Marton Owl

I say the word obviously a lot. Obviously

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

HALF A MILLION PEOPLE WERE DEFRAUDED

Imagine you are behind on your store card payments. You are already struggling. Then the bank quietly adds an extra charge on top of what you owe. Not because it costs them that much. Just because .. they can. And because they think nobody is watching.

Someone was watching.

Nicholas Wilson was a debt recovery lawyer. He goes by Mr Ethical @nw_nicholas on X. His old boss meant it as an insult. In 2003 he noticed that @HSBC subsidiary HFC Bank was adding an illegal 16.4% charge onto the debts of people who were already in financial trouble.

Store cards from John Lewis, Currys, B&Q, Dixons, PC World. Ordinary people. Struggling people. Being quietly robbed.

He told his boss it was illegal. His boss started calling him "Mr Ethical" as a joke. Then they sacked him.

He reported it to the regulators. @TheFCA ignored him for years.

When a researcher separately wrote to both HSBC and the FCA asking about the fraud...

... both wrote back with responses in the exact same wording, same punctuation, same paragraphs. The bank and the regulator were sharing the same script.

FCA's own independent Complaints Commissioner eventually investigated. He called it the worst case of regulatory failure he had ever dealt with.

FCA's response was to appoint Ruth Kelly, an HSBC director, and Baroness Hogg from John Lewis, onto its own board. The two people they were supposed to be investigating were now sitting inside the regulator.

You actually cannot make this up.

After 13 years of Wilson refusing to go away, HSBC quietly agreed to pay some money back. FCA announced 6,700 victims.

Wilson says the real number is closer to 500,000. HSBC has now set aside £223 million for repayments. No fine. No criminal charges. No one went to prison. No one was even publicly named.

Wilson has spent the last 20 years unemployable. Blacklisted. Living on state benefits. Fighting to keep his home. Someone even anonymously reported him to the DWP for benefit fraud while the actual billion pound fraud went unpunished.

The bank that robbed half a million people kept its licence.

The man who caught them lost everything.

Source: @guardian | @BBC | @PrivateEyeNews | @SundayMirror | @realmediauk | nicholaswilson com | @nw_nicholas and others.

[Brendan May @bmay]

Man’s girlfriend is very annoyed that the free press she champions, despite having emigrated to a dictatorship without one, is investigating her boyfriend for stuff she says people who aren’t her boyfriend, like Angela Rayner, should resign over.

[Marton Owl @carl_doolan]

We all need @EdConwaySky to do a story on North Sea gas. Too many opinions to make any sense of at present. They can’t all be right.

[Larry the Cat @Number10cat]

Finally, I was surprised to see that the administration you work for is requiring visitors to the US to provide access to their social media history to your authorities. I'm reassured, given your stance, that criticism of Trump and his government won't lead to anyone being denied access. I'm certain you would feel obliged to resign from your post if that turned out to be be the case
https://t.co/eChhuEsmhO

[Stewart Wood @StewartWood]

In light of criticism Rachel Reeves has received for not telling us all in advance of the Budget about improved tax receipts, here is a salutary reminder of how Chancellor George Osborne handled his big surprise announcement in the November 2015 Spending Review. #Budget25 1/7

[steve richards @steverichards14]

I hope @ChrisMasonBBC and others read this thread…the selective framing of a budget argument is common and not the same as uniquely lying to win an argument.

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

Our government tried to let racist, genocidal Israeli football hooligans rampage on Birmingham's streets.

They smeared those opposed to this as being driven by hatred of Jewish people.

Now listen to what the West Midlands Chief Constable told MPs.

What a scandal.

[sue#NHSLove💙💙💙#FBNHS suesuezep.bsky.social @SueSuezep]

Oh dear!
EXCLUSIVE: Flag campaign chief praised by Tommy Robinson facing jail over ‘holiday sickness scam’ https://t.co/tv00KK0eCW

[Anna Turley MP @annaturley]

Well this is a total lie @Telegraph. I don’t own any property in London. I live in Redcar. I have one home and one home only, in my constituency of Redcar. What appalling journalism. How dare you just make things up?! Please retract.

https://t.co/V3uvoFRzi4

[Mark Davies @MarkDavies67]

Here’s what I think of Rob Edwards today. Good luck to him, I say. #UTB https://t.co/gYSfIBDJmG

[Sheffield Wednesday @swfc]

A message from the skipper 💙

[Sheffield Wednesday @swfc]

A message from the players to all Wednesdayites 🦉 💙

[Marton Owl @carl_doolan]

@tomp_5 Perhaps you missed the bit Tom when everyone of your players left a bit on the opposition well after the ball . Or was it just me?

