local NHS. The NHS confederation told the select committee:

delayed transfers of care already cost the NHS £545,000 per day (approximately £200 million per year)

However, they are almost certainly dramatically underestimating the cost, as they based their assessment on a costing provided by the DH, which has a vested interest in downplaying the figure to keep the spotlight off the issues that the government’s cuts to services are creating. The NHS currently treats some 3 million patients per week, from a budget of £104 billion, or £2 billion per week. £2bn divided by 3 million comes to £667 per patient, per day,

It’s a very rough measure, but it gives an indication of the what it costs to treat people in hospital. According to the the Kings Fund, on any given day there are around 4,000 patients unnecessarily in hospital because of delayed discharges caused by lack of social care provision. £667 x 4,000 comes to a daily cost to the NHS of almost £2.7 million, or £973 million a year.

The NHSC’s estimate of £545,000 per day, divided among these 4,000 patients, would mean a cost of only £136 a day, which seems unrealistically low. There are, of course, fixed costs that don’t vary with the number of patients, so the real figure will be somewhere in the middle, but in any event it’s a vast cost that is little appreciated outside the healthcare system – and the government is quite happy for it to be that way – and that includes ignoring the effects on waiting times for those who do need treatment, who consequently suffer longer and unnecessarily.

But for the sake of argument, let’s use the Confederation’s figure of £200 million a year, so no one can say I’m exaggerating. Put that together with the £1bn taken every year from NHS funding to shore up social services that are falling apart because of cuts in other areas. Then add the extra £300 million the government has added to the ‘social care drain’.

That makes a figure of £1.5 billion per year that is being covertly slipped out of the NHS, on top of the sum of at least £1.4 billion ‘clawed back’ by the Treasury. The £1.5bn is supposedly to integrate the two care systems so that they operate more efficiently – but the evidence given to the committee indicates that this integration is:

unlikely to produce major cost savings or improvements in patient experience outside of a small group of conditions

Instead, this money is being taken away from front-line care for patients who need it, in order to inadequately ‘paper over the cracks’ – cracks that can only widen following Eric Pickles’ announcement this week in Parliament of further cuts to local government funding of 3-8% (although he factors this down to an average of 1.7% and calls this a ‘bargain’!). If he stays true to form, the higher cuts will fall on poorer areas because they will never vote Tory anyway, so that their effect on already-wobbling services will be catastrophic.

These twin moves of Treasury theft and quiet transfer of funds to partially offset massive spending cuts in local government and therefore in social care are a massive con designed to  allow the government to claim (though according to the UK Statistics Authority it’s untrue even then) that it is ‘protecting’ and even increasing NHS funding, when the reality is that significant percentages of the NHS’ funds never make it through to benefit patients or provide the staff and care that they need.

It’s absolutely essential that the public starts to understand what’s going on. So spread the word and let’s counteract the propaganda and expose the con-trick.

cards and coins

Some years ago I shared a flat with my friend Graeme. The accommodation came rent-free as part of the caretaker’s job I had at the time and, while this was pretty much Easy Street, my duties sometimes tied me to the flat. So it was one Saturday afternoon when I had to remain on the premises while a group of local ne’er-do-wells came to carry out their community service. Bless them.

As Graeme was going to the pub and I was to be home alone, I decided to coach him in an old con trick that I had come across years earlier. As this trick involved participation from me at home, it would relieve the monotony between horse races. So, in true Real Hustle style, here is how the trick, which certainly earns the description ‘simple but effective’ was played out.

Graeme would ask one of the regulars down at the pub to pick a card from a standard deck. He would then make a phone call and, when the phone was answered, he would ask to speak to a mysterious being known as The Phantom. When The Phantom came to the phone, my friend would then hand the receiver over to the guy who had chosen the card and a sinister robotic voice would immediately say what that card was.

The trick worked perfectly first time and there was consternation at the bar. People were almost queuing up to have a go so that they could maybe work out how it was done, but none did. I received about a dozen ‘Phantom’ calls that day but we didn’t make any money from it (they were our friends, you see). So how was it done?

