pagan386

Female British Leftie, Not a pagan more like a story telling Atheist, & a little bit o politics. A Gargoyle of Beelzebub

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

POST OFFICE PUT A CHILD IN PRISON

In 2002 Tracy Felstead @TracyF882 was a 19 year old counter clerk. She worked at the Camberwell Green Post Office branch in south London. She had left school and was proud to have a job with a company everyone trusted.

Then the Post Office's Horizon computer system showed a shortfall of £11,503 at her till. Nobody checked if the machine was wrong. @PostOffice investigators decided Tracy was a thief.

She was interviewed under caution at Peckham police station. Investigators asked her to prove she did not steal money that a computer had simply invented. They even asked if her own family had pressured her to steal.

Her family scraped together the £11,500 and paid it back. They were told this could help her avoid prison. It did not work.

Tracy was convicted of theft and false accounting at trial. The judge sent her to a young offender institution for 6 months. She was still a teenager.

Inside, she saw things no 19 year old should see. She has said the memory of prison still comes back to her now, decades later. She has spoken about trying to take her own life twice because of what happened to her.

Years later the stress caught up with her body too. She suffered a neurological breakdown that left her temporarily paralysed on one side.

Tracy was not alone. Horizon was built and run by Fujitsu @fujitsu_uk. Between 2000 and 2014 the Post Office prosecuted more than 700 sub-postmasters and counter staff using data from that same system.

It is now officially called the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

Paula Vennells @PaulaVennells1 ran the Post Office as chief executive from 2012 to 2019. Under her watch the organisation spent millions fighting the very people it had wrongly accused, rather than admitting the software was broken.

Over 1 million people later signed a petition demanding she hand back her CBE.

The Court of Appeal finally quashed Tracy's conviction in 2021. 19 years after she went to prison. Nobody at the Post Office or Fujitsu spent a single night in a cell for it.

In 2023 Tracy sat down with Post Office bosses in Parliament, with the support of her then MP Lucy Allan @lucyallan.

She told the chief executive to his face how to fix the compensation process. She later gave evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry @PostOffInquiry, chaired by Sir Wyn Williams, about what six months in a cell at 19 actually cost her.

A faulty computer got 16 years of trust from an entire national institution. A teenage counter clerk got a criminal record, a prison sentence, and a mental health battle that has lasted her whole adult life.

Same script every time. Protect the system first. Apologise decades later, if at all..

SOURCES: @PostOffInquiry @BBCNews @guardian and many others.

[Alethea Bernard @Tush27J]

Paula Vennells.
In her 7 year tenure as CEO of the Post Office she waltzed off with £5.1 Mn; around £2.2 Mn coming from performance related incentives and pension in lieu payments.
Yet postmasters/mistresses are still waiting for their compensation.
#Newsnight #PostOfficeScandal

[GrumpyChineseGuy @neilzsg]

Trinity Goodman is 44 and lives in Oklahoma City. She sells blood plasma twice a week because that is how she stays alive. Her checking account only has $3.78 right now. Washington looked at a woman selling her own blood and decided the thing that had to be trimmed was her food stamps.

At the same time, Washington found plenty of room for a tax cut: for the people in this country with private planes, who can write that money off as a tax deduction. And they keep telling you there's no money left.

According to the New York Times, she keeps one cent in her savings account on purpose so the bank will not close the account.

[David Graeber Institute @Graeber_social]

The reality of modern work and of the opportunities available.

[LubnanBoi @AgitatorAK]

Dear @JeremyClarkson I saw this on my feed on another platform and instantly thought you needed to see it.

"Jeremy Clarkson thinks people who receive benefits should have to send a weekly thank you email to a randomly chosen working person, explaining what they did with the money, or have their payments stopped.

So here is mine. If you’d like to give it a share to help Jeremy see it, that would be great.

Dear Jezza,

Thank you for your concern about my contribution to society.

I should say first that you were aiming this at young people you believe are sitting at home doing nothing.

But you wrote it as a blanket rule applying to everyone whose benefits are paid.

That includes more than thirteen million pensioners, millions of people who receive benefits while working, who may find themselves being ordered to thank another benefit claimant, and me.

I receive PIP.

That money goes towards the Motability car I use to travel to work.

It is not a free car. It is not even my car. I exchange the mobility part of my PIP to lease it.

The car takes the lot.

Which is awkward, because that same payment is also meant to help cover the additional costs of being disabled, including a wheelchair that is actually usable for my job and hearing aids that allow me to do it.

There is nothing left for either.

I chose the thing that gets me to work.

That car enables me to work and, because I can work, I now pay considerably more in tax than I have ever received in PIP.

But my contribution does not end with my own tax bill.

I have built programmes that hundreds of people now use to earn a living.

They pay tax too.

Those programmes have helped thousands of people overcome anxiety, return to their lives and, in many cases, return to work.

Then there are all the people supported by the coaches and practitioners I have trained.

That is what disability support can do when it is designed to enable people rather than humiliate them.

My PIP did not disappear into some great benefits black hole.

It helped provide the transport that allowed me to work, build a business, create opportunities for other people and contribute far more than I could ever have done without it.

But as we are exchanging thank you letters, perhaps you could send me one too.

