Who gets out - and who comes in

 I doubt the liberal congoscenti will begin to comprehend the spittle flecked fury raging across the country about the erroneous release of Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, the Ethiopian migrant who arrived on a small boat and was convicted of sex offences on a 12 year old girl and a woman. When we heard this was the very dude whose original arrest was the trigger for the protests and disturbances at the Bell hotel, Epping it was a "you could not make that up" moment.

To my surprise the story wasn't even on the front page of most of the newspapers the next day which I found bizarre.

He's now been nabbed but the story epitomises the general air of incompetence around anything to do with the British government and the functions and services under its control. Many in authority will just sigh that this sort of thing is inevitable. I don't for a moment believe it is.

On the latest figures over 260 prisoners were incorrectly released in the 12 months to March 2025, a 128% increase on the previous year. So the number more than doubled. David 'Mastermind' Lammy said the government had "inherited a system that was collapsing" but he and Shabana Mahmood have overseen it getting much worse.  Something is clearly wrong in the system and I agree with the commentator who said this isn't really about an error by one person. If one officer did make an error I'm left wondering how the relevant process doesn't build in adequate checks.

Apparently the paperwork is awfully complicated. That sounds a very lame excuse. There will, I accept, be resource limitations and there is currently huge pressure on prison officers in our inadequate and overcrowded prison estate (another Tory failure, I must say. One would have thought building more prisons would have played well with their base).

But still none of that is an excuse. I don't know whether it is, but I would expect all paperwork on dangerous prisoners to be clearly marked. But I would also have expected that high political risk prisoners, like Kebatu, would be identified. There can't have been many higher political risk prisoners in the jail categories lower than A, the highest security. One can only assume they are not, which I find incredible.

Stats on the gov.uk website suggest that something like 90,000 prisoners a year are released, mainly on licence, and claims a "success rate" of 99.5%. I think that's a pretty abysmal performance for this particular activity. 1 in 200 is a fairly typical of a human error rate in a system without proper checking. A system that should be aspiring to very high reliability should be able to easily get to 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 and a high integrity system would expect to do much better than that. The government doesn't need to hold an expensive and time consuming public inquiry. It needs to marshall some of the expertise readily available to it and get a team of independent people with experience in prisons and in sectors like aviation, rail and nuclear and sort out a process that works. Releasing the wrong person shouldn't really happen more than a handful of times a year at the most, if ever.

Meanwhile the long run up to Rachel Reeves's budget continues and speculation grows. Why did she push the budget back to the latest possible date? The reason, as any accountant will tell you, is that bad numbers take much longer to add up.

I may return to what Reeves should do in her second budget but for now one can't help reflect that she didn't make particularly sound and robust decisions in her first, which was meant to be a "sort things out, once-off this parliament" budget. The general air of doom and despondency Reeves allowed to take hold in the run up to her last budget is being repeated. Talking down the economy and hiking taxes, with the ill judged NI increase made inevitable by Labour's rash manifesto promises, all pushed in the opposite direction to Labour's aspiration for growth. As Charles Colville pointed out in the Sunday Times if you talk down the economy and increase taxes on businesses then those businesses don't invest. Who knew? Well everyone, pretty much.

One straw in the wind I saw was an analysis by Chris Walker, of the independent economics consultancy Chamberlain Walker, which suggests that 1,800 former non-doms have left the country since April, twice the number expected, after Reeves abolished non-dom status which allowed people whose permanent homes are abroad to escape tax on their overseas income and wealth (note not their UK income). Most people would shrug their shoulders about that but it probably means that Reeves won't anything like get the extra £34 billion she predicted. Indeed I would expect the tax take to go down from the abolition of non-dom status. Which is why so many chancellors had left an arrangement that dated back over 200 years in place. Rachel clearly thought she knew better than two centuries of her predecessors.

The Treasury responded that the 1,800 estimate was based on "anecdotal evidence that we don't recognise". That is because the Treasury rely on data from HMRC, which collects information from people in employment. The wealthiest non-doms would be investors in and owners of businesses, not employees. Chris Walker concluded that the Treasury was "effectively flying blind" about the the behaviour of the most responsive group of non-doms, with no real idea of how many have decided to decamp to places like Dubai.