It was very easy really. When I answered the phone I had to listen carefully to what my friend said in asking to speak to The Phantom, as this would tell me the suit of the chosen card. Check out the initial letter of the four requests he used.

Hello, could I speak to The Phantom please?

Sorry to bother you, but could I speak to The Phantom please?

Do you think I could speak to The Phantom, please?

Could I speak to The Phantom, please?

Get the picture? I knew immediately which suit I was on. Then it was simply a matter of whispering the values of the cards – ace (beat) two (beat) three etc to Graeme. When I came to the chosen card, Graeme would say ‘Hello?’ as though The Phantom had just come to the phone and then he’d hand the receiver to the dupe. With both value and suit now known I would confidently say which card had been chosen, then hang up.

As luck would have it we were in a band at that time and we had one of those voice-changing megaphone type things that we had been using for experimental vocals. It had a pretty cool robotic voice function that suited our purpose very well.

I came across this con plastered on the front page of the Sunday Post. Apparently, gangs were fleecing pub customers across Scotland using this trick, and so the newspaper decided to print the scam to alert potential dupes. I can’t help thinking, though, that  printing precise details of the con would have had gangs in England marching to the pub to carry it out.

Fast-forward to another Saturday afternoon at the same pub. I hatched a plan with a different friend, Fez, that had people guessing for a while. Here’s the old chestnut of a scam we pulled..

I would line up five 2p pieces in a row on the table, and then I would invite someone sitting opposite to touch one of the coins while I wasn’t looking. After they had touched a coin, I would hover my index finger over each coin in turn, and then push the touched coin forward to identify it. This ruse had a 100% success rate, and here’s why.

While my eyes were closed, my confederate, Fez’s, were wide open. He was sitting casually at the next table, and he made a note of which coin had been touched. When I hovered over the coins with my finger, I watched Fez from the corner of my eye. When I hovered over the chosen coin, he would flick ash off his cigarette. It was that simple.

Of course, I played up to the audience. I knew exactly which coin had been touched, and when I hovered over that one I made my finger tremble for effect. After several people had been tricked (not out of money, I might add – again, these were our friends), the inevitable happened: someone touched two coins.

This presented no problem to me, as my associate was good at his job, and I saw the two separate ash-flicks. Again I played up to it, claiming that something was not quite right this time, even though I knew exactly which coins had been touched. Finally, just as I’d lured my audience into thinking I was beaten, I slid forward the two coins to the sound of laughter and gasps.

They knew that someone was tipping me the wink, but they never suspected Fez. After a while, interest in the trick waned, and the coins were put away. Still, it had injected a little fun into an ordinary Saturday afternoon down at the pub. I went home later that day, reflecting on a successful mission, and Fez went home with a finely honed smokers’ cough.

Batley is a town in West Yorkshire that was the home of the famous Batley Variety Club (Louis Armstrong appeared there, amongst others) and is also famous for…er…well, that’s about it.

Oh yes, it’s also home to someone who must be amongst the top ten most gullible people ever to have walked God’s green earth.

POLICE have issued a warning over a scam after a 31-year-old man was tricked into paying £200 for an iPad which turned out to be a bag of potatoes.

The victim was approached by a man in Dark Lane, Batley, who offered him an iPad for sale. The price was agreed and the men drove to a nearby cash machine on Commercial Street where the £200 was exchanged for a black laptop bag which the victim believed contained the iPad. However, after leaving the scene he discovered that it was actually full of potatoes.

‘Dark Lane’…you couldn’t make it up, could you?

As for the confusion between an iPad and potatoes, the Yorkshire Post has provided a very useful picture guide to avoid such tricky situations in the future:

Furthermore, for those who are unfortunate enough not to have been schooled at the University of the Totally Fucking Obvious, a police spokesman has also commented:

“It should be commonsense to check that you are getting what you pay for but as a similar incident to this one in Birstall took place in the summer we are warning people to be wary of accepting deals that seem to be too good to be true.

