HOW BRITAIN REWARDS PEOPLE WHO TRY TO SAVE TAXPAYER MONEY: FIRE THEM
Mike Kiely spent 22 years inside BT (@BTGroup). He knew how the telecoms industry operated. So when the government hired him as a consultant to oversee the £2.5 billion rural broadband rollout, he knew exactly what he was looking at.
BT had won all 26 government contracts. All of them.
Kiely did the maths. Installing a street cabinet in Northern Ireland cost around £13,000. On the mainland, BT was charging the government between £61,000 and £80,000 per cabinet. Public money covered roughly 77% of every single one.
He suspected BT was simply inventing tasks and inflating charges to absorb as much public funding as possible without doing more work.
So he shared his analysis with local councils. The people whose job it was to negotiate these contracts and spend public money responsibly.
Then his document leaked to a broadband blog.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport trawled his internal emails, found what they needed, and sacked him. The man who tried to protect public money.
Margaret Hodge (@margarethodge), chair of the Public Accounts Committee, told the Guardian (@guardian) she was getting increasingly concerned at the way whistleblowers were being bullied. She pointed out that hiding behind commercial confidentiality was denying the public the right to know how their money was being spent.
Her committee later confirmed what Kiely had warned all along. Taxpayers had been ripped off. £1.2 billion had gone to BT shareholders.
Kiely was eventually vindicated when a community in Oxfordshire paid £28,000 per cabinet. Exactly in line with what his numbers predicted was fair.
He lost his job for telling the truth. BT kept every contract.
This is what accountability looks like in Britain. The consultant who raises the alarm gets sacked. The company he raised the alarm about gets the cheque.
Support whistleblowers. They are the only audit most public spending ever gets.
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@BBCNews@TheRegister@guardian@margarethodge
This entire campaign was sold with a sense of desperate urgency, yet Esther Rantzen is still with us and Parliament is again being pushed to rush one of the gravest moral and legal changes imaginable. We cannot even guarantee decent care for the living. Why would anyone trust the state with assisted death?
Between Tesla and SpaceX Elon got 38,000 million dollars in government subsidies on his way to becoming the world's first trillionaire, or about $120 for every man, woman, and child in the USA. That makes Sissy SpaceX the biggest immigrant welfare queen in American history
Funny how debt is forgivable when it's tied to yachts, hedge funds, or failed businesses, but suddenly becomes a character flaw when it's tied to education, healthcare, or survival.
A truly wonderful story. And, come on, admit it: you wouldn't raise even an eyebrow if your spouse spent around 5% of their post-tax income buying a pair of your old shoes. You'd think this perfectly normal behaviour and shame on those who think differently.
@bubbotron3000@DannyBeales Absolute rubbish. I’ve had more homophobic abuse from the trans lobby in the last ten years than I experienced in the 50 years before that.
Gender ideology is a homophobic cult.
Ugh. This is DISGUSTING @LushLtd. Teenage girls love to shop in your stores and here you are happily encouraging them to CUT OFF THEIR HEALTHY BREASTS in the name of trans pride.
This is beyond repulsive. It's dangerous and sick. No parent should allow their child near your stores.
Please share: #BoycottLushNow
We are especially concerned by the role of Equality Network which is currently attempting to overturn the SC ruling. These groups are not accountable or open to FoIs.
It is time this was addressed.
Can’t stop thinking about how Wall Street is celebrating Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire, while he single handedly eliminated humanitarian aid that will lead to the needless deaths of 4.5 million of the poorest children in the world in the next 4 years.
@TheParty1sOver All his assets were frozen so technically he has no money. Everything will probably be needed to pay back what he stole. If there is anything left legal aid will claim it. It’s the way it works same rules for everyone in the same circumstances
We lost the vote 71-50 tonight which would have forced a Scottish Parliamentary inquiry into the SNP’s murky affairs.
John Swinney’s pals, the Greens backed the SNP to avoid scrutiny.
The public deserve better.
As a lesbian, I am so tired of this nonsense. I am tired of corporate Pride and activist Pride.
This week HelloFresh decided that the best way to celebrate Pride Month was to post jokes about preparing for anal sex and offering high-fibre recipes to help people "prep". They then doubled down with a discount code called BOTTOMSUP.
Inclusion! WOO! 🙄
The thing that frustrates me is that people like me have spent years defending gay rights against accusations that we are hypersexual, inappropriate, and incapable of ordinary family life.
That was one of the central prejudices gay people faced. For decades, opponents portrayed gay men in particular as sexually obsessed and depraved. They argued that homosexuality was all about sex rather than love, commitment, relationships and family. The fight for equal rights was partly a fight against exactly that caricature.
And now here we are. A major multinational company has decided the best way to celebrate Pride is to publicly discuss anal sex. What an achievement.
The same-sex marriage movement wasn't about sex. It was about love, commitment, and the ability to build a life with the person you love. It was about family and equality before the law.
Most gay people are not what the weirdos in the HelloFresh marketing department think we are. We go to work, pay bills, walk the dog, argue about whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher, and try to build a decent life together.
You know... Normal things.
The overwhelming majority of gay people just want to be accepted and left alone. We want the same freedoms, responsibilities and opportunities as everyone else. We don't need multinational corporations making dirty jokes about us to feel "included".