There is a less anecdotal piece of evidence which the Treasury didn't comment on. Ferrari limited its supplies of cars to Britain six months ago amid concerns that some people are getting out of the UK for tax reasons, as it's Chief Executive told the FT. OK, so we know who to believe then.

Reeves countered concerns that non-doms were leaving in an interview with the Guardian last week, in which she said "this is a brilliant country and people want to live here".

Sure Rachel, a lot of them do. The keenest seem to be folk like the guy who was removed under the one in one out deal with France and was back on a small boat within a month, d'oh...

I suppose that did show that we have some processes that work as at least that dude was immediately identified. Still, it's shame we can't swap out these two

Bonnie Blue and the swords of a thousand men

A couple of months ago there was a media tizzy over the Channel 4 "documentary" 1000 Men and Me: the Bonnie Blue story. Rather to my surprise, Mrs H agreed we should watch this to make our own minds up about the, ahem, journalistic merit of the story.

Bonnie Blue is the alter ego of Tia Billinger from Nottinghamshire, a girl with a middle class upbringing and a fascination with reality tv who turned a side hustle into a lucrative business based around exploiting her body utilising the OnlyFans "platform for creators".  Having become a "webcam model" and finding she could earn $5,000 a week she launched her OnlyFans page and established her USP in the porn market: having free sex with members of the public provided they consented to it being filmed and posted on line. The Sun showed her holding a poster saying "bonk me for free, let me film it".

The documentary charted her progress as she increased her monthly earnings into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, hiring a support team to help produce the videos and deal with all the paperwork. In order to grow her number of regular followers she decided she didn't just need to create content but to plan ever more eye popping stunts. She'd already run a series of videos about having sex with "barely legals" (which she noted wasn't her phrase) which put a whole new angle on university freshers' weeks. Her big wheeze was to set a world record by having sex with over 1,000 men in a day.

The documentary showed her planning and then posting the invitation, telling punters where they could report to take part while wondering aloud to the camera whether anyone would actually turn up. The film showed lines of men (waist down) queueing to take their turn. Bonnie had already told us they would get 40 seconds each to "do what they wanted", penetration counting as "having sex". This was some production line.

The stunt achieved its publicity objectives and her income soared to $500,000 dollars a month (some sources say over $2m a month). Where's there's muck, there's brass as they say.

However when she planned her next big stunt - being tied up naked in a glass box while members of the public did what they wanted to her - OnlyFans tired of her attention grabbing antics, or rather the credit card business that collects the cash from her punters decided it was harming their image and pressured OnlyFans to ditch her. The documentary showed a crisis meeting with her team as Bonnie realised her income had gone down from megabucks to zero in an instant.

She was more than put out - she had run every idea past the OnlyFans people before publishing her videos and got their ok. And, as she pointed out, while it might be a "platform for creators" the overwhelmimg majority of content posted is porn. She was more than miffed by the double standards.

She was only allowed to continue posting material if it used actors. So she returned to more conventional porn for a while but the need to maintain interest amongst her followers meant multiple men. Which she noted was exhausting because they were much fitter and stronger than members of the public.

Salvation was at hand in the form of another, less well known, site called Fansly. Bonnie fretted about how much the change would hit her income. Reports don't confirm her income on the new platform but it would be no sweat for her fans to migrate to Fansly so my guess is she's still putting it out there and coining it.

What did we think of the Channel 4 "documentary"? The content was tawdry, vulgar and undignified but the way it was portrayed, with some pixellation of Bonnie's anatomy and her punters only ever shown from the waist down and never actually doing anything could not be called obscene. 

Perhaps the grossest moment in the film was when Bonnie, having completed her epic feat of endurance cast her eyes over the floor of her ad hoc studio which was littered with discarded condoms and the odd bit of mislaid clothing (some of her punters must have arrived home with the odd sock missing). With a mischievous glint in her eye as an idea formed she lay down on the floor and did that snow angel thing with her arms an legs that people do in the snow, brushing the detritus aside. Yuck!

Surprisingly we warmed to some aspects of her personality. She seems close to her family and looks after them. While her parents had been shocked at their daughter's choice of "career" they are supportive, but then they've had their mortgage paid off. Her mum acts as Bonnie's PA and several of the family are Bonnie's payroll.