Yes, it should be common sense, but it obviously isn’t.

Not in West Yorkshire, at least…

its field sales agents will cease doorstep energy sales activity for an initial three-month period. This in line with a request to all suppliers made by Consumer Focus. The energy provider will now work with its customers and consumer bodies to develop the way it provides access to advice and information about its products and services, including the role of appointment based face-to-face advice.

Doorstep selling, in its current form, is an increasingly outdated way for energy companies to engage new customers who no longer regard it as a preferred or trusted way to review their energy arrangements.

British Gas has been reducing the use of doorstep selling for many years. The number of British Gas field sales agents is now less than a quarter of the 1,300 employed in 2006.

Adam Scorer, Director of External Affairs at Consumer Focus, said:

‘British Gas has responded to our call for action. We applaud the move and call for others to follow the lead set by British Gas and SSE. This is the sort of move that responsible companies make when it becomes clear that consumers are unhappy with the way they do business.

‘For over a decade cold call doorstep sales have led to hundreds of thousands of people paying more for their energy after switching to a worse deal. We know people strongly dislike doorstep sales, feel pressured to switch at the door and that energy firms don’t offer their best rates face-to-face. Cold call energy sales simply aren’t what customers need or want.

‘Energy firms have had years to get doorstep sales right. There have been plenty of well-intentioned commitments and initiatives to do things better, but they have failed to deliver the change that consumers want.2 Unless other energy firms realise the end of the road has been reached on cold call doorstep sales, mis-selling will continue to drive consumer mistrust even deeper. It also risks damaging consumer confidence and buy-in for key Government schemes, including the Green Deal and smart meter roll-out.

‘We would urge all consumers to think twice before they buy on the doorstep, shop around for the best deal, and take time to think things over before making a final decision.’

But British Gas seems to be reserving the right to resume such activity, if its competitors persevere with it.

The fact is, door to door utility salespersons have been scamming people across Britain for years, with many of them working for unscrupulous ‘marketing’ firms hired by the energy suppliers. It’s outrageous that they are allowed to call at the homes of confused old people, and sign them over to more expensive contracts.

Consumer Focus suggests that all consumers ‘shop around for the best deal’, but this is much easier said than done. The utilities companies have a plethora of different and complex tariffs, and equally complex terms and conditions. This makes the comparison of suppliers’ offers an extremely difficult task, probably beyond the capabilities of most people. So there needs to be a substantial amount of imposed tariff standardisation, in order that people can make informed choices between different suppliers’ quotes on the same product.

Is this true? Unlikely. It is more likely that Apple are pushing their distributors for sales forecasts, to test the impact on the market of their decision to prevent app developers from selling content direct to the actual person who owns the iPad outright and should be able to do whatever the hell they want with it.

Here is our reply:

Cast your mind back a few years… What killed off Betamax in favour of the technically inferior VHS? Content. The studios licensed their content to the consortium of VHS developers, not Sony’s Betamax. People couldn’t get films, so they didn’t buy the machines. Sony learned quickly, and bought Columbia Pictures so that they would never be denied content again.

Random House recently announced that they are putting their entire catalogue of 17,000 books onto the iPad. But for any publishers who don’t deal direct with Apple, the Kindle is a much easier and more reliable option. Will this fragment the market? Or will it polarise the market into serious readers who will see the Kindle as a clear winner, or people who primarily want to play games and waste time on Facebook, and dip into the odd ebook here and there, who will go for tablet PCs. Note: Tablet PCs, not necessarily the iPad.

About 20 years ago, the mobile phone companies realised that whoever owned the device in your hand owned what you saw and heard. But wireless Internet is moving the goalposts again. That device could be any one of a number of things, from your phone to your tablet PC, even your television. This favours the content distributors.

Apple have played a very risky strategy; giving content and app development over to third parties, and then trying to control them with restrictive, unfavourable contract terms, based on the belief that Apple owns the world, therefore the developers have no choice but to comply. You want to sell your products? You have to play by Apple’s rules, because they control the market.

