Top Tory Donor Is Handed Lucrative Contracts

UK Foreign Secretary Didn’t Know What The Customs Union Was.
Boris Johnson, the former UK Prime Minister who campaigned for Britain to leave the Customs Union, had to have a Labour MP explain to him what it was after stopping him in the corridor to ask about it.
Labour MP Barry Gardiner revealed that Johnson, when he was Foreign Secretary, and one of the three people who was supposed to be in charge of Brexit, did not know what a Customs Union was.
Gardiner claims that Johnson said to him, “Tell me, tell me what is all this stuff about a Customs Union?”
Gardiner then claims to have asked Johnson what he meant by his question, and Johnson replied: “Well what is a Customs Union?”
( Basit Mahmoud, 13.09.2023 )  ..  leftfootforward.org

Top Tory Donor Is Handed Lucrative Contracts.
One of the UK Conservatives’ biggest ever donors has profited from £135million of contracts with the Department of Health and Social Care in under four years.
Frank Hester, a healthcare tech entrepreneur whose company supplies computer systems to the NHS, gave PM Rishi Sunak’s party £5million this year.
His company, the Phoenix Partnership (TPP), paid out more than £20million in dividends between 2019 and 2022, with Hester the only shareholder.
Its main operating company, the Phoenix Partnership (Leeds), recorded a turnover of £75million, with profit before tax of £47million in the year to March 2022.
It paid dividends during the year of £10million to its parent company, which is ultimately owned by Hester, and a salary of £515,000 to him, its sole director.
Over a period of four years from 2019 to 2022, the ultimate parent company, TPP Group, paid out £23.5million in dividends, which appear to have gone to Hester as its only shareholder.
Contracts with the Department of Health and Social Care appear to make up a large proportion of TPP’s business.
TPP said it did not wish to comment when asked about its business with the NHS and whether all the dividends were paid to Hester.
The scale of business that Hester and TPP have with the NHS was uncovered by the Good Law Project, which found payments totalling £137million to the company since the start of the Covid pandemic in April 2020.
Jo Maugham, the director of the Good Law Project, said: “Once you see how much Mr Hester gets from an NHS that is desperately starved of money, you can understand why he is so committed to the government that lets him.”
( Rowena Mason, 20.09.2023 )  ..  theguardian.com

Judaism Is Not Hereditary, But A Religion.
After the horrors of the Holocaust, the concept of a Jewish race is still alive and well in the minds of too many.
To be a race, Jews would have to have been isolated from other populations.
However, they never avoided crossbreeding and converted many non-Jews.
In other words, from Day One Jews have married non-Jews, and therefore there is no way to genetically characterise them as a race.
Nevertheless, many people find it difficult to accept the ideas that Judaism is not hereditary, but a religion, and that Jews who abandon the Jewish faith, whether they adopt another religion or none at all, are no longer Jews.
As a trained geneticist, Alain Corcos became convinced that there are not and never were human races.
In the last twenty years, an increasing number of anthropologists and biologists have reached the same conclusion.
They argue that there is no way to genetically characterise race, because no human population has ever been isolated long enough from other populations to avoid “crossbreeding.”
The history of the Jews, in particular, supports this thesis.
From Day One they had children with non-Jews.
Hence, biologically, Jews are not different from non-Jews.
Although many volumes have been written that condemn anti-Semitism and deal with its history, only two treat the myth of the Jewish race.
Oddly, though both maintain that there is no such thing as a Jewish race, their authors write about Jewish blood and Jewish genes, which are misleading concepts as harmful and pernicious as the term race itself.
( Alain Corcos, The Myth of the Jewish Race, 2005 ) ..  Lehigh University Press