Eyes on the Monitor

Earlier this month the Daily Mirror splashed with a gripping story headlined: "Government spends £5.8m on NHS consultancy firms - many of whom help out Tories."

The Mirror had done some digging and found that since the Conservatives came to power the NHS financial "watchdog" Monitor has paid millions to consultants that could have been spent on nurses.

The paper highlighted £700,000 going from Monitor to KMPG and £811,000 to Deloitte, both firms which give expensive consultancy to the Tories for free.

KPMG has given the Tories £635,000 worth of research, while PwC has given £545,000 in non-cash donations.

It's an important story about government-linked consultancies squeezing cash out of the NHS.

It shows how the Mirror can still, when it puts its mind to it, run powerful, important political stories.

Sadly it also showed how Labour is still hobbled by new Labour-y impulses.

Shadow Treasury secretary Rachel Reeves was enraged, telling the Mirror this is "just the tip of the iceberg."

But does the submerged iceberg only float under Tories?

Labour set up Monitor and also gave much government cash to consultancies.

It is hard to have confidence that another Labour government wouldn't make the same mistake.

After all, PwC got £1.7m out of Monitor. The same PwC has given Labour over £500,000 in free consultancy services. Reeves must know this.

Like many of Labour's front bench, Reeves has had a free research assistant from PwC for much of last year, a research freebie from the consultants worth over £50,000.

Monitor appeared again in this week's news. It is newsworthy because this formerly obscure body is central to Andrew Lansley's NHS privatisation plans.

Lansley made it the "competition authority" for the NHS.

Most people probably aren't even aware there is such a thing, imagining that the NHS is all about co-operation.

But under Lansley's reforms the NHS isn't allowed to use the, er, NHS to carry out operations. Not unless it gives private companies the chance to "compete" for the work first.

So pretty much everything is wrong with Monitor - the name doesn't suggest anything to do with doctors or nurses.

It always puts me in mind of either a nasty creepy schoolboy bully with a tin badge from the head. Or a big green lizard. And it seems to act in a creepy, lizard-y way.

The latest Monitor story, revealed by the Guardian, shows that it is considering exempting companies that win NHS privatisation contracts from corporation tax.

So they would take money from the tax-funded NHS, but avoid tax.

This mad scheme is supposedly proposed because it is "unfair competition" for health privatisation firms to pay tax when NHS hospitals themselves don't.

Tax breaks for privatisers is proposed in a paper bizarrely titled Fair Playing Field, which said taxing profit-hungry privatisers creates "distortions."

In the Guardian's report, health academics said the regulator has been "captured" by industry.

But it wouldn't have to go on a very long safari to bag Monitor's chief executive David Bennett.

He's in charge of one of the most significant NHS bodies, but he's never been a doctor or nurse. He couldn't help you at all if you were poorly.

Instead, Bennett spent decades at management consultancy McKinsey before becoming Tony Blair's chief policy adviser at No 10.

Labour rightly condemned Monitor's latest mad plan, but sadly it lumbered us with the organisation's crazed chief in the first place.

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City & Westminster MP Mark Field was one of the 12 Tories lobbying George Osborne in an open letter last November to block Lib Dem "mansion taxes."

Field and friends denounced them as the "politics of envy" which would "hit ordinary families and pensioners" - although presumably only the ordinary folk living in mansions.

According to the latest register of MPs' interests, Field got an early Xmas present in December - free honorary membership of the Royal Automobile Club.

This doesn't mean that when his car breaks down the men in orange coats will come and fix it for free.

The Royal Automobile Club sold off RAC Motoring - the car-fixing men in the orange jackets - in 1999.

What it kept was one of "London's finest private clubs" where "members can enjoy two unique and historic clubhouses, one in the heart of Pall Mall, the other Woodcote Park, a peaceful estate set within 350 acres of rolling Surrey countryside, complete with two 18-hole parkland golf courses."

Field's free membership is worth £1,450. According to the dress code, men must "wear tailored jacket and trousers together with a collared shirt and tie (no cravats)."

Field's new club has banned cravats not because it thinks they are too posh and daft but because it thinks cravats are too scruffy.

It's perhaps not surprising that an MP who gets over a grand of free club membership with rights to hang out at an exclusive Pall Mall clubhouse or country retreat, free from the danger of scruffy, oikish cravats, probably does see "envy" all around and believes ordinary people live in mansions.

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I think the left and unions didn't pay enough attention to the international Occupy movement.

The imaginative campaign broke out of standard protest operating procedure and shifted opinion about the need to cut social spending while bailing out banks.

But one group did understand Occupy's importance - the FBI.

Documents obtained by US campaigners from the Partnership for Civil Justice using freedom of information requests showed the FBI spied on Occupy throughout the US.

The Feds did so mostly using their "joint terrorism task forces." They viewed the overwhelmingly peaceful Occupy as terrorists.

Moreover, they then shared intelligence on Occupy with the banks - notably through a sinister group called the Domestic Security Alliance, a forum where the FBI shares info with banks like Barclays and Citigroup and, bizzarely, Kellogg's and the Walt Disney Group.

So instead of chasing bank fraud the FBI joined the banks to worry about the protesters against bank cheats and criminals.