Because I’m having to say this about 50 billion times…

Long rant that will be interesting to almost no one but I’m really frustrated I tried hiring someone to do decorating work for me He has started the work and he’s efficient, reputable and highly recommended by locals… but Lloyds Bank nonetheless flagged my first payment to him as potential fraud Fair enough. Rang them up, and not for the first time with them, I found myself inside mirror world where I have to convince the bank to let me spend my own money And I don’t mean we just have a bit of a chat and they say “oh that seems legit, alright”. I mean they ask endless questions and make you explain all the work you’re having done, why it costs what it does, and why you’re doing it too. As though they are your Mum and the money you have is just your allowance. Last time this happened AI decided my fate after I’d shown the man operating it a lot of documents. This time it was a real life human who got to make the call. And yet I could not convince her to let me spend my money. She got me to tell her the endless details of the invoice, list all the jobs I was hiring him for, explain how I knew him, how I’d heard of him etc etc etc for about half an hour and then it was still a computer says no situation I have to go into a branch and the fraud lady said I should take photos of previous work this man has done. So me and the bank manager are going to have fun looking at flooring and wallpaper I guess. Then he can tell me if I’m allowed to pay this man for his work or not. Which is awful because how will I pay him now if they won’t let me?! And if the concern is that he is a scam, then how is *me* rocking up at a bank with photos a solution anyway? It is SUCH bullshit I swear. I have never been cost them money by fraud, or bought anything exciting enough to be suspicious. Yet here we are. They’ve also now frozen my account until I visit but will kindly 🙄 lift the freeze to pay vital bills if I ring them each time The nearest bank is half an hour away which sounds minor but with chronic illness, and an unwell mum I’m looking after at home, it actually isn’t to me Surely the whole conversation should have simply gone… Bank: we are worried it might be a scam Me: it’s not and these are the reasons I’m sure it’s sound Bank: well we are concerned and if you go ahead anyway and are scammed we won’t pay you back for it Me: ok, I’d still like to go ahead. Thank you End of discussion After all they’d already made it clear they wouldn’t be liable for paying me back with this transaction. So why then do they care They said “we want to protect our customers” and I said “this doesn’t feel protective. It feels like control” If I want to spend my money on seventeen clown cars and a kazoo from the least reputable company in the world, they really ought to let me I don’t see this as just the story of me trying to renovate something…which is, after all, a small story… I see it as the story of how we are now treated, and how tightly controlled we are. Your money, in your bank, is now yours only on a whim. That will only get worse over time. And the more hoops it is acceptable to make us jump through, the more hoops they will feel entitled to make everyone jump through In 2067 we will be justifying our flake 99’s at this rate Let me just go shake my fist at a cloud. Nothing is like it was back in my day. The lady was the perfect voice of bureaucracy, to a degree that really upset me because normally you can just talk to people. One of her colleagues was so kind. He just couldn’t fix it because it had already been decided Had to send a message to the decorator to explain the delay and he’s now continuing work on sheer trust. Which I don’t think he should have to do

Disabled teen who scored a GCSE 9 in Spanish 'blocked' from studying his passion at college because he failed maths. When the Government bleats about NEETs, there is much more they could be doing to level the playing field liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liv…

Couldn’t sleep last night so was reading my medical record, probably not the best thing to do 🤦🏻‍♀️ . Another failure I came across when I was struggling with eating and self harm. Letter states: “he is fairly concerned about her as she is young, not responding to medication, has a BMI of <17, and exhibits symptoms suggestive of anorexia” “he is sufficiently concerned and would like me to do blood tests and weigh ins on a fortnightly basis” “He has stated he wants CMHT to assess this patient as this is their remit” “I have contacted X hospital who will not see her as she is <18yrs.” “CAHMS are not interested as she is not at school” “I have cancelled her referral to the mental health gateway worker on the advice of Dr X as this patient requires a higher level of input”. So many failures and I know fine well this still happens, especially to do with mental health and SH. Even doctors on the patients side can’t get through to other agencies. The first agency that actually saw me in person told me “you weigh too much”. I was less than 40kg and all I heard was “starve yourself more and then we will help you” Why are children failed so badly? What can we even do to change this?

