State benefits here, AI and swearing there, stupidity everywhere

1 November 2025

Without doubt, the most shocking of recent excitements is a new insight I gained into the Britain’s state benefits system.  A neuro-divergent friend, a single-parent with two small children, struggles to survive on Universal Credit and Child Benefit.  The older child was recently diagnosed as needing a SEND plan and the school counsellor said they should apply for Disability Living Allowance.

When the DWP heard about this application they immediately cancelled the next Universal Credit payment because they hadn’t been told about a change in circumstances.  People claim benefits because they can’t live without them so letting a Jobsworth remove a benefit because of a technical breach of their bureaucracy leaving the claimant Sweet Fair Angela to pay their rent and heating bills and buy food for the next month seems … petty (the kindest word I can think of)

What can anyone say about a bunch of civil servants (paid by you and me) who enforce such an ineffably stupid and cruel response? 

I wonder how ‘changes in circumstances’ are defined?  For example, should a parent report that a child will no longer drink Ribena but will now drink Dr Pepper?  If this should be reported, we can all overwhelm the bastards with trivialities.

Perhaps I’ll google it and see how changes in circumstances are defined.

I read recently that Google’s AI programming has some sort of swearing restrictions and will anticipate questions rather than offer the results of a wider search.  If you ask “What is AI?”, you’ll get an AI-generated selection of links;  if you ask “What the fuck is AI?”, you get a quite different selection.  (Of course I tried it.)

Apparently, you can also circumvent those irritating chatbots by repeating “I want to talk to a human”, or say something is an emergency, but I haven’t yet tried this.

In other news, Plaid Cymru won an election for a traditionally Labour seat in Wales;  Labour and Conservatives were humiliated and Reform was disappointed.

Further east, Andrew Windsor, the piss-artist formerly known as Prince, was stripped of all his titles  while others just worried about digital ID cards.  Why do people get so exercised about having them?  We already have photo ID driving licences and passports, I have an iris scan on a computer somewhere in America, my mother’s ‘maiden name’ was shown in ‘Who’s Who’ until I deleted it some 20 years ago, and Sainsburys know where I live.

I also wonder how many people give honest answers to ‘security questions’ about things like my favourite football team and the name of my first pet (both ‘hydrangea’ if you’re interested).

However, with the incomparable brilliance of governments generally, it seems a trial run will introduce a smartphone-based veteran card available to 1.8 million people.  “Veteran”?  Does that mean those of us who are a generation behind technology, haven’t even got smartphones and are more likely to be suffering from dementia?  I have already had to accost passing strangers at 11 pm on dark nights to offer to repay them in cash if they’ll use their smartphone to pay for my parking because the car park company’s payment machine doesn’t accept cash or cards or jokes from Christmas crackers.

More worrying still are the results by research by Cardiff University into how viewers’ preferred news media influence their beliefs about what is happening in the world.  For example, they discovered that 84% of GB News viewers believed net migration into the UK is still increasing, compared with 71% of ITV viewers, 62 % of BBC viewers and 51% of Channel 4 viewers.  It’s interesting that, in all these cases, more than half these viewers still believe net migration has increased although, in fact, while net migration did rise between 2020 and 2023, it has since been falling.  But who lets facts stand in the way of a good story?

Incidentally, can anyone think of any other political party leader apart from Nigel Farage who is allowed to front their own series on a television news channel?  I’ve tried watching some of his (and other) GB News shows but my hearing no longer lets me separate individual voices when two people are shouting over each other and I get more pleasure from reading a good book anyway.

In the Middle East, the word ‘ceasefire’ is gaining a new meaning.  Because Hamas hadn’t returned the remains of all their hostages and an Israeli soldier was killed in a skirmish between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants, Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a raid on Gaza that killed at least 104 people, 35 of them children, and wounded many more.  The situation was further complicated by Hamas’s return of the remains of a hostage who Israeli forces had claimed to have recovered two years ago. 

And there was I thinking “ceasefire” meant that firing would cease.

More evidence of stupidity came from the covid inquiry when Boris Johnson denied claims that his government had failed to prepare for school closures, saying he thought it would be “amazing” if the Department for Education hadn’t done this.  Chuck Brodsky once sang about George W Bush: “Orders come down right from the top / to punish the guy who pushes the mop”.

So here’s another example of stupidity at the bottom of the food chain in our nearest town: last week, a woman pushing a buggy, was being followed by a somewhat older child who, unbeknownst to her, dropped a sweet wrapper.  Suddenly, a “Littering Enforcement Officer” loomed out of the shadows and fined the mother £120, payable NOW or they’d call the police.  These people have the power to fine people from £75 to £150, so what costs £75 if a sweet wrapper costs £120 – an unexpected sneeze?  

Thus did the Jobsworth make a parent responsible for a crime they didn’t even know had been committed.  Surely this will allow:  “Good evening, sir, I’m a police officer.  You may have thought your 9-year-old was in their bedroom but they’ve just been caught setting fire to the Council offices so you’re under arrest for arson.”