Except, they don’t.

They have scored some early wins by getting customers to fall in love with their products, but this will absolutely not last forever. How do we know?

When Ford’s iconic XR3i ruled the suburban backstreets, every product had an ‘i’ on the end of its name.

When Sony’s Walkman ruled the subways and classrooms, every product had ‘man’ on the end of its name.

When McDonalds ruled the world of crap jobs, every crap job became a McJob.

When Yahoo became My Yahoo, every website became ‘My’ website.

When the Internet came into the home, every tenuously related product had an “e” at the beginning of its name.

When Apple’s iPod took the Walkman’s crown, every product had an ‘i’ at the beginning of its name.

Apple is tightening its grip on the market. And what can you expect to happen next? The tighter Apple squeezes, the more of that market will slip through its fingers.

Here’s another example that arrived today:

Sounds great! Exciting!

Where’s the outline? Where’s the connection between the author’s name and the email address?

The article referred to is genuine; http://nymag.com/news/features/51835/

But is the person in the article in Palm Beach, Florida, where the phone number appears to point to?

So why the suspicion?

If you were an author, wouldn’t you put a link to the article? Would you include at least some outline of the book or a sample chapter?

Spam, scams and con tricks are everywhere, unfortunately.

David Cameron

‘THE MEANING OF DAVID CAMERON’ – WITH RICHARD SEYMOUR

Wednesday, 26 May 2010
Time: 19:00 – 21:00
Location: Housmans Bookshop
Street: 5 Caledonian Road, Kings Cross
Town/City: London, United Kingdom

Description:
Richard Seymour, blogger of ‘Lenin’s Tomb’ fame, and author of ‘The Liberal Defence of Murder’ will be in store discussing his latest publication, ‘The Meaning of David Cameron’.

The Tories are posing as a ‘progressive’ and ‘radical’ alternative to New Labour. Drawing from George W Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’, they maintain that the ‘Big Society’ can do what ‘Big Government’ cannot – produce a cohesive, mutually supportive, happy society. Cameron’s court intellectual, Philip Blond, maintains that this if David Cameron’, which is a viable alternative to the failures of the egalitarian left and the excessively pro-market right. But is this more than campaign mood music? And are the conservative traditions that they draw on – from the bucolic, pseudo-medievalism of G K Chesterton to the anti-statism of Friedrich Hayek – really a bulwark of progress and radicalism?

Richard Seymour argues that such ideas can only seem ‘progressive’ in light of New Labour’s acquiescence to Thatcherism. To understand the Cameronites, it is necessary to understand how the social landscape and corresponding political language was transformed by the collapse of post-war social democracy and its more radical competitors. To resist the Cameronites, he argues, it is necessary to attack the neoliberal consensus on which all major parties found their programme.

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

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It’s hard to put into words how much I despise Tony Blair.

After much of my life voting Labour – yes, a stupid mistake which I now freely acknowledge – and believing that Thatcher was one of the worst things to happen to this country in the 20th century, I now have an unshakeable conviction that Blair has done more than any Prime Minister, before or since Thatcher, to totally fuck up our nation.

Announcing his resignation and giving a year’s notice, he was at great pains to talk about his ‘legacy’, which we now know to be a level of national debt unprecedented in this country and two military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that are still taking the lives of our troops as well as those of a far higher number of innocent civilians.

Along the way, he has amassed a vast personal fortune  and is now believed to have an annual income of approximately £7million which is all stewarded using a labyrinthine series of companies, trusts and ‘foundations’.

Certainly, he’s no stranger to the murky side of personal finance when it was discovered that he took out a mortgage of some £300 000 on a house valued at half that amount and then used this property to build up his portfolio at the taxpayer’s expense.

And this is totally separate from this mortgage – or rather, that mortgage. Yes, the one where Blair and his delightful wife were taking on mortgage debts of £5million when it should only have been possible to borrow £1.3million based on their income.