Kaleb Cooper's mother is a dog groomer and his father is a carpenter. He inherited no land. He spreads ninety thousand tonnes of muck a year, cuts thirty thousand bales and runs eight hundred hectares of arable contracts. Every argument about British farming starts from the assumption that the gate is bolted. Grass is making close to nine thousand pounds an acre. You inherit or you never get in. The whole trade is a closed shop in a wax jacket. At thirteen he was handed three chickens and four acres. Within months it was four hundred and fifty hens and he was selling eggs to his own teachers. At fourteen he was breeding sheep and working on a dairy. At fifteen he spent five thousand pounds on a Case 1394 and two thousand on a topper, then knocked on the door of every house in the district with a horse and a scruffy paddock and told them their field would look considerably better mown. Not one acre of it was his. When Ukraine sent fertiliser vertical, he and Jack Tuckey spent a hundred thousand pounds on two spinning disc spreaders with not a single tonne booked to go through them. Then they went and bought the chicken muck nobody else wanted and put it on at variable rate. That is the whole business. He sells the one asset in agriculture that has never required capital behind it, which is knowing how to do the work and turning up on the day he said he would. Jeremy Clarkson's farm was already a customer before a camera was switched on. He was doing that ground when the previous farmer gave up. The programme did not discover him. It filmed him explaining a field to a man who had never drilled one. Fourteen million people watched that and came away talking about the accent. Land is the most expensive barrier in British farming. The tallest one is free, and nobody in the industry will say it out loud: we have spent thirty years telling every capable fourteen-year-old in the countryside that the way in is a degree, a placement and a graduate scheme, and they believed us. There is a lad in your parish this morning who would do exactly what Kaleb did. He is being told to finish his A-levels first.