Two liars, Russia’s defences, new capitalists and dating

3 June 2023

The most extraordinary story this week has been the public enquiry into the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic. 

It’s being led by Baroness Heather Hallett, a retired English judge of the Court of Appeal and a crossbench life peer, who was praised by Boris Johnson when he selected her to lead the enquiry in December 2021.  “She brings a wealth of experience to the role, and I know shares my determination that the inquiry examines in a forensic and thoroughgoing way the government’s response to the pandemic,” he said.

However, as things have progressed, this seems to have been another of Johnson’s bad decisions, for him at least, as the enquiry has demanded his unredacted WhatsApp messages, diaries and notebooks from the time.  Initially, the Cabinet Office and Johnson both refused to release them but, possibly realising that his refusal made us all think he had something to hide, Johnson had changed his mind and handed the material directly to the enquiry himself.

The Cabinet Office has said that, for the first time in history, there are “important issues of principle” around releasing information that might not be relevant.  Happy to ignore an established, centuries-old precedent, the government is claiming this would set a new precedent that could lead to demands for information relating to serving ministers including – tell it not in Gath – the prime minister.

Goodness gracious!  Transparency of government?  Huh!

(Cynics have, of course, now questioned Johnson’s motives in releasing the stuff.)

The saddest story of the week is about Phillip Schofield, the former co-presenter of a morning TV show.  Schofield was a married man with children who has apparently been conflicted about his sexuality and stayed in the closet until quite recently when he admitted publicly that he was gay.

From then on, it’s difficult to know exactly what happened except that he’s admitted having a sexual relationship with a younger man who worked in the team supporting his programme.  They had first met when the other man was 15 (he’s now 21) but Schofield says they had no any further contact until several years when he admits introducing him to people who gave him the job.

Up to this point, WTF, but the tabloids say Schofield lied to his co-presenter and then lied to quite a lot of people about what had happened.  This was stupid and, unsurprisingly, he left the programme.

Perhaps because nothing interesting was happening in the political world (see above) and people were no longer dying in Ukraine and the American economy wasn’t on the brink of collapse, this suddenly became a cause célèbre that sold lots of space in the media.  Comparisons were made with Jimmy “Paedo” Savile and Donald “I can grab any woman’s pussy” Trump although, in Schofield’s case, only one other consenting adults was involved and the real problem was that he had lied.

In an interview broadcast last week by his former employer, it was obvious he’d lost weight and he looked dreadful.  He seemed to answer direct and painful questions honestly and, on a ‘likely to commit suicide’ scale of 1 to 10, I’d have put him around 9.  He actually said that if his daughters weren’t “guarding” him, he wouldn’t be here today.  I also thought there was some comfort to be found in his ‘betrayed’ family rallying around to protect him.

I didn’t know much about him before all this happened but am now feeling sorry for him because of all the shit that’s been thrown at him.  I hope he survives.

More depressing news is that, as of Wednesday, Elon Musk is once again the world’s richest person.  This is known because Bloomberg produce a daily Billionaires’ Index (though they don’t use an apostrophe) which publishes updated figures for the top 500 at the end of every trading day in New York.  Can you imagine anything more pathetic than people who care about this sort of thing?  “Oh look mummy, I’ve gone up from number 472 to number 468 in yesterday’s list” / “Shut up and deal.”

And, in Russia, some missiles of unknown origin were shot down over Moscow, breaking a window and causing a small fire.  Loosely translated, Vladimir Putin’s response was “They came from Ukraine but we’ve proved how effective our air defence systems are”. 

Ukraine is about 500 miles from Moscow so, if they did come from Ukraine, Russia’s defence systems didn’t spot the things until they actually reached Moscow;  or perhaps destroying them over a field in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t have been as newsworthy? 

If the missiles were Ukrainian, we’ve all been shown just how far into Russia they can reach before being detected by Russian defence systems. 

France has one of the highest taxes on cigarettes in the EU with the result that entrepreneurs have set up factories that churn out millions of illegal cigarettes and now, according to research by KPMG, a third of cigarettes smoked in France were bought illegally. 

Tempting as it is to admire these people for following the basic precepts of free market capitalism by finding a new market and making money from it, we need to remember that the only reason the French government is getting upset is that it’s illegal, and the only reason it’s illegal is that the government can’t tax the sales.

Meanwhile, a new development in the ‘hungry singles’ market is the Pear ring*, a turquoise rubber ring that you wear to let other people know you’re on the market or, as the marketing blurb puts it “to show you’re single and open to DMs”.

(Being somewhat out of touch with dating, I decided that Doc Martens wouldn’t be much of a turn-on so I looked it up and gather it now means ‘direct messaging’ on social media, which leaves me wondering how you get a name and contact point so you can DM them and, if it means talking to them, why you don’t just talk there and then and sod the DM?)

*          Pear ring / pairing – geddit?