Of course, such financial wheelings and dealings seem to have been ignored in the recent talk of ‘class war’, but they reveal a cupidity and an arrogance that far surpass anything we’ve seen from Sir Fred Goodwin and his fellow ‘greedy bankers’ and at least Sir Fred never trousered public money.

If it was possible to obtain all the relevant documents (some of which have been conveniently shredded) it would appear that Blair has been the worst trougher of all when it comes to feathering his nest at the public’s expense.

As the Times summed it up earlier this year:

It was reported last month that the former prime minister remortgaged his constituency home for £296,000, almost 10 times what he paid for it, months before he bought a townhouse in west London for £3.65m. He was able to claim on his parliamentary expenses for the interest repayments on almost a third of the new mortgage on his constituency home.

The amount loaned was said to be sufficient to cover the deposit on his house in Connaught Square, one of five properties he owned, valued at £10m in total.

Of course, Blair is hot news with the ongoing Iraq inquiry and he’s due to give evidence to it sometime in the coming week.

Ahead of this, he’s given an interview to be broadcast tomorrow in which he says:

Discussing Saddam Hussein and the decision to invade Iraq, Mr Blair was asked: “If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?”

Mr Blair replied: “I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean, obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat.”

So, after the ‘sexing up’ of the WMD dossier and the 45 minutes from Armageddon claim, not only have we since discovered that WMDs didn’t exist and the 45 minute claim was total bollocks, but now it’s revealed that we would have piled into Iraq anyway under another convenient pretext.

Add to all this the open declaration by Cherie Blair that she is hoping for a Blair Dynasty to run through the future politics of this country, then you have the emergence of a new breed of socialism which appears to be remarkably effective in making itself acceptable to the rising young Labour electorate and commentators and grows in wealth and influence whilst diminishing the prosperity and freedom of the masses.

It’s yet another aspect of the legerdemain pulled off by the government and its friends in the left-wing MSM which I commented on here.

What would be seen as totally abhorrent to anyone calling themselves a socialist is now acceptable, and even apparently intelligent people are being fooled in their hundreds of thousands into accepting true inequalities – the demolishing of personal freedoms and responsibilities and the increasing burden of taxation – in the name of manufactured inequalities and reverse discrimination manifested in the proposed Equality Bill.

This is Blair’s real legacy – an empty Treasury, erosion of civil liberties, the increasing reliance of the British people on the welfare teat, laws which pressure people into societal conformity in ways which threaten social cohesion and stability and military conflicts which were never debated freely and which we entered into under false pretenses.

Hanging really is too fucking good for him.

(The best photo I could come up with)

I don’t want a ‘green’ budget – but Shadow Chancellor George Osborne thinks we should have one.

This, of course, has given rise to the usual retaliatory posturing from Labour – Pick me, sir. I’m greener than he is!’ This time in the form of the predictable blatherings of arch-cunt Geoff ‘I’m a fucking greedy liar, I am’ Hoon.

There’s gold in them thar green issues – carbon offsets to be bought, lovely remunerative quangos and fake charities to keep the bucks rolling in for the favoured people, lots of doubtfully ‘green’ products churned out for people to feel good about being conned into buying.

Not to mention the extra laws, rules and regulations that governments – of any political hue – can heap on an already over-controlled public.

You might vote red or blue – even yellow – at the next election but the future looks set, sure as shit, to be green.

The biggest falsehood concerns the belief that the G20 nations have pioneered a $5trillion spending boost to global economies. Although Gordon Brown and President Obama had originally hoped to get world leaders to agree to such a ‘fiscal stimulus’, they actually failed to secure a single penny of extra government spending anywhere in the world.

Rather than admit defeat, however, they pretended they had won. So they invented the $5trillion figure. They arrived at the number by adding up the extra government borrowing expected to take place in G20 economies between 2008 (when the recession began) and 2010 (when world leaders hope it will end). It is a completely arbitrary figure.