Her school mates have said they were shocked and surprised at how their friend's life has evolved. Tia married her privately educated boyfriend Olli, who had encouraged her when she had doubts about her webcam career, thinking she wasn't pretty enough and people wouldn't want to watch her. "No, you're beautiful, do it" the Sun reported. Olli's parents had subsidised the couple in the early days before her revenue earning took off and, at the start of the period covered by the documentary, they were still married. But by the end the weren't together.

There were a couple of take away messages from the Bonnie Blue documentary besides the obvious titillation. 

Firstly, Bonnie said she found what she did "empowering". I get that - it's certainly empowered her to accumulate a lot of money very quickly. It's her choice what she does with her body. But the obvious point to make is that what empowers her helps to disempower, intimidate and hurt large numbers of other women who aren't so assertive. The documentary didn't probe that issue, which left one feeling it was really just - er - light entertainment.

Secondly, there was some furore in the media over the ease with which young people could avoid age restrictions and view the documentary on Channel 4's streaming service. While it was tawdry it didn't show anything the majority of even "just teens" wouldn't already have been exposed to. Not that that's a good thing but that pass was sold a long time ago, unfortunately. But I wouldn't have wanted younger children to see it, with Bonnie (clothed) discussing with her producer whether the various bits of furniture were at a comfortable height for her purposes and trying out (on her own) some different positions. I'm very critical of the social media companies for not doing enough on age verification. But when the government can't seem to make sure that only people of an appropriate age watch services like Channel 4 catch up or BBC's iPlayer, how do they expect facebook, youtube and OnlyFans to do what they aren't doing with organisations under their control? For me that was perhaps as significant a point as any.

On a rather different note, after watching the programme I found myself humming a song from the early 80s I don't think I've heard in 40 years. After a while I identified it as punk influenced Tenpole Tudor's song "Swords of a Thousand Men". Ha, that's why I was humming it!

More on Tenpole Tudor below. And here is Bonnie Blue in a slightly more demure pose than some of them in the documentary:

1000 men and me: the Bonnie Blue story "documentary" is available on Channel 4's catch up service.

1000 Men and Me: the Bonnie Blue Story review - the troubling tale sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours. The Guardian, 29 July 2025

Bonnie Blue bedded hundreds of teens. But she also had a private school rugby husband and a VERY middle class upbringing. The Sun 11 November 2024 https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/31632237/bonnie-blue-middle-class-upbringing-husband/

I remembered punk recording artist Tenpole Tudor from his role in Julian Temple's 1981 film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle in which he played himself, being called "Tadpole" throughout by Irene Handl's character. Swords of a Thousand Men was his most successful recording, reaching number 6 in the UK singles chart in the same year with its singalong chorus of "Hoorah, hoorah, hoorah, yeah - over the hill with the swords of a thousand men" over a simple but catchy guitar riff. Tenpole performed under the name of Edward Tenpole, though his real name is Edward Felix Tudor-Pole. Yes, he's an actual aristocrat, a descendent of Owen Tudor, grandfather of King Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty. Punk rockers, eh?

China Syndrome

I'm puzzled by the collapse of the case against House of Commons researcher Christopher Cash and his buddy Christopher Berry. Most of the media scrum concerns whether the government gave in to bullying from China. While that would be a big story my concern is rather different. The case collapsed because China was not officially categorsed as an enemy. But why does a country have to be classified as an "enemy" for unauthorised passing of information to be a criminal offence? 

It also made me wonder how many countries are classified as enemies of the UK and which ones are they?

Having signed the Official Secrets Act myself many years ago I was under the impression that passing official secrets to anyone unauthorised would be in breach of the Act. On the occasions when I was in possession of classified documents it wouldn't have seemed to me to be a defence to say the recipient didn't belong to an enemy country. After all the recipient might pass it on.

The Commons Defence Select Commitee seemed to struggle with this when considering the Integrated Review of Security and Defence, which was carried out in 2021 and updated in 2023. The current government would therefore say it's not their work and out of date, but as they haven't updated it, it is theirs.That report concentrated on Russia and China, noting that that the Integrated Review only categorises Russia as an enemy (or at least "the most acute direct threat"). This left me wondering about Iran and North Korea for starters. But surely it wouldn't be a good idea to pass nuclear secrets to, say, Pakistan? Is that country an enemy?

