TORIES DECIDE: “IF TAXPAYERS WON’T VOTE FOR US, NIHIL DESPERANDUM – WE CAN ALWAYS USE THEIR MONEY

Jeremy Hunt stands accused this morning of flagrant misuse of public money as a gerrymandering tool…but corruption in the Conservative Party goes way beyond the NHS budget: £36m of taxpayer money has been devoted almost entirely to Coalition marginals.

Blyth Valley Labour MP Ronnie Campbell has undertaken an analysis to show that almost all the winter emergency NHS funding is “southern based, where local health authorities received fewer NHS cuts in the first place….Jeremy Hunt [is] rewarding councils which happen to have [Coalition] marginal constituencies in them”.

Local Conservative spokespersons and NHS apparatchiks jostled each other in the rush to issue statements about ‘scaremongering’, but notably neither denied any of the substance of Mr Campbell’s analysis.

The background to this financial gerrymandering is a feeling at the top of the Tory Party that, to quote one backbencher I spoke with, “the way Britain’s constituencies are drawn favours Labour”. This is obviously the new Camerlot mantra, because in almost an exact echo of that remark, a Goldman Sachs top-nob told Reuters a fortnight ago that “the way Britain’s constituencies are currently divided favours Labour”. So in their classic sociopathic judgement mode, the Conservatives have decided to correct this most regrettable situation…with taxpayers’ money.

That our old friend Jeremy Rhyminge-Slang is up to his neck in such graft should come as no surprise to followers of The Slog’s Hunt Balls page. But it gets worse, for lobbying research revealed earlier this month that Andrew Law, British head of major US healthcare investor Caxton Associates, has given £32,000 to Jeremy Hunt’s constituency. Of course, he wouldn’t want anything back from that no noooo, perish the thought – any more than Jezzer’s close relationship with second-cousin Virginal Front-Bothamley benefits her role as a Private Health promotion consultant in the House of Lords.

Fed up of NHS subterfuge spearheaded by Jeremy Typing-Errah, Louise Irvine – the south London GP, who led the successful campaign against the downgrading of Lewisham hospital – will stand against Mr Hunt for the South West Surrey constituency for the National Health Action party in next year’s general election. Irvine has issued a statement asserting:

The Conservatives ‘Self-Rewarding Rotten Boroughs’ scam stretches way beyond the health sector. I’ve blogged before about misuse of taxpayer monied Civil Service communication budgets to score political points. Now the Telegraph is alleging that, in recent months, ‘thirty six areas of the country were handed on average £1million each to pay for new art galleries, coastal path improvements and new bus and cycleways. Most of the cash benefited Tory or Lib Dem seats.’

As you’d expect from the Barclay-steered Torynaff, with hundreds of Conservative constituencies to go at, the paper chooses to focus on LibDem Care Minister Gordon Lamb’s constituency, where he was able to unveil a £497,000 grant to upgrade Sheringham station. But it seems that almost all the £36m went to Tory marginals.

Commenting on this targeted sweeties award, Taxpayers’ Alliance campaign director Andy Silvester told the Seismograph, “Politicians shouldn’t be using taxpayers’ money to boost their prospects at the ballot box, and spending like this so close to an election is bound to raise eyebrows….It’s disheartening to see pork-barrel spending of the like seen in the United States potentially creeping in to British politics.”

But on the whole, not terribly surprising.

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Meanwhile, something apparently exercising the ire of the Spanish electorate at the moment is the way Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, in the light of Syriza’s success in Greece, has decided to ‘get’ the emerging Spanish Left Party Pademos. The Opposition New Labourish mob under Pedro Sanchez are in an even bigger flurry of panic, but only Rajoy has the State power to damp down the Pademos appeal.

And that appeal is substantial: a mere four months after it’s foundation, Pademos won 1.2 million votes and five seats in the Euro-elections last May. And by November, opinion polls were giving the Party around 29% support for the 2016 General Election.

Now it has emerged that Comfortan Rajoy, the arch pro-Brussels austeritist, has been making some nice juicy offers among the media set: the general tone of them seems to be “rubbish Pademos and you’ll get bigger and better broadcasting contracts”. Bribes for contracts among the Spanish élite have been around since God was a girl, but this is one step beyond even for the corruption-riddled Popular Party.

Rajoy is already under the spotlight because of his alleged knowledge of, and compliance with, ongoing media bribes, and slush funds for silencing nuisances. But the focus this time is not so much bribes for contracts as bribes for support. Grupo Planeta, it seems, has been approached by Popular Party bigwigs to go for the Podemos jugular….and their reward for doing so will be yet more broadcasting licences. (GP is already the biggest media conglomerate in Spain).

So anyway, all those in England so dead keen to see the BBC destroyed – and replaced by Newscorpse corporacratic nonsense – take heed, and be careful what you wish for. Better to give the Beeb tougher powers to be independent, than sell out to The Digger.

Yesterday at The Slog: George Osborne is doing his bit for Britain’s gdp