I paid my television licence throughout the years the BBC gave you the platform that made you famous.

I now pay for Amazon Prime, which helps fund the television programme about your farm.

I do not choose to watch it.

But that is how society works, Jeremy.

We all contribute towards things we may never personally use because the entire country would fall apart if every payment had to provide us with an individual benefit.

Perhaps you could also thank the taxpayers whose public services and infrastructure support your businesses.

And while you have the stationery out, perhaps you could explain the farm.

In 2021, you told The Times that avoiding inheritance tax was “the critical thing” in your decision to buy land.

In 2024, when that became rather inconvenient, you said it had never been true. You claimed you had actually bought the farm because you wanted somewhere to shoot and that tax avoidance had simply sounded like a better story at the time.

I am not sure which version helps your argument.

It is funny how public support and clever tax arrangements are treated as perfectly respectable when they benefit wealthy people.

Yet when a disabled person receives help to leave the house, go to work and participate in society, you think they should be made to perform gratitude.

So thank you for your concern, Jezza.

I hope my licence fee, Amazon subscription, taxes and contribution to the economy have all been gratefully received.

Please send your thank you letter weekly, along with a full breakdown of how you spent the money.

If it is not sufficiently fulsome and effusive, I assume your income will be stopped.

That is only fair."

[Political Spider @polispider]

Whilst I was shocked that my wife’s cancer surgery left us $5,000 out of pocket, the final bill has now come through.

The full cost? $98,524.16

That is the reality of a privatised healthcare system.

To those in the United Kingdom casually attacking the NHS and backing Reform UK Limited’s plans to dismantle it: understand what you are asking for. This is not abstract policy debate. This is what happens when healthcare becomes a market commodity instead of a public service.

Without insurance, that bill would have been ours alone. No safety net. No guarantee of affordability. Just life-altering debt at the worst possible moment.

Be very careful what you wish for !

[Jamie Jenkins @statsjamie]

Britain had the rain. So why the shortage?

Just five months after England’s eighth wettest winter, reservoirs fell from 94% full to 75.3%.

No major new reservoir in 30+ years. Population up 11.5 million. Nearly one litre in five lost through leaks.

This isn’t just about the weather. It’s about failing to build, store and maintain.

[simon maginn @simonmaginn]

Luciana Berger allowed neo-Nazi Bonehill-Paine's antisemitic attacks on her to be fraudulently used by the media as evidence of the 'Labour antisemitism crisis'.
Now he's a Tory candidate.
UK politics, 2026
#ItWasAScam
https://t.co/FybI3S6ovN

[Bryce Greene @TheGreeneBJ]

Holy shit... Wired reports that back in May, the U.S. Military was testing an experimental GPS jammer and and caused a civilian plane to crash into the side of a mountain, killing everyone on board.

[nadsat11 @nadsat11]

Lot of dosh - £500,000 or so - taken by Yvette Cooper 'from a donor linked to healthcare recruitment, or from companies ultimately owned and controlled by him'.
I have the full BMJ story with donation list.
https://t.co/c7Tuf8zjje?

[pagan386 @pagan386]

@Jacxdad3376 He was an utter Shite

[pagan386 @pagan386]

@citizentommy Indeed

[tern @1goodtern]

You may have heard about 'ocean acidification' and filed it under 'things that scientists warn about and that sound a bit scary but that I don't understand'.

So let's sort that out...

[Jody McIntyre @jodymcintyre_]

Andy Burnham says that he will cancel David Lammy’s jury trial proposals.

But did you know that he just re-appointed a former Israeli Supreme Court clerk to the Ministry of Justice?

I’ve been investigating to find out what is going on…🧵

[pagan386 @pagan386]

@Hazzreid He was an utter shit

[Dick Mackintosh🌹#StopTheWar @DickMackintosh]

Parliament binned 318 tonnes of subsidised food in a year as foodbanks struggle. As one in five worry about where their next meal is coming from during the cost of living crisis, the shocking amount of dumped food in Parliament has been revealed
https://t.co/UZIb1JWp6A

[Rakesh Kumar @Rakeshhkumaar]

They call it a “free market” until you trade outside the dollar, nationalize your resources, or elect a leader Washington doesn’t approve of. Then come the sanctions. Then come the coups. Then comes war. Suddenly, “free market” means following Washington’s rules.

[Big Brother Watch @BigBrotherWatch]

👁️Shadow Home Secretary @CPhilpOfficial is calling to make facial recognition a REQUIREMENT for every police force.

This is the same politician who
🔸Allowed the Home Office to turn all of our passport images into facial recognition mugshots
🔸Secretly lobbied the UK data watchdog on behalf of a private facial recognition firm

Criminals should be brought to justice, but papering over the cracks of broken policing with Orwellian tech is not the solution.

#StopFacialRecognition⤵️
https://t.co/6gGXvfpMcK

[pagan386 @pagan386]

@_MAGA_NEWS_

[Privacy International @privacyint]

@libertyhq To recap: ‘Technical Capability Notices’ (TCNs) let the UK secretly compel companies around the world to make their products less secure - such as demanding access to encrypted data - if UK users are involved.

https://t.co/Dc1TXsLvrK