It seems far too simplistic to categorise countries as enemies or allies. I'm sure there are many countries who are both friendly and antagonistic, depending on the issue. But even without those shades of grey, there's a lot of information we wouldn't want allies to see, especially at particular points in time e.g. in the run up to a trade negotiation. And there could be plenty of embarrassment if frank assessments of our allies and their leaders were leaked, as happened with comments about Trump. Are these sort of documents official secrets? Having worked in the nuclear industry not the Foreign Office, I've no idea but I doubt it.

Did the information Cash and Berry passed to the Chinese contain official secrets? We don't know. One of them was detained at Heathrow returning from China and found to have £4,000 in cash in his briefcase. Suspicious sure, but it can't have been especially valuable information, unless that was a down payment. I could easily imagine that the two prunes had a little side hussle going passing reports of tittle tattle (what's on the menu in the House of Commons tea room maybe, alongside some snippets of overheard gossip perhaps) to what they saw as gullible Chinese contacts. 

If they were passing stuff which did not contain material marked as officially secret that doesn't mean it was harmless. If the law doesn't prohibit passing of harmful info even to supposedly friendly countries it should. But a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act might not have been appropriate or the best way to proceed. In the case of the Commons researcher an employment sanction could have been considered though there would be the risk, had he been sacked without prosecution, that would have seemed weak, so politically risky. And it's not clear that avenue was open for the teacher. 

The collapsed case has also led to some angst about how to manage our relationship with China. It was remarkable with hindsight that we got into a position where a Chinese company, Huawei, would have been at the heart of our 5G network, all because BT had made major commercial deals with that company in 2005. At the time there seemed no great security concern: going back to before 2012 it seemed commerce and trade were the main aims of China but no-one appeared to ask any "what if?" questions. The "what if" came to pass when Xi Jinping became secretary, chairman and president of everything in China between 2012 and 2013. China's clampdown on Hong Kong and the Uigurs and it's more aggressive military stance in the Pacific followed. Meanwhile the UK seemed on autopilot, with David Cameron quaffing pints with Xi in the Cotswolds and the USA (Trump in particular) having to pressure Boris Johnson about Hauwei, who we seemed to want to stick with purely because of the extra cost and timescale of ditching them. It seems to have taken us a decade to get our mind round the simple fact that China wants to trade but also wants to spy on us.

Josh Glancy argued in the Sunday Times that we should choose how to deal with China pragmatically on the specifics of each issue: buy chairs from Beijing but not your wifi he said. That sounds simple but there are still many awkward areas. For example, clothes ok but what about electric cars? The Chinese company BYD is rapidly expanding its market share in the UK. Many experts think it's a very bad idea to have lots of high tech electric Chinese vehicles on UK roads. I tend to agree. But they're very much cheaper. This is not the only specific area where security and net zero would appear to be in conflict.

However we try to manage our relations with China it seems to me that we've been carelessly slow in trying to develop appropriate policies.

Together with the mess over defining and protecting our "secrets" from states that might not be enemies but might not always have our interests at heart (i.e. every other country) it's all quite a Laurel and Hardy situation really.

Post publication note: while I've concentrated here on the oddity that the recipient of leaked information appears to have to come from an enemy state for a succssful prosecution - which I'm still not sure I believe - there is one "smoking gun" in the government's position that it did not collapse the case. Starmer's National Security Adviser, the slippery Jonathan Powell, belongs to the 48 Group Club, a UK based organisation with deep ties to China's ruling communist party that aims to foster UK-China business and political relationships. That would seem to be a clear conflict of interest and completely inappropriate for his role. I find it bizarre that he didn't leave that group on his appointment as NSA. There is also the point that his deputy, Matthew Collins, included in his witness statement passages lifted from the Labour party manifesto. Sources say he wouldn't have done that without ministerial direction and that he has admitted privately that the decision not to provide the evidence requested by the CPS had been "political", contradicting claims made by Starmer and his ministers in the Commons. I note that Boris Johnson's defenestration was partly because of "misleading" parliament. Hmmm.

 P.S. Talking of employment sanctions I once terminated the contract of a project manager who had been passing commercial information to a competitor. We had evidence in the form of emails but the individual went for the modern day playbook, accused his boss (a very careful and measured chap) of bullying and took us to an industrial tribunal. There was some satisfaction when the chair of the tribunal, seeing straight through all of the nonsense, declared there was only one bully in the case and it was the claimant. I still remember the buzz that went around the open plan building after a resource manager and member of the HR team escorted this chap out of the building having arrived at his desk and requested his pass and keys. We could have been more discreet and invited him to a meeting but we wanted to make a visible example. Was that bullying? I don't think so, but it didn't backfire on us. I wonder if someone decided to make an example of Berry and Cash - and found it did backfire?

