Simon

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

You might have heard of Maggie Oliver.

She's a former Greater Manchester detective who, in 2012, was ordered to abandon her investigation into the systematic rape of children in Rochdale, and decided she would rather resign her warrant card rather than do so.

Maggie, as that would imply, is one of the good ones. I constantly ask how our police can consider themselves worthy of the badge if they are not willing to return the badge rather than commit injustice in its name. Maggie did just that; she was asked to cover for criminals, so she told the shirts to stuff themselves and handed back her commission.

She won a small but consequential victory in the High Court on Friday. Mr Justice Kimblin granted her foundation a full judicial review of whether the British state has actually done anything about the recommendations it accepted, in 2022, at the end of a seven-year inquiry into the institutional cover-up of decades of child sexual abuse.

Maggie Oliver is one woman. She has no political party behind her and no standing in Whitehall. She has no peerage, no chambers, no billionaire foundation footing her bills.

She was ordered, by senior officers, to drop her investigation into a network of men who were raping children in industrial quantities in her city, because of the demographics to which those men belong made the whole thing a bit awkward.

Fourteen years on, she has done what nobody else in this country has been able to. She has hauled the British state into open court to answer for the choice it made, over four years and under two governments, to hold a seven-year, £200 million inquiry into the institutional cover-up of child abuse and implement, deliberately, none of that inquiry's recommendations.

The Home Office accepted those recommendations in 2022. So did the Department for Education, the police inspectorates and the Crown Prosecution Service. And then nothing happened. The recommendations sat. The departments restructured. Ministers rotated.

The girls and women who had given evidence aged. More such operations continued around the country, while the men who had run the previous set of them either walked free, left the country, or drew their own pensions.

The state, in the manner of every institution Tony Blair ever built, had decided that the writing of the report was the action, and the doing of the report could be handed off to history.

That is what Maggie Oliver has now forced into court. And the political class knows what that means. The Home Secretary has not commented. The Prime Minister has not commented. The candidates jockeying through the post-Starmer Labour succession have, at the time of writing, failed even to speak her name, as though they know that, if they do, lightning will flash in the sky and they'll be turned into a pillar of Tesco's-own-brand dishwasher salt.

They are silent because they recognise, accurately, that the answers a judicial review will produce - to the question of why their inquiry's findings were treated as ornamental - will, should, must end the careers of every official who was supposed to act on them and did not. That councillors and councils, mayors, indeed entire political parties, will be caught under ultraviolet light and shown for their guilt.

It's time a government did what the British state has spent twenty years declining to do. Take on institutional failure.

Name the institutions that failed, in public, on the record. Name the officers and officials who covered it up, and the officers and officials who pressed for the cover-up too. Prosecute them under the standards that any other employee of a public organisation defrauding the public would expect to face.

The recommendations the inquiry produced must be implemented in full, alongside whatever further measures a second look at the evidence then demands.

There will not be another inquiry into the inquiries. There will be the verdicts.

Maggie Oliver is one of the bravest people in Britain. She has earned, by her own resignation and by fourteen years and a foundation and a court case carried on her back, the right to expect from a future British government the simple thing that ought to have happened in 2014, in 2016, in 2018, in 2022 and in every other year of this national disgrace.

She has not yet been given it; we have not yet been given it. But it will be given, and soon.

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

Fair point on the double standard, though worth noting the inquiry found Davey was also being fed written assurances by the Post Office that turned out to be lies. Alan Bates himself said Davey shouldn't be singled out over the other 15 ministers who all got played the same way. The Gillian Keegan/Fujitsu contracts angle is the more interesting thread tbh, that one got way less scrutiny than it deserved.

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

THE MAN THEY CALLED A NUTTER JUST GOT A KNIGHTHOOD

In 2003, the Post Office fired Alan Bates from his small branch in Llandudno, Wales. The reason? He refused to repay £1,200 that the Horizon computer system had invented out of thin air.

He invested £65,000 in that post office. He made 507 calls to the helpline. He kept meticulous records proving the software was broken. The Post Office's response was to terminate his contract and walk away.

Their own internal documents called him "unmanageable." People at industry conferences called him a nutter and a thief. He couldn't afford a hotel room at one protest event. He slept in a tent.

So naturally he spent the next 20 years building the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, dragging the Post Office into the High Court, winning a landmark judgment in 2019 that proved Horizon was riddled with bugs, errors and defects, and triggering the overturning of more than 900 wrongful convictions.

