The Russian honey trap

We should shed no tears over the oleaginous Peter Mandelson’s downfall, after so many previous disgraces this slippery, slithy tove has slithered his way out of.

What’s striking, though, is Jeffrey Epstein’s travelling harem seems to have included a large number of young Russian women.

It’s almost as if Vladimir Putin and his chums plotted to implicate as many influential people as possible in one vast honey trap with, or without, the connivance of the spider at the centre of the web.

Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, the Windsor formerly known as Prince, the current President of the United States, various bankers… the list of luminaries involved with the great financier and paedophile goes on and on (though only one relatively minor offender is actually in jail).

So is this all a Russian plot to destabilise the West? If so, you can only say it’s been a great success.

Police 'dodgy dossier' scraping the barrel

Crime commissioner Simon Foster has been pleading poverty again in a bid to put up local taxes to cover an alleged £41 million ‘black hole’ which would certainly be filled if only he stopped wasting public money.

What may or may not be a waste of money (see Birmingham Council’s Oracle debacle) is the West Midlands Police ‘Synergy’ IT programme on which it spent a little over £1.8 million in November and £3.4 million in October.

You’d at least think it was enough to ensure that, when they Googled for evidence to justifying a ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters attending a match at Villa Park, the results would be trustworthy.

On his humiliating recall to Parliament, Chief Constable Craig Guildford told MPs he stood by his force’s ‘dodgy dossier’ exaggerating the cost of policing a Maccabi Tel Aviv game in Holland, completely inventing one against West Ham and falsely claiming it had consulted local Jewish groups.

So what about WMP’s IT policies? It’s hard to tell, after wading through a 2024 report by Marc Williams, its ‘Head of Architecture’.

It uses the word ‘leverage’ 38 times in 35 pages and you can be certain any official report relying on a word that has to be pronounced in the accent of a Wall Street trader means you’re in for a cold shower of meaningless drivel.

For instance, ‘policing Data has become the apex of focus for untapped potential’ while ‘desktops are being leveraged to provide the niche use-case where the fixed technology makes sense’ and so on.

Even so, maybe Mr Guildford should have waded his way through this gibberish (why are IT people incapable of using plain English?) because it does warn: ‘Trust and Confidence in policing's use of public data is critical.’

Mr Guildford told MPs his force ‘do not use artificial intelligence’ which is interesting because his IT report says: ‘A logical step in the enhancement of Data within policing is the potential to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies.’

Mind you, the report does add: ‘Policing needs to proceed with caution here.’

https://www.expressandstar.com/sport/football/aston-villa/2026/01/06/west-midlands-police-chief-denies-scraping-for-reasons-to-ban-maccabi-tel-aviv-fans-from-aston-villa-match/

Oh no it’s no-go Lenovo

Tried buying a new PC from Lenovo but they refused to deliver it at a convenient time. Cancelled the order. They then asked for a review so I submitted the following:

Still waiting for a refund

Never delivered because of Lenovo’s ridiculously inflexible delivery policies which forced me to cancel the order after several conversations with employees who said changing the delivery date was ‘against the rules’. Eventually forced to cancel the order and ask for a refund. Three weeks later I am still asking for a refund and still haven’t had one. The computer may or may not be good but the service is absolutely lousy

Surprise, surprise I got the following from Lenovo:

“Computer says no,

“Our staff has read your review and values your contribution even though it did not meet all our website guidelines. Thanks for sharing, and we hope to publish next time!”

Still waiting for a refund…. have called their helpless line three times. They just laugh at me and say I'll get my money back within six working days of the PC arriving back in Amsterdam (if it ever does).

LATER: Lenovo blame a system update and claim they will have it sorted in within five working days and may then considfer a refund. However it's noe been more than a month and if this is any guide to the value of their computers then they are in real trouble.

Birmingham taxpayers bung unions £1 million

Bankrupt Birmingham Council has smashed the £1 million trade-union time-off barrier.

In the 2024-25 financial year, taxpayers allowed 60 employees to spend more than half their working hours on union work at a cost of £1,099,124.66. The year before, it was 46 people and £777,412.

This increase in union activity at the taxpayers’ expense comes even though there is no end in sight to the bin dispute with the Unite union.

Meanwhile, as the council spends millions so we can all get on our bikes, it’s not above paying its staff’s parking fines for them.

In November, the taxpayer paid out £420 in parking fines via council credit cards. In fact, the council has paid at least £25,000 in employees’ parking fines since April 2021 though that’s probably an under-estimate as not all such payments are recorded as ‘penalty charge notices’.