P.P.S. The China Syndrome was a 1979 film thriller starring Jane Fonda with a storyline about reporters discovering safety cover ups at a nuclear power plant. Just twelve days after the film was released the partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania made it seem prescient. The title is based on the figure of speech term for a nuclear reactor core melting down through the various containment structures and underlying earth all the way to China. While the story was fanciful I recall a key part of the plotline was the discovery of major corner cutting: all of the radiographs supposedly veryifying the different welds on a leaking component were identical. The organisation I worked for through the 1980s and 1990s pioneered the development of some non destructive testing techniques for nuclear components and was responsible for qualifying the inspectors of the Sizewell B reactor pressure vessel, basically exam testing the testers. I can't speak for the systems in place in the United States in the 1970s but reassuringly there were too many layers of verification for that particular ruse to have worked on Sizewell B, commissioned in 1995.  At Three Mile Island extensive monitoring of 30,000 people for 20 years showed no adverse health effects. I think I recall that, despite an awful lot going wrong leading to a fairly significant release of radioactivity, no member of the public received a radiation dose larger than a dental x ray.

* House of Commons publication Chapter 3: The UK in the world: allies and adversaries https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5803/ldselect/ldintrel/124/12406.htm

This City Is Ours, La

Mrs H and I are overly infuenced by reviews these days when it comes to what we watch on TV. Life is too short to watch even half of the first episode of a new series before having the debate about whether it's worth persevering with. It always feels as if we've failed to give it a chance if we bail out so early but the alternative is sticking with it all the way through only to conclude that's several hours of life we wasted and won't get back. 

Based on positive reviews we gave the BBC series This City Is Ours a go. It's based around a drug dealing family in Liverpool, which sounded fairly grim and unpromising. But we gave it a go and can recommend it.  

The lead character is played by James Nelson-Joyce who, despite his seemingly posh double barrelled name, hails from Orrell Park 3 stops on Merseyrail towards the city centre from the suburb where I was brought up. Most of the scouse accents are convincing, but his is real. He's the mean looking dude in the centre below:

Nelson-Joyce plays Michael Kavanagh, correctly pronounced in the northern way, to rhyme with Savannah with the gh having essentially no impact, rather the the southern way as in a colleague I worked with in Oxfordshire whose surname Cavanagh was pronounced Ca-vn-are. 

Kavanagh is not part of the family but is the patriarch's trusted and long serving number 2 introducing inevitable tension with the oldest son, who is somewhat younger than Kavanagh but has also come to believe he should take over the business now its founder has started thinking of retirement. And also, as a result, got greedy for larger returns, setting it up for things to go wrong.

Which made me ponder - how many drug dealers get to retire peacefully anyway? Spoiler alert - the patriarch, played by Sean Bean (who makes no attempt at a scouse accent) doesn't get to retire in good health.

We liked the many authentic scouse touches, such as the son referring to Kavanagh as "soft lad", which doesn't mean he's a softie, it's a form of mild scouse abuse meaning soft in the head, i.e. a bit dim. Soft lad can also be used as a term of teasing endearment. An example is when Mrs H, finding she needed to buy a new golf glove before playing and with no means of paying, told the our club pro shop to "put it on soft lad's account" (i.e. mine). Which produced a slightly surprised "what did you call him?" response. "Soft lad". "Oh, right then".

It turns out that Kavanagh is a bit of a softie in some ways, as well as a hard case. But I won't say more in case you decide to watch.

The series is well made, with some good choices of music and some stunning views of Liverpool as well as the inevitable grittiness. I could readily nitpick - as an example would the Colombian cartel's Spanish contact man really walk around the streets of Liverpool without a minder? But we'll definitely watch the second series which has already been commissioned.

I told Mrs H that that I'd read several years ago that Liverpool was the only English city in which the drugs trade hadn't been taken over by foreign gangs. Indeed, according to the Guardian 5 years ago, Liverpool gangs dominate the trade in guns and drugs everywhere in the UK outside London. The lead dude at the National Crime Agency's Firearms Threat Centre was quoted as saying "the evidence is that the north-west groups pretty much dominate the rest of the [criminal] communities in the UK".