In 2013, the man who would become Anurag Mohindru KC told the panel interviewing him for a prestigious position 23 Essex Street that he had studied at Oxford. Asked for his CV so the claim could be checked, he edited it to say he had read medicine there for a year, and because he's a man of taste and saw that his fraudulent resume required some leavening texture he added a cricket blue he never won. After all, who ever heard of a less-than-well-rounded Oxford man? The Bar's tribunal called Mohindru's false claim a "reckless, foolish and completely unnecessary lie", found he had "doubled down", and disbarred him. On 3 July in the High Court, however, Mr Justice Johnson restored Mohindru to the practice of law with a sentence that deserves engraving above the door of every chambers in London: "It would be wrong to impose the ultimate sanction merely because dishonesty is present." 'Merely.' Mohindru is now is free to resume his career spent testing other people's honesty under oath. It seems like Britain is running an epidemic of fraudulent self-invention at the moment, and running a second epidemic underneath it: the organised defence of the people caught doing it. Jason Arday resigned his Cambridge chair and his Jesus College fellowship on 5 August, the day the university finally opened an investigation into his academic record. You've heard it all by now. The allegations, raised in July, are that passages of his thesis and published papers copy other scholars without attribution, and that celebrated elements of his life story sit awkwardly beside the available record. He denies the lot; Liverpool John Moores examined the plagiarism claims against work done there and found "honest and reasonable error"; nothing is yet proven, and the investigation can take its course. Cambridge stood by him for weeks and, on the day he resigned, announced it would "continue to provide support to him". The Good Law Project circulated a letter, signed by more than 24 academics and politicians, describing the examination of a public academic's public record as a "smear campaign". Validating a man's CV is now an act of aggression, provided the man is the right sort. Elsewhere, Zholia Alemi practised as an NHS psychiatrist for 22 years on a forged University of Auckland degree, having left her course in its 1st year. She detained patients. She was convicted of 20 offences of fraud and forgery in 2023, sentenced to 7 years, and has since been ordered to repay £406,624 of the £1m-plus she drew in salary. The forgery was exposed by a local reporter in Carlisle, who managed in an afternoon the check the General Medical Council had not performed in 22 years. Still elsewhere, more than 700 healthcare workers have been guilty of obtaining or seeking UK nursing registration through tests sat by paid proxies at a single test centre in Nigeria; the investigation swept up nearly 2,000 nurses; hundreds of them stayed on wards while it ran; 48 were asked to sit the exam again. The scheme was described in the proceedings as fraud on an industrial scale, and the regulator processed it at the pace of a parish council. And 2 weeks ago, on 24 July, Maidstone Crown Court gave Amran Hussain, 40, of Westerham, 4 years. Hussain applied for 2,071 NHS posts and landed 13 of them, worth £168,072.41, on the basis of him supposedly holding MSc degrees from Oxford and Birkbeck that nobody could verify, memberships of professional institutes that nobody could confirm, a directorship at an NHS trust he never held, and references supplied from NHS email accounts he himself controlled: the service wrote to ask whether Hussain could be trusted, and Hussain replied warmly that he could. Once he got in-post he went off sick until each contract died; how laughably appropriate that his one sincere engagement with the NHS was its sickness policy. 4 years, richly deserved. Hussain had no college behind him, no chambers, no campaign group, no letter with 24 signatures. The institutions doing the forgiving hold a doctrine. The CV may be a genre of self-marketing, and everybody may round the odd number up; but outright self-invention is quite another thing. Still, these places allow it. To them, dishonesty is just a lapse, an episode in a wellness journey, treatable with reflection and a statement about learning. Consequences are for outsiders. To them, the audit and the reckoning is the real offence, to be called disproportionate, vindictive or racist according to the defendant's profile and connections. Who pays? The candidate who told the truth and came 2nd, 13 separate times, to Hussain. The junior barrister who put her real university on the form at 23 Essex Street. The patients detained on the judgement of a psychiatrist with 1 year of study and 22 of practice. Do they know? The judge wrote "dishonesty is present" into the reinstatement itself. It is on the record in his own hand. This must all end. It is a practice of formalised dishonesty not known in public life in these isles for centuries. It will not be brought back. Progress's National Anti-Corruption Act stands up a 500-strong unit, the Malebranche, at the centre of government, with independent power to investigate and prosecute white-collar crime, procurement fraud and institutional corruption, and it pays whistleblowers up to 10% of recovered funds for exposing fraud inside public or private institutions, with criminal sanctions for any employer who retaliates. The first line of that policy reads: "If you're a white-collar criminal, there will be no worse place to be in Europe than Britain." We wrote the sentence before this summer's parade of the forgiven, and the parade has been making our argument for us ever since. This country runs, hour by hour, on the honesty of people whose honesty is rarely if ever honoured, merely taken for granted: the electrician whose certificate is real, the nurse whose exam was her own, the accountant whose letters were earned. Above them sits a class that treats truthfulness as a courtesy, extended and withheld among friends. A thoroughly Third World attitude. The defenders of the fraudulent are organised, lettered and funded. Organise against them. Progress is where that is being done, and the entry requirement is the one Mohindru failed: be what you say you are.

During the Telford Inquiry it was revealed that the police allowed a "No-Go area where "South Asian pimps could sell under age prostitutes without any interference". I hope that you and everyone else will repost this fact and remember the years "1997/2010" The Blair/Brown years.

