Peter Davies

⚠️ Graphic content. Ann McElliney and Phelim McAller have made this film based on actual court transcripts from the UK. What has and is still happening to children across our country is absolutely devastating. @annmcelhinney @PhelimMcAleer

@SjBarrister @AllForProgress_ It's not a system, it's a job. Workers work. shirkers shirk. You appear to live in a different universe to me.

@peted76 @AllForProgress_ You design a system - people use the system - you moan about the people not the system. That is not a hot take - that is simply what you are doing.

A whistleblower has revealed this month that civil servants across multiple Whitehall departments have been gaming the flexitime system to award themselves up to fifty extra days of paid holiday a year That's about 2.5 months of full-time work lifted off the public payroll without record, on top of the CS-norm 26 days of annual leave, the eight public holidays, the contractual sick days, and of course the parental allowances that are already part of the standard package. The methods and techniques by which this fraud has been accomplished are worth dwelling on, because the detail tells you something about the institution. The first technique is the laptop-open-on-the-kitchen-table move. Here, the civil servant clocks off for all intents and purposes at 5pm but leaves a work laptop on, accumulating "active hours" from a home Wi-Fi connection, registering the evening as labour without performing any of it. The second trick is the commuting-time-as-paid-hours wheeze, in which the round trip from Surbiton to Whitehall - coffee-and-podcast - is logged as part of the working day. The third con, which the whistleblower reported as the most brazen of them all, is the straightforward falsification of office attendance against the three-days-a-week-on-site rule that this government, having promised the public a return of civil servants to civil-service buildings, has manifestly failed to enforce. The falsifications, in some cases, have been running for years. Sit, for a moment, with the kind of person who does this and the kind of institution that permits it. The person doing it is, in the main, a desk-bound senior official on between £55,000-130,000 a year, with access to a clocking system that runs on trust, who has decided, with the active connivance of his line manager and the silent assent of his department, that the appropriate response to that public trust is to defraud it. And it's not even ambitious or spectacular. At least with a major fraud, you have a level of vision and nerve you have to admire even as you despise the motivating corruption. No, here, it's done through a series of small, deniable engineered manoeuvres that together transfer large sums of public money into undeserving pockets. No honour among thieves, but some thieves are even less honourable than others. The institution that permits it is the British Civil Service, an organisation whose senior cadre has spent the last decade in a state of escalating public-facing self-pity about its working conditions while the country it is paid to run has visibly fallen apart underneath it. These are the same people who inherited the mandate of Brexit and, because the idea ran against the Metropolitan class bromides by which they orient their lives, hashed it up on purpose to punish the electorate whom they are duty-bound to serve. And it's the same civil service that could not, in the end, manage a single COVID procurement contract without losing about £30 billion out of the back of the warehouse. In light of this general disposition, a flexitime fraud is its small, daily, individual expression. And the cost is not abstract. The Civil Service pay bill runs to roughly £15 billion a year. Headcount has grown by approximately a hundred and fifty thousand since 2016, with the deepest expansion in the policy and "leadership non-teacher" desk grades, the exact cohort the whistleblower says is gaming hardest. Every 50-day phantom holiday, on a senior salary, is around £20k of public money paid for nothing. The country has been told for years, under successive governments, that there is no fiscal room for the things the country actually wants, like policing, prosecutions, courts that sit, borders, doctors, dentists, because the public finances are too tight. Bollocks are they. You've got a whole parallel economy of piss-artist leave-taking running in Whitehall, and there'll be plenty more cash coming in to keep its subsidy even given this whistleblower's report. I don't for a second believe that no one senior saw it or knew about it, just as I don't believe that the rampant inequities in our police departments go unnoticed by whole legions of bystanders. But the bystanders are not arsed. That's why I say "Hooray for the whistleblower." Their life is going to be hell. They will be hugely unpopular. They will be described as bitter, disloyal, mentally ill, motivated by personal grievance, and unrepresentative of the dedicated public servants who go above and beyond. That is what these institutions always say when one of their own breaks ranks. It is what they said to Maggie Oliver about Rotherham, to Alan Bates about Horizon, to the survivors of the Letby ward, the Cumberlege report, and the Sussex maternity unit. The smothering of internal dissent is now part of what the British civil service does for a living. The actual public service is something it has subcontracted to itself, badly, in stolen office hours, from the kitchen table. I was the Civil Service comprehensively remade in this country, the only way such things are ever made, which is by changing the people and all the incentives under which they operate. These people have been on the public payroll for fifteen years and have produced nothing for which the public can be grateful. It's time to find out where the hours went, and dispense with those who are wasting them, along with our money.

@katieAL @AllForProgress_ Wow.. you've taken a leap or two there! My hot take, the civil service is limp wristed and full of people trying to keep getting paid for taking no responsibility for actual outcomes.