And taxpayers are now on the hook for electric cars as well.

According to the council’s own credit card data, taxpayers were charged £4,920 for topping up electric vehicles – even though they were also billed £4,246 for council old bangers polluting its clean air zone.

All this driving around is clearly necessary – last month the council’s well-travelled credit cards forked out over £11,000 at hotels as far afield as Kensington, Ealing, Manchester and Oxford.

But it seems odd the council is pursuing its war on the motorist (£540,000 for speed bumps last month) while allowing its own staff to park where they want, drive what they like and motor wherever they choose. Maybe on union business.

Time to end the BBC's poll tax and give viewers a windfall

Now there is renewed debate over the future of the BBC, isn’t it time to privatise the corporation by swapping every TV licence for one share in the business?

Amid all the talk of subscriptions and paywalls and the future of BBC radio, nobody seems to ask who it belongs to – the licence-payers.

So, if it is to become a revenue-generating business – rather than relying on the licence fee poll tax – the owners deserve a pay-off.

BBC could easily become commercially viable rival to people like Netflix and Apple TV. It is an extremely valuable entity with (despite recent failings) a global reputation, some very successful programmes and a valuable back-catalogue. It could become a major player in the media industry.

It would probably attract interest from a range of media businesses which would have to acquire shares in the BBC. Those shares belong to every licence holder – one licence equals one share.

This windfall to licence-payers would leave us free either to hold onto our shares or sell them at the prevailing market rate as viewers would be required to subscribe and/or endure advertisements if they wanted to use BBC services.

We no longer need a State broadcaster. But if the BBC entered the commercial world, it should thrive. Privatisation would be a new era for the BBC, not some sort of punishment (though no doubt that's how it would be portrayed in some quarters). And by giving every licence-holder one share, it would ensure every viewer had a vested interest in the success of the corporation in its new guise.

Tell Sid.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz94q0v4kq2o

Dumbo Dimbo and the BBC poll tax

As David Dimbleby, the hereditary BBC Royalty correspondent, bites the hand that feeds him, the corporation thanked its viewers for paying for the programme.

The BBC, struggling for relevance and support in the streaming era and despite its dubious and downright libellous editorial decisions, failed to spot the irony.

While it is employing a Dimbleby whose family made its name bowing and scraping to the Monarchy, the turncoat is now attacking the Monarchy’s alleged wealth (who thinks they will really sell the Royal stamp collection or any of the valuable paintings held on the nation’s behalf?).

His immensely tedious programme went on ad nauseam about how rich the Royals are thanks to tax-dodging deals with the likes of George Osborne. And he made it clear we taxpayers have no choice but to endure these rich and privileged Royals lording it over the plebs.

It’s worth remembering the BBC is funded by their own special unavoidable poll tax which raises £3.8 billion. The Royal family costs us £132 million.

Birmingham’s £650 million bad debt disaster

No business can expect to survive for long if it doesn’t collect the money it's owed and any business which doesn’t bother to chase up its debts deserves to go bust.

Birmingham Council, as we know, went bankrupt because it had an equal pay liability of maybe £750 million and an £80 million overspend on its Oracle computer system.

Perhaps even these disasters need not have doomed the council if it were not for the fact that it is apparently incapable of collecting the money it’s owed.

The commissioners sent to restore order from chaos reveal in their third letter to the Government, published this month, just how incapable the council really is.

What with unpaid council tax, unpaid business rates, over-paid housing benefit and so on, the council – which wrote off £30 million in bad debts last year – is chasing an astonishing £650 million it’s owed.

The commissioners say: ‘There is effective senior leadership of the finance function, which is a positive starting point; however, the structure below the Director still has a significant number of temporary staff and there are capability deficiencies in some key functions. The Council has a plan to address these staffing inadequacies, and it is important that this is resolutely applied.

‘To demonstrate the scale of the task, one area that requires modernisation is in respect of ‘accounts receivable’. Debt levels remain high at c.£650m and whilst there is a programme to improve the position, the long legacy of poor or non-existent debt collection in some service areas means that this will be a resource-intensive multi-year programme.’

I did ask the council how much of that £650 million it realistically expected to recoup (no response) but I reckon we can all guess the answer.

This, surely, is an even greater scandal than its ludicrous over-spending on computers or its failure to deal with Tony Blair’s time-bomb legislation on equal pay. No wonder the commissioners don’t plan to give up their lucrative part-time work for another three years.

https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/news/article/1686/third_birmingham_city_council_commissioners_letter_published