The next fabrication concerns the claim that G20 leaders agreed a ‘programme of support to restore credit, growth and jobs in the world economy’ – worth some $1.1trillion. It was this headline-grabbing figure which caught everyone’s imagination – yet sadly, it too is mainly a bogus number because much of the money had already been pledged in recent months.

Almost half of that $1.1trillion – some $500billion – takes the form of extra money for the International Monetary Fund to bail out countries that run into trouble during the economic downturn.

Although Gordon Brown brazenly asserted that this was new money, this is simply not true. Japan, for example, gave $100billion to the IMF last November, while the EU offered the same sum earlier this year. Admittedly, China did agree an extra $40billion last week. However, this contribution is very much less than Gordon Brown had hoped – and, most worryingly, indications emerged after the summit closed late on Thursday that the Chinese were having second thoughts.

Next, Gordon Brown claimed that some $250billion has been raised to regenerate world trade with the help of extra finance. Once again, his claim is an invention. Indeed, the small print of the G20 communique suggests only $3-4billion of new money has been committed, and the $250billion figure is only a vague pledge.

I fear that the more we look beneath the headlines of the London summit, the more its achievements look threadbare. I would estimate that no more than $250billion of the much vaunted $1.1trillion is genuinely new money. The true story is that Gordon Brown seems to have corralled fellow leaders into perpetrating a gigantic collective fraud on world public opinion.

Amid all the hoopla of Thursday’s triumphant communique, it must be remembered that Gordon Brown has a long and disgraceful track record of this kind of bogus financial announcement. When he was Chancellor, many of his Budgets turned out to be contain fabrications.

This week’s hubristic G20 communique reminds me vividly of Brown’s notorious Comprehensive Spending Review of July 1998. Back then, Gordon Brown declared: ‘On the 50th anniversary of the NHS, the Government will now make the biggest ever investment in its future.’

This announcement was given a euphoric reception by the media – only for it to emerge some time later that there was no extra spending and that the Chancellor had merely made the figures look huge by double and treble counting.

The problem with this kind of duplicity is that you always get caught out in the end. So will be the case with the G20 summit. Gordon Brown has achieved brilliant headlines in the short term, and it is likely that Labour’s rating in the polls will soon start to rise as a result.

This week Gordon Brown and his fellow world leaders played cynically with the hopes and fears of these desperate people. They made promises they can’t keep, made claims that they can never substantiate and triggered hopes that undoubtedly will soon be dashed.

The Prime Minister has won short-term plaudits, but over long haul his cheap and dishonest tactics will gravely damage the esteem in which politicians are held, and do great damage to his reputation.

Oborne’s analysis is right. The con trick is unravelling and unravelling fast. Once the markets realise this, who knows what the consequences may be. Read the entire article HERE.

The problem is that living in Zone 2 we are the target of endless con-artists, door-to-door salesmen, dubious and religious charity collectors and so forth. 90% of the time answering the front door would be to my disadvantage. Luckily I can see through the glass built into the door to check if it is the postman. Friends and others only call “by appointment”.

I have been subject to two classic cons (don’t worry, I didn’t give them any money). One was the well dressed man who claimed to be a new neighbour of mine, had his car wheel-clamped as he wasn’t aware of the parking rules and needed £50 for the fine which I would get back when he could drive to the estate agent to get his keys; he was quite good apart from the fact there are no parking restrictions on my road. The other was a woman who claimed to live next door and needed some change for her electric meter and happened to have no cash on her, which just seemed odd as I knew next door wasn’t rented out.

In the case of the well dressed man I contacted the police (in concern for my real neighbours) and they were around for a statement within 10 minutes, they seem to see it as a real problem for the area.

Every now and again I’m expecting a delivery and keep answering the front door to check, on these occasions I get about 2 unwanted callers before getting the delivery which re-enforces my determination to stick to the no answer policy.

It is a sad fact of the realities of London life that we have to adopt a hermit-like approach to doorstep hassles.