Over 900 people were prosecuted. Around 700 convicted. 236 went to prison. The scandal was linked to at least 13 suicides. The compensation bill has now passed £1.2 billion.

Fujitsu (@Fujitsu_Global) knew about the bugs from 1999. The Post Office (@PostOfficeNews) knew. They prosecuted people anyway. Then they destroyed the evidence, sacked the forensic accountants when they got too close to the truth, and deleted social media comments from victims.

Paula Vennells, the CEO who presided over much of it, collected a CBE. She kept it for years. Bates turned down an OBE in 2023 specifically because of that.

He finally accepted a knighthood in 2024. After the ITV drama. After the public inquiry. After the nation had caught up with what he'd been saying since 2003.

Twenty years. Sleeping in a tent. Called a thief by the people who were supposed to represent him.

Sir Alan Bates was right from the start. The institution was lying from the start. That is the whole story.

Sources: @ComputerWeekly | @BBCNews | @ITVNews | @guardian |

[Simon @Reacher14]

@bphillipsonMP Please give them something more substantial than what looks like white toast with little nutritional value.
Surely a bowl of porridge would be more substantial and keep them in learning mode nearly all day

[Simon @Reacher14]

@JohnSCooley @wideawake_media The question I ask is why we don’t build small nuclear power plants on the disused power station sites all the infrastructure is there already

[Simon @Reacher14]

@TammyPaxMP @TheNelsonAgain @DrHoenderkamp What do Londoners pay at the moment Midlands Dads Council tax is £375/month for 2 bedroom house ours is 3 bedroom and is £425 month, we earned less, have less benefits in transport costs and houses worth significantly less than £1.5M, then £100-£200 extra for living in London

[Simon @Reacher14]

@brett_heath @AS332L I don’t understand, why people are resist to investing. Dad was a single parent, no pension other than state spent all his working life as a low paid Farm Labourer, but even he managed to invest his way to over £250k if he hadn’t , £110k care fees would have been taxpayer paid

[Simon @Reacher14]

@therealmissjo not just London the U.K. is decaying. listened to all the political parties they have no idea how to sort out the U.K.
clusterfu***ks the lot of them. None have vision. Conservatives had years to sort the U.K. but all they have done is made their mates ££

[Simon @Reacher14]

@chinnychick What a moving poem that is

[Simon @Reacher14]

@StockBible @shiftingshares That’s my fear, whilst they all have cozy civil service pensions.

[Simon @Reacher14]

@MerrynSW DY see the tweet from Torsten Bell just the opposite Now deleted.
Saying ISA to should be capped at £100k ! Then goes on to say “Why on earth is the state spending billions subsidising savings that large” The Government never subsided me I paid Tax and NI on all that money.

[Pete North @FUDdaily]

A lot of people my age were pressured by their parents to go to university as they saw it as the only path to social mobility. At one time that might have been true, but in a functioning economy, it just isn't. My other half was pressured into a degree and now she's a mid-level bureaucrat who wishes she'd trained as a plumber. So many white collar graduate jobs are bullshit jobs that serve no real world function and they're depressing as hell.

I felt that same pressure because everyone around me was going to university. I didn't particularly want to go, had no real idea what I wanted to do if I did, but the job market was pretty miserable, and I didn't know what else to do. So I went to Uni.

That didn't last long. I was pretty appalled by the whole affair. I thought I was going to be surrounded by bright people who might somehow inspire me, and it would open the door to a new social life among intellectual equals. Oh boy was I disappointed. The calibre of students was pretty low. I think there were only about three other students in a cohort of 180 who were actually going to excel at it, but six months in, I couldn't have been less interested. It was good for the university to have all those deadbeats (me included) because it was lots of fee income with practically zero overhead.

Nobody else was getting a good deal out of it. It was a giant con. Facilities were poor, teaching was poor, tutoring was virtually non-existent, and if you wanted to use any advanced equipment, you'd have to plunge yourself into debt and buy it yourself. I suppose there's no problem with that if you're fully committed to it, but I had no business being at university, and a functioning system would have rejected my application.

But they don't do that. They'll take anyone with a pulse. Even now they're taking in young people who aren't temperamentally suited to academic study, who will drop out in months, leaving with a boat load of debt they can't manage. These are young people who were always going to be better off in vocational training or full time work, and the lack of a degree is no real barrier to well paid work. The expansion of the British university system is one of the greatest British cons of all time. We cheated an entire generation who would have got by just as well, if not better, without setting foot on a university campus.