What makes this even more ridiculous is that HelloFresh's core market is clearly not radical "queer" activists with blue hair and septum rings.
Their customers are overwhelmingly middle-class couples and families. Busy parents. Professionals. People with disposable income who want convenient meals after work.
How hard would it have been to make a genuinely wholesome Pride advertisement?
Two mums cooking dinner with their kids or two husbands hosting friends. A same-sex couple just making dinner together or flipping a coin to see who has to cook. A simple message acknowledging families and love. Instead they went with rectum jokes.
Somewhere along the way after the TQ+ hijacked our movement, Pride stopped being about acceptance and started being about performance. A small but influential group of activists have convinced themselves that being as shocking, vulgar and sexually explicit as possible is somehow brave and intrinsically "queer". They think boundaries of any kind are oppression including standards and decorum. They think manners are censorship.
The result is campaigns like this one and somehow people are shocked when there is backlash against us all.
I actually feel really sorry for gay men in particular because one of the oldest stigmas they have faced is the idea that they are dirty, promiscuous and defined entirely by sex. This campaign reinforces that stereotype.
If you wanted to design an advertisement that would make ordinary people roll their eyes and think Pride is ridiculous, or shield their children's eyes in horror, you would struggle to do better than this.
The irony is that HelloFresh's marketing department thinks this is progressive. It's regressive and distasteful. It takes decades of work by ordinary gay people who want to be seen as neighbours, colleagues, parents, partners and family members and reduces all of it to a crude sexual punchline.
The people who fought for our rights wanted dignity, but the people most enthusiastic about Pride today seem determined to turn it into a fetish convention with corporate sponsors.
November 1971. Chiswick, West London.
Erin Pizzey is 32 years old. She is not a lawyer. Not a politician. Not a doctor.
She is a woman who talked Hounslow Council into lending her a cold, rundown building on Belmont Road — a former community hall — for almost nothing. Her original plan was modest. A warm room. A cup of tea. Somewhere for mothers with young children to simply get out of the house.
Then the door opened.
A woman stood in the entrance. She was covered, head to foot, in bruises. She was holding two small children. She was shaking.
She didn't want tea.
She needed somewhere to hide.
Erin let her in. She didn't turn her away. She didn't tell her to call the police.
Because Erin had already called the police. They told her the same thing they told every woman in Britain at the time: they could not enter a private home over a "domestic dispute." That was the law. The home was private. What happened inside it was a family matter.
When Erin contacted a female civil servant to report what she was seeing, the response was astonishing. The woman told her flatly: "There wasn't a problem of battered wives until you made one."
Erin put down the phone. Then she went back to her residents and made sure they were fed.
Within weeks, 40 mothers and children were sleeping in four tiny rooms. No funding. No staff. No legal authority.
She didn't stop.
By 1973, word had spread through quiet whisper networks — one woman telling another, "There is a place. Go to Chiswick. She won't turn you away." That same year, Erin hosted the first National Women's Aid Conference in the UK. Women from across Britain arrived, and they all recognized the same thing at once: what she had built needed to exist everywhere.
In 1974, the council set a maximum of 36 residents. At peak times, 150 women and children were living inside those walls — sleeping on floors, on chairs, in hallways. The building smelled of cooking, fear, and something else entirely: relief.
Erin was taken to court for overcrowding. She appealed all the way to the House of Lords.
She kept the doors open the entire time.
That same year, she wrote a book. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear. It was the first published account of domestic violence in British history. It used real stories from real women inside the shelter. Overnight, a problem that had no official name was on front pages from London to New York.
The movement spread. Refuges opened across the UK. Then Australia. Then Canada. Then the United States. The pattern she created in four small rooms in West London — no blueprint, no permission, no funding — had been replicated in hundreds of shelters across the Western world.
MP Jack Ashley stood up in Parliament and said: "It was she who first identified the problem, who first recognised the seriousness of the situation and who first did something practical."
She was ranked 14th in a poll of the 100 women who shook the world. She was awarded the Italian Peace Prize. She received a CBE. The charity she founded — Chiswick Women's Aid, which became Refuge — grew into the largest domestic violence charity in the United Kingdom, with over 460 employees and an annual income of more than £33 million.
Erin Pizzey passed away on October 4, 2025, aged 86.
She never stopped.
It all began with one woman, one borrowed building, and an absolute refusal to say no.
Forty women and children showed up with nowhere to go.
She made room.
Share this if you believe one ordinary person, refusing to look away, can build a shelter that holds the whole world.
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This fantastic video was made by @andysayshi1, and he would love to see it shared as widely as possible.
(he doesn’t even care about the credit, but i think he deserves a massive thank you)
This seems pretty clear, & see the explicit statement in the embedded link that donors’ money would go direct to an Indy campaign. I used to practise criminal law. I can’t think of a reason why this isn’t, or did not morph into, fraud. Nor do I see why it took 5 years to investigate, apparently coming up with nothing (so far).
If you’re in a hurry, this screenshot is Branchform in a nutshell. In 2021 the police already KNEW the fundraisers were fraudulent and the money had been spent. They knew nothing about Murrell. Two separate crimes, but only one has been dealt with. https://t.co/xSi1Dqe2hF