Amongst their 'achievements' are gun factories which use cheap components sourced from China to convert £135 handguns from Slovakia and the Czech Republic into automatic firearms they can sell on for £5,000. They import cocaine from South American cartels via the city's container port and feed the "county lines". Links have been made with organised crime gangs in Ireland and they have good connections into Scotland.

"In Liverpool and the north-west there is a combination of really good business entrepreneurs that have evolved...learnt new mechanisms, means of communication, transport and concealment" the NCA source said. This criminal skill set should be considered alongside the city's demographics: before the pandemic a third of the city's children lived below the poverty line. "You look at the consistent demographic of unemployment and deprived areas and how serious organised crime has evolved. If you did an assessment of how society has evolved with serious organised crime, Liverpool's gangs have probably been at the forefront.... It's about sculpting your business model".

In a way that isn't at all right, proper or approriate it makes a son of Merseyside feel rather proud in a strange kind of way.

Liverpool gangs dominate guns and drugs trade outside London. The Guardian 11 July 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/11/liverpool-gangs-dominate-gun-and-drugs-trade-outside-london

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nelson-Joyce

Not My Country

I find I don't live in the country I thought I did as I grew up. 

Not due to immigration, though how one cannot be concerned at the remarkable numbers of people still arriving and claiming asylum puzzles me. Blair and Brown were culpable for engaging in a deliberate experiment with open borders but Boris Johnson lost all semblance of any control. However, that argument seems to have been won, with 56% of people saying in a recent poll that it was their biggest concern and most political parties trying to outdo each other with tough statements, though not much sign of any practicable solutions to back them up.

Rather, I always tended to think that we lived in a basically decent country where one could trust that public officials would be efficient and honest rather than being self serving and engaging in cover ups when things go wrong while leaving a trail of wrecked lives in their wake.

This specific thought occurred to me after belatedly watching the wonderful ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office. I didn't feel the need to watch the series at first as I've followed the story in the Sunday Times for over a decade after they picked up on the original Computer Weekly item from 2008. It's been like watching a slow motion disaster movie for most of that time. The lead characters and villains, specifically Paula Vennells and the Post Office's ability to bring prosecutions seemingly at a whim were all well known to me, as was the damage it had caused to so many innocent individuals. I'd been horrified by the saga for so long why watch the programme? But the reviews and the continued dragging of heels in resolving the claims caused us to watch. It was well worthwhile, from the opening scenes at Mr Bates's Post Office at Craig-y-don, just two and a half miles down the road from us. Indeed here it is:

As you can see it's a charity shop, now not a post office, though the post box is still in use on the pavement.  Here's how they made it look for the TV drama:

Awful as the Post Office scandal was - and still is - it's far from the only sorry tale of the UK's uniformly useless response to it's seemingly institutionalised inability to do the right thing by its people.

I give you as further examples the contaminated blood scandal, the numerous health trust scandals involving maternity care in particular and the poor regulation that allowed crooked businesses to create the Grenfell Tower inferno followed by the totally inadequate response that has also left many individuals all over the country suffering prolonged consequences.  

There's also the sodium valproate issue, another slow burn problem with evidence emerging in the 1980s and 1990s that the anti-epilepsy drug could cause problems for foetuses. It was downgraded as a first line treatment for women of child bearing age in 2004 but children continued to be born disabled and mothers were denied the truth. In 2018 Jeremy Hunt, then Health Secretary, commissioned a report by Baroness Cumberlege to examine valproate and two other health scandals. Her report, published in July 2020, found that patients had been "dismissed, overlooked and ignored", in some cases for decades. The government accepted some recommendations but rejected compensation. In 2022 Hunt, then chairman of the Health Select Committee, called the scandal "the most egregious injustice" and said it was time "the British state faced up to its responsibilities". England's patient safety commissioner, Dr Henrietta Hughes, was asked to examine redress and how it would work. See reported 18 months ago since which silence.