This was especially true for me. I had to find my own way. Instead of spending three unproductive years at university, I gamed the dole system for two years, went nocturnal, and learned to code. I then took up contracting work, culminating in many years at Airbus. To date, I still have zero qualifications, I have no intention of getting any, and my only regret is that I ever applied to uni in the first place. It was a total waste of my time, and it was detrimental to my well-being. I'm sometimes tempted to do a masters for my own personal gratification, but it wouldn't open any doors for me, and it would be a criminal waste of £10k, especially considering who my money is going to.

The bottom line is that we don't need to produce as many graduates as we do. It's actually detrimental to society to produce so many credentialled idiots. As much as anything, there aren't the jobs to sustain them, and all it does is contribute to qualification inflation.

What makes it all the more abhorrent is the unbridled green of universities. Not content with deceiving a generation of young British people, they're ripping off foreign students while selling degrees as a back door to the immigration system, expanding beyond their capacity, and dumping the externalities on the wider community. Entire tracts of towns are converted to student dwellings and entire districts become transient and squalid. As a consequence, ordinary people can't afford to live in these places and face longer commutes from out in the sticks. Universities are wholly parasitic.

Many argue that studentification of towns is the only reason these places stay afloat, which may be true, but that actually points to more serious structural problems in the economy. Worse still, the only beneficiaries of this Ponzi scheme are landlords, bandit property developers, deliveroo drivers and middle class non-jobber academics who create more problems than they solve. University expansion was a sticking plaster to mask the youth unemployment epidemic, and in so doing, we created an unsustainable bubble. And now it's popping.

Not only will many of these universities not survive, they don't deserve to, and nothing of value is lost when they fail. In fact, if these places revert to being sleepy, slightly depressed, little cathedral towns, they'll at least feel like home again, rather than a student doss house consumed by blocks of "luxury student apartments".

If your job creation scheme university is contingent on fraud and deception, then it's doing more harm than good. It's just another pillar of a fake economy that stands in the way of addressing the structural problems in the labour and housing markets. We need to put an end to it now.

[Simon @Reacher14]

@dontdelay My biggest beef is pensions they favour the rich, when the opportunity to being able to max out your pension in our case £30K we couldn’t go back the three years to top up. Because we didn’t earn more than, at that time £40k now it’s £60k. Only the ISA is open to us.

[Simon @Reacher14]

@CutMyTaxUK From our end all our oil and gas equipment sales that we once got now go to our Italian company. That’s lost revenue to the UK less jobs created.
The political parties seem to have become total clusterf***ks.
No thoughts to future prosperity.

[Chris Rose @ArchRose90]

An Islamist preacher in France was arrested earlier this week after describing a "tricolour flag" as "satanic" & saying it has "no value with Allah".

He was deported to Tunisia within 12 hours after his arrest.

This makes the UK look so weak!

https://t.co/yJpjdqVquZ

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

Have seen countless angry tweets from Labour MPs condemning Lee Anderson for his comments about Islamists running London. Fair enough.

Have seen zero angry tweets from Labour MPs condemning actual Islamists for ruining the life of the Batley schoolteacher.

[Isabel Oakeshott @IsabelOakeshott]

Millions are sick fed up of the rampaging hate marches in our capital every weekend. The projection of anti Semitic slurs on Big Ben = breaking point. @LeeAndersonMP_ echoes public fury. Tory leadership just proved they are totally out of touch

[Lee Harris @LeeHarris]

A pro-Palestine hate mob let off flares and shut down Tower Bridge causing absolute chaos.

Sadiq Khan and Mark Rowley's two-tier Met policing has empowered the mob.

They've lost control of London.
This is what Lee Anderson was talking about.

[The Secret Accountant @TheSecretAcct]

A father whose daughter had been severely injured in a motor accident & in a coma & hospitalised for 3 years, invested £1.25m & within 24 hours the company had handed out nearly all of it to four of its associates

Shocking. Surely they must get sent down

https://t.co/jKUfkaiVKR

[Cut My Tax @CutMyTaxUK]

Labour plans further discrimination against private sector pension investors in favour of gold-plated public sector schemes.

Making it the party of the public sector, not "the party of business"

Political parties should be honest about our 2nd national debt, not add to it.