@AllForProgress_ Sounds like a bit of looseness of a tiny few is being blown all out of proportion to justify a DOGE type ridiculousness, which then cuts the teams which investigate FAR more expensive to the taxpayer corporate wrongdoing and mega millionaire tax evasion

@SjBarrister @AllForProgress_ Hell of a take there, however I guess being a barrister, this is exactly the kind of take which one might expect. People get paid to work, not to be at work or just clock in and clock out, the pay is for actually doing a job.

"Whitehall departments have been gaming the flexitime system" You mean, using the system within the rules of the system, but creating an outcome you don't like. This language is pejorative but it doesn't suggest that anyone has broken the rules. Instead of acting like these people have done some "wrong" why don't you simply call out a poorly designed system?

@elonmusk There are best practises related to road collision reporting, these were officially introduced in 2021. The main aspect/reason was to assign human agency. None of these reports adhere to that.

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@officialsammyuk @recusant_raja Whatever the facts of this matter are, you are both fighting on the same side. You're both hugely important to the cause of justice and only the leftists benefit from this spat. Please sort it out the pair of you!!

Raja, I spoke with you privately and addressed things in a meeting. I have tried calling you three times to speak with you directly, and I’ve also messaged you privately to deal with this. You spoke about me publicly on your podcast, which I responded to publicly. You then sent a letter to my workplace, threatening me which is just low. You need to apologise and move on. If you speak publicly about someone, you must expect a response. It works both ways. You made this public so I responded publicly. You have my number, I’ll look forward to your call and your apology.

Raja Miah is lying. The letter he sent threatening legal action if I did not meet his demands has been received, and I have taken legal advice. I will not cave to his silly demands. I can assure you that Raja will not win in court. I will be contacting my legal team again in the morning so evidence can be provided to the public. For him to claim that he sent no such letter concerning me is absolutely ridiculous.

In 2001 the Home Office put an investigator in to Rotherham Council. She put together a report naming a local Pakistani drug gang, who were already grooming children. She sent a copy of her report to the Home Office. She sent a copy to the Chief Constable. It gave names, addresses, phone numbers and an estimation of 270 victims. The Home Office told her to be silent. South Yorkshire Police, took no action but forced her to go on a diversity course because all of the names on her list were Pakistani. The Gang were not convicted until after Blair and Brown had both been evicted from Number 10. By then an estimated 1,400 children had been groomed in Rotherham alone. How do any of the members of the Blair/Brown Cabinets, Home Office workers and senior police officers still have work on the public payroll or are still getting a gold plated pension? Why didn't Starmer's CPS get them convicted? How do any of them, including Andy Burnham, sleep at night?

@JohnSlinger The irony! Some of the people who disagree with Keir, he 'literally' labelled as enemies!

One thing I’ve not heard much of in the debate about who should be Prime Minister of our country is the human being at the centre of this, & his family, & the effect of this on them all. The vitriol is off the scale. Show some humanity. People we disagree with are not enemies

@BBCPolitics ... 'cause I think our country is already down a very dark path Sir Keir.

"We are not just facing dangerous times, but dangerous opponents, very dangerous opponents," PM Keir Starmer says "If we don't get this right, our country will go down a very dark path," he adds Follow live: bbc.in/4tpGnSE

@BBCPolitics When he says dangerous opponents, does he mean anyone that wants the law to be upheld in all areas of criminality and not 'downgrade' crimes.

@BBCPolitics When he says dangerous opponents, does he mean anyone that wants a straight forward answer about anything really and isn't gaslit with either a very narrow 'legal' answer or if that fails.. gaslit as a baddie for caring.

@BBCPolitics When he says dangerous opponents, does he mean anyone that is opposed upping our taxes to fund a fag packet idea for wind farms across the country which we can't afford or utilise properly?

@BBCPolitics When he says dangerous opponents, does he mean anyone that is opposed to housing and funding the lifestyles of proven terrorists from Afghanistan and Iran?

@BBCPolitics When he says dangerous opponents, does he mean anyone that is opposed to higher taxes to fund the welfare bill?

@BBCPolitics When he says dangerous opponents, does he mean pentioners or waspi women?

@BBCPolitics When he says dangerous opponents, does he mean anyone that has an opposing opinon to his lobbyists?

@BBCPolitics When he says dangerous opponents, does he mean someone who opposes what he and his gang think?

@BBCPolitics When he says dangerous opponents, does he mean anyone that is opposed peodophiles? It seems Labour are firmly entrenched in protecting peodophiles of all kinds.

@GBNEWS No.. it really is politicians.. and your funders and lobby'ists.

'This Labour Government will block far-right agitators from traveling to Britain for that event.' Sir Keir Starmer says his Labour Government 'will not allow people to come to the UK, to threaten our communities and spread hate on our streets'.

@SkyNews This man is a barrister with a skewed view of the world, and has lost the British people through a series of disastrous decisions over the past two years. He must go, parliament should be dissolved. The backroom staff who advise this slop must be removed.

"I am fighting for them. We are fighting for them. I am their Prime Minister, and this is their government." Sir Keir Starmer says he's spent too much time talking about what he's doing for working people, and not enough about why or who he stands for. trib.al/gPf8UG5