One of the points I cannot get my head around is the poor safety and accountability culture in the health service revealed time after time by the various health trust scandals. I don't begin to understand how the NHS can be so dysfunctional at escalating what we used to call "unusual occurrences" in the nuclear industry, learning from events whether they caused actual damage, constituted a "near miss" or just struck someone as possibly being "not quite right". All employees and contractors were actively encouraged to report what we called UNORs (unusual occurrences) and they were all investigated appropriately with feedback provided. The culture was "if in doubt, report it", whereas the NHS seems to adopt "if in doubt keep your bloody mouth shut".  To be fair, I later found that the UK rail industry had more of a climate of fear, with contractors reluctant to report issues in case they count against their companies in future bids for work.  Perhaps nuclear, chemicals and aviation which also have strong safety cultures, are the outliers. In many other fields of endeavour whistleblowers are not encouraged or actively bullied into silence.  

Most of these industries - don't kid yourself the health service is an industry, after all it's England's biggest employer by a street* - act in silos, pretending but not actually spreading best practice within but ignoring anything "not invented here".

Grenfell is a more complex story with an interplay between ineffective regulation and dishonest pactices by private developers and suppliers but the awfully inadequate and painfully slow response is from the same playbook.

It seems we just cannot trust that our political leaders have the know how, willpower and common decency to sort these things out.

Paula Vennells eventually returned her CBE, a few weeks before the King revoked it. But that is unusual. The majority of the culprits of that scandal and all the others just seem to sail on. The lack of accountability is concerning, but not as concerning as knowing that the culture all remains in place. So the scandals will continue.

I used to be horrified by these scandals, but now I feel ashamed as we just get empty words from empty suits who seem capable of belated apologies but never willing or able to actually fix anything.

As I said, not my country, or at least it's one a long way from the one I thought it was.

* The NHS employs around 1.5 or 1.6 million people in the UK depending which source you believe. If you add together the next nine largest employers in the UK (in order Tesco, Sainsbury's, The British Army, the DWP, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Defence, HSBC, the Metropolitan Police and Barclays Network Rail you still don't get to much more than a million. You could add HMRC (which I suspect should be in that top 10) the RAF, the Royal Navy, the BBC, the Home Office, the Scottish and Welsh governments and the UK Parliament and still get nowhere near the NHS total. 

PS Jeremy Hunt seems to be one of the few good guys in all of this, pushing for reparations for contaminated blood as Health Sec but being frustrated by the Treasury - until he went there. 

PPS I only just realised that Craig-y-Don means rocks and waves, very apposite for its location near the Little Orme.

Abandoned. Five years after a report called for payouts - and 100 parliamentary questions - the families of children born diabled as a result of an anti-epilepsy drug await justice. Sunday Times 17 August 2025

Who are the UK's top 10 employers in 2024? https://ukvisajobs.com/blog-detail/87

https://historypoints.org/index.php?page=post-office-whistleblowers-former-shop-llandudno

Liars, damned liars and dissemblers

Are NHS waiting lists coming down? A simple yes/no question it would seem.

NHS England claimed last month that"hard working staff" had delivered "record numbers of treatments" with waiting lists falling by 260,000 since Labour was elected.

But there are two things going on here.

According to reserach by the Nuffield Trust and the Health Foundation the NHS is still treating fewer patients than are joining this waiting lists. So the trend remains upwards.

So why has the waiting list total come down? It seems hospitals have got round to validating the list by removing those who have had private treatment, left the country or died. Nothing unusual in that, they should be maintaining the list. But they are doing it because they're getting paid to do what should be their job anyway. NHS England, as part of its recovery plan, is paying hospitals £33 for each patient removed from the waiting list. Since the NHS doesn't spell out what the reasons are for taking people off the list, there is a lack of transparency.

I am left wondering why on earth hospitals have to be bribed to do part of their job. Personally I'd suggest a "negative bonus" for the managers responsible for not doing their jobs if there isn't eveidence of waiting list maintenance would work just as well.

What is clear is that  public statements by the NHS and health ministers on the waiting list issue should be taken with a large pinch of salt.

What is worrying is that they must know they are, at best, dissembling. Or maybe I should just say lying?

Waiting lists being cut for £33 a patient. Sunday Times 17 August 2025

A trio inspired by statistics

 The "interesting statistics" part of the rubric below my blog title has perhaps been ignored a tad recently. So, to put that right... Some dishes are called a trio (of say lamb, or desserts). Well here's a trio of pieces inspired by statistics that caught my eye.