My latest investigation into the booming shadow care market, where councils send 100s of kids, reveals an absolutely shocking catalogue of potential safeguarding failures in one of the UK's largest illegal operators 1/2 thebureauinvestigates.com/st…

on Arday. Cambridge are suffering reputational damage. They should. Remember Fishmonger Hall and their conduxt around Usman Khan? I want to go back to that. The same deluded progressive mindset there got Jack ans Saskia killed got Arday his chair

I am a 64-year-old woman who just got fired from the only job I ever had and I am pretending it was a retirement. I spent thirty-six years as an establishment mouthpiece. I asked the questions they wanted asked and called it journalism. I made people cry on television and called it a million minutes of live news. I grabbed a photographer by the throat in 2008 and Sky said I was provoked. I asked a serial killer's girlfriend if better sex would have stopped him murdering women. I told volunteers searching for April Jones that she was dead while they were still looking for her. I made Peter Andre weep about his children and said I did him a favour. I broke lockdown rules while lecturing the public and got suspended for six months. I came back. They finally showed me the door and I stood there calling it an honour. You wrote all of this down in one tweet and the British public enjoyed reading it more than they ever enjoyed watching me. I am mentioning my follower count because I have nothing else. I am calling you "young man" because I am old and irrelevant and this is the only power I have left. I am offering to "amplify" you because I am terrified that you have already amplified what I actually am and half a million people just saw it. I said 68,000 complaints. I made that up. I hope you don't notice it was actually 1,800. I am clinging to "none were upheld" because a regulator once said I was technically legal while 55,000 people signed a petition to fire me. I have spent four decades being technically legal. I made that up too. I hope you don't notice that either. I am the woman who asked Israel if they valued Palestinian lives less. I am the woman who asked a serial killer's girlfriend about her sex life. I am the woman who told volunteers their search was over while they were still hoping. I have no boundaries. I have only a microphone and a sneer and an establishment to protect. Please have a lovely day. I am having a panic attack in an empty newsroom. I am thirty-six years of cruelty with a Sky News logo and you just showed the receipts. I am not the voice of Britain. I am the voice it was relieved to finally switch off.

Imagine primary schools had started doing this before now. There would be uproar and rightly so. Picture the headlines! But now we need to decide who is at risk of unemployment when they’re still children? This is not our job.