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Here you go, @michaelgove:
Gove’s book is a confused epic of simplistic incomprehension, riddled with more factual errors and misconceptions than any other text I have come across in two decades of reviewing books on this subject. Thus we are solemnly told, for example, that during the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank from 1948 to 1967, the Palestinian population from Jenin to Hebron was “herded into, and kept penned up inside, refugee camps”, an idea as novel as it is comically ridiculous and ahistorical. During this period, towns such as Ramallah became sleepy backwaters, quite free from the land seizures and apartheid policies of Arab-free Israeli settlements and Arab-free road networks that followed the Israeli occupation — realities entirely at odds with what Gove calls Israel’s “culture of equality”.

Gove also rewrites history when he alleges it was the “appeasement” of the Palestinians represented by the Oslo peace process that encouraged al-Qa'eda to launch the 9/11 attacks. In fact it was not any offer to make peace, so much as the violent repression that followed Israel’s unilateral ending of peace talks that actually formed the backdrop to the attacks. In his Knights Under the Prophet's Banner, Bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri has written that it was the the repressive campaign waged against the second intifada by Sharon in the Autumn of 2000 that provided al-Qa’eda’s opportunity : as the corpses of dead children piled up, al-Zawahiri realized that here was the rallying cry that could unify the Muslim world. All that was needed was a massive strike, and the US system in the Middle East would begin to unravel. And so - thanks partly to Gove's friends in Washington- it has indeed proved, to the peril of us all.

Gove is also quite wrong that few Muslims or Islamists really mind what Israel does to the Palestinians and the Lebanese, and that “it is what Israel is, rather than what Israel does” that really provokes resistance. Instead Israeli violence is the principle cause of anti-American anger- Bin Laden himself has written that it was the sight of US support for the Israeli bombing Beirut in 1982 that initially radicalised him: “they started bombing… I still remember the blood-torn limbs, the women and children massacred. Houses were being destroyed and tower blocks were collapsing… As I looked on those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America…”

Throughout Gove's book, the old NeoCon myths are reheated and served up, despite being long discredited, most recently by the 2005 CIA report released last week by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Saddam, believes Gove, “invited Islamists into Iraq” (p130); he was “determined to pursue his WMD programme” and “dreamt of emulating” 9/11, strongly suggesting the central lie of Saddam's non-existent links with 9/11. Gove also repeats the tired old canard that the spread of democracy will exclude the Islamists from power in the Middle East, (p135) despite the evidence from Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt and Algeria that given the option, the newly radicalized Muslim peoples of the region are much more likely to choose fundamentalist candidates over secularists.

At the heart of Celsius 7/7 lies the long-discredited idea that the Islamists are motivated by a deep hatred of freedom: as Bin Laden noted in his 2004 broadcast, if that was so “why we did not attack Sweden?” Instead, it is specifically to fight for freedom from US interference in the Islamic world that al-Qa'eda was formed: “We have been fighting you because we are free men,” said Bin Laden in the same speech. “Just as you violate our security, so we violate yours.”

All terrorist violence , Islamic or otherwise, is contemptible. But just because we condemn does not mean we should not strive to analyse accurately. It is exactly the sort of woolly elisions that Gove indulges in that has got us into the trouble we are now in.

[Marton Owl @carl_doolan]

@AngelCesar_fm Berlin

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

Human rights group B'Tselem releases shocking video of Palestinian journalist Awdah Hathaleen filming his own murder at the hands of Israeli settler Yinon Levi.

As is usual in Israel, a judge quickly released Levi, even though the footage shows he shot Hathaleen in cold blood.

[Dom Howson @domhowson]

When asked about Dejphon Chansiri on the The Sports Agents podcast, Chris Powell said: “He doesn’t sell players. He keeps them to the end of contracts, and they walk away. He was holding out for money for Danny [Röhl]. He was offered money (and) didn’t take it."

#SWFC 🦉⚽️

[Alan Biggs @AlanBiggs1]

In a nutshell. A complete absence of proper structure. Those covering the club have known this & highlighted it for years. At last, that ridiculous reality is confirmed from the inside. It could all have been so different had one person listened. #SWFC

[Sheffield Wednesday @swfc]

We are delighted to announce that Barry Bannan has put pen to paper on a new contract, confirming his commitment to Wednesday

#swfc