Racism by Machine

I was reading recently about how many first round job interviews are now carried out by AI. So, as many applicants CVs will have been generated by AI, we are in a circular competition of the bots. However, there are problems. Candidates report that the process is soulless and they don't get any feedback or sometimes any response whatsoever and are just "ghosted". But it's worse than that. University of Washington researchers used real CVs but varied names associated with white and black jobseekers in AI recruitment systems and found that the AI favoured the white-associated names 85% of the time. Female-associated names were picked only 11% of the time. "If we're not careful, AI will just automate discrimination at scale". They also found that AI interviewers trained on datasets dominated by American speakers could be biased against different accents, non-native English speakers or individuals with disabilities that affected their speech. "Candidates... can be ruled out regardless of [their] skills...reinforcing existing workforce inequalities".

I'm waiting for the first legal case of discrimination to be taken against a company which was using AI for recruitment, or other employment related processes. It wouldn't surprise me if the first such case was taken out by a law firm using AI to generate its cases.

Meanwhile we all carry on playing games and viewing videos on our phones, the modern equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns.

The significance of the dollar as the world's reserve currency

I've long known that the dollar is the predominant currency for currency transactions around the world. But I didn't realise that the dollar is used in 88% of global forex transactions. Nearly every commodity is priced in dollars. This simple fact is one of the main reasons for the USA's enduring financial strength and resilience. It also gives the USA the platform to bully/impose order/sanction miscreants (delete as appropriate). It is undoubtedly a big part of the strength and influence of the West on the world. 

The dollar's overwhelming position as the world's reserve currency is coming under threat by the USA's long term shift to being utterly spendthrift - one expected it of the Democrats but not the Republicans - but that is now being amplified by President Trump's economic "policies". China, Russia and probably quite a few other countries would much prefer to conduct business without recourse to dollars. The so called BRICS countries are making some progress towards that end. But it seems to me that the seeds of the fall of the West are already there to be seen and are of the West's own making.

The implications of falling birth rates

Tom Calver, who writes a fact rich column in the Sunday Times titled Go Figure, recently reviewed a book called After the Spike: The Risks of Global Depopulation. The book's central premise is that we are on the upper left side of a gigantic population spike. In about 50 years we will reach the peak and then humanity will start shrinking. And shrinking fast. The cause is simple. Nearly every country is on a downward fertility trend. To maintain the same population size the average woman must have two children, the review said. (Actually it must be a bit higher. It was generally reckoned to be about 2.1 depending, I guess, on infant mortality rates).

The stat that caught my eye was that, while western Europe has struggled to reach that number for some time, every other country now has the same problem. In India, the world's most populous country (interesting quiz question that, many people guess China) the average woman has 1.98 children. And that ratio is falling. The comment that really caught my eye was as follows: "No country in the world has managed to consistently increase its birth rate once it has fallen below this rate".

Unless the trajectory changes the world's population will peak at about 10 billion in the 2070s or 2080s, then fall back to about 8 billion by 2150 and - if we continue at this rate - be around a mere two billion people by 2350.

Many of our current environmental problems are caused by there being simply too many people. But the shape of this population spike has huge implications for humanity. One of the big issues with a smaller global population is a declining rate of innovation. Calver gives an example: had the global population been 10 million, not 1.4 billion, in the 1870s the chances of the light bulb being invented would have been considerably smaller.

Birth rates have been pushed back up briefly in some western countries, including in America where, between 1976 nd 2007 it grew from 1.7 to 2.1 despite increased reproductive rights and more women entering the workforce. But these examples have proved temporary. 

Nevertheless, Calver thinks the authors have exaggerated the nature of the spike. It only looks like a spike if we "zoom out". In real time he calls it more of a gentle hill. He reckons we need to find a way of getting the number back up to 2 by 2125. Which gives plenty of time for plenty of bright people to work on it.

But, of course, surely there's going to be AI to do that for us?

No, I wouldn't rely on that either. But the seeds of humanity's downfall, not just the West, are perhaps coming into view.

Interviewed by a bot: how AI is ruling the jobs market. Sunday Times 22 June 2025.

I've read the stat about the predominance of the dollar in global transactions in several places, but I saw it most recenty in Irwin Stelzer's brilliant American Account column in the Sunday Times.

Calver's review of After the Spike by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso was in the Sunday Times on 6 July 2025