Professor JASON ARDAY told CBS News he "couldn't read or write until he was 18." Not struggled. Not certain words. COULDN'T READ OR WRITE. He resigned from Cambridge today. Channel 4 News, September 2023, his words. "In old money I was diagnosed with ASPERGER'S syndrome, which is commonly now referred to as autism." Born 1985, diagnosed at three. That's 1988. Asperger's didn't enter the ICD-10 until 1992, or the DSM-IV until 1994. It was in neither ICD-9 nor DSM-III. In 1988 there was no such diagnosis for a British clinician to give and he wouldn't have qualified anyway. DSM-IV, criterion D, word for word. "There is no clinically significant general delay in language, for example single words used by age 2 years, communicative phrases used by age 3 years." Criterion E rules out delay in cognitive development. ICD-10, F84.5. "In contrast to autism, there are no clinically significant delays in language or cognitive development." That absence of language delay WAS the dividing line. It's the entire reason the category existed. Now his own account. Non-verbal until eleven. Global developmental delay. Years of speech therapy. Sign language to communicate. Every one an automatic exclusion. Not a judgement call. A definitional bar. The diagnosis he named couldn't have existed in 1988, and couldn't have been given to the child he describes. I'm not saying he isn't autistic. I'm saying his stories don't match each other and they keep growing. LJMU's page named two conditions. Wikipedia now lists autism, global developmental delay, DYSLEXIA and epilepsy. Dyslexia arriving late, once people started asking about his writing. He told The Times his dissertation errors came from lacking support for his autism and "complex learning disabilities." So explain the BTEC. LJMU's own page says he "defied all expectations by achieving a BTec and then a degree." A BTEC is two years of written coursework. He couldn't write before 18. He was at St Mary's by 20. There is no window. Read at 18. Degree at 23. Doctorate at 31. Cambridge chair at 37. Truly one of the great minds of our time. Then someone checked the thesis. 188 sentences belonged to someone ELSE, some carrying the original's COPY EDITING ERRORS across. He also took interview quotes from other researchers' papers and passed them off as his own subjects. That's not sloppy referencing. That's inventing EVIDENCE. LJMU CLEARED him in March 2026, blaming "a depleted student supervision team." So the university blamed its own supervision and the man who supervised that PhD, Phil Vickerman, is now LJMU's PRO-VICE CHANCELLOR. That clearance is what Cambridge hid behind for three years. He also says a benign brain tumour was removed weeks before his viva, causing memory loss. No record of that either. Glasgow and Ohio State now DENY any ongoing link. Those titles are still LIVE on his pages. Jesus College has opened its own investigation. But forget Cambridge. Everyone's looking at the wrong university. ST MARY'S, Twickenham. Their alumni page, live today, says he "came to St Mary's in 2005 to do an undergraduate degree, having learnt to read and write at the age of 18." They admitted him, so they saw whatever he presented. No school named. No sixth form. No A levels. No Access course. His documented education begins at TWENTY. They taught him three years, so they know what English walked in and what walked out. They gave the degree. Then a master's. Then, in 2024, an HONORARY DOCTORATE, when he was already famous. That page claims £5.5m raised for over 80 charities, hedged as "part of several fundraising collectives and teams." Somebody wrote that hedge. Somebody knew. The only verifiable record is a 2010 JustGiving page. £6,285. Pressed, he said it came from a syndicate of about a hundred people, under NDAs he couldn't name. Cambridge inherited a CV others validated. St Mary's can't say that. They were FIRST and it isn't one education qualification. It's SIX. A BTEC, a degree, a master's, a PGCE, a teaching certificate, a doctorate. All in education. A man who says he learned to read at 18 trained to teach children to read, then wrote a thesis on MENTORING student teachers. The same man said POULTRY when he meant PALTRY in a keynote. Extraordinary range. Then the rest. He claimed he appeared on Seven Up. It first aired in 1964. He was born in 1985. He claimed 600 miles in SIX DAYS. Do that maths. It means 1.86 metres per second, every second, for 518,400 seconds straight. No sleep. No food. No stopping. Six days of legs on a 24/7 shift. The maths says 1.86 metres a second. Biology says absolutely not. That claim later became twelve days. He claimed a pig's head was sent to his parents. The Guardian asked the butchers he named. No police officer ever came in about a pig. He claimed a masked man confronted him twice, knife the second time, telling him to resign. Enhanced CCTV caught NOTHING. He hit the panic alarm, the security team was on site, nobody came. He told no colleagues, then ran a PhD viva two hours later. A police FOI found no matching reports. When it started unravelling, Times Higher Education had 63 pages ready in September 2025. His lawyers sent ONE letter. No lawsuit. The story stayed buried TEN MONTHS. So you were never told. That was the point. His New York Times interview was cancelled. Simon and Schuster scrubbed the financial claims from the memoir. It still publishes on 11 August. Meanwhile he sat on the NHS Race and Health Observatory group. ITV's Cultural Advisory Council. Trustee of Runnymede for eleven years. Named on UKRI and NIHR funded research, your money. Guest Editor of Radio 4's Today programme and Patron of the Adult Literacy TRUST. His story was so inspiring that six universities, the BBC, the Guardian and a publisher all repeated it. Not one checked it. Turns out that was the clever bit. He didn't beat the system. The system never LOOKED. It wanted the story too badly to check it. Cambridge is investigating now, three years late, and only because journalists did their job for them and when it was finally all put to him, he said this. “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?” They did believe him. For twenty years. That was the whole plan. St Mary’s page is still up. £5.5m and all. Check it before it disappears.

This is correct but I don’t believe he never actually knew better. People believing the lies you tell does not mean you don’t know they are lies or that you don’t know benefiting from exploiting people’s stupidity or benevolent racism or whatever it is, is wrong.

Wondering how all the people abused by the epitome of the lanyard class, social care, are feeling about paying an extra tax to give them more money… Absolutely not without accountability to the public for whom they work IMO.