Boris is far worse for this than Keir Starmer, for sure. In fact, most of his 'gifts' were not even declared, and much higher sums. Much worse. However, Boris is a thing of the past, thankfully. Keir Starmer promised a new kind of politics. It's unclear how he could be unbiased in matters relating to football regulators now he has received £40,000 worth of tickets from FIFA, for example.

Lisneed Oil! That gave me a chuckle.

Exactly this. Gifts should mean gifts. Like if someone you know personally for a long time buys you a GIFT. Not a corporate group would not give you a penny were it not for your political position.

The only problem is Abbott can't tell the difference between a thousand and a million.

Did you watch the video to the end?

I never said he had broken laws, so that's a bit of a straw man. I said it was completely unacceptable for him to do that. I stand by that. As is mentioned in the video, Tory MPs helped negotiate sweetheart tax deals for big business, which is also wrong, but legal.

As I said, sir, I have looked at Keir Starmer's policy failures. I am not specifically anti-labour, I think our whole political system is in tatters. If you looked at my second to last video you'd see I covered the VIP lanes. I'm not Tory, but I hold Keir to higher standards because he has promised higher standards. If he wants us to focus on policies he should stop taking gifts from private donors and causing controversy.

And Boris Johnson was very wrong to do that. Worse than Keir Starmer by far in this regard. 🤷🏻‍♂️

And that's not how our political system should work. He is paid about 170k per year, and worth millions. He can pay for his own glasses. As for policy failures and broken promises you'll have to just go and watch the last video. Receiving 3x more gifts than any other MP is a weird thing to get defensive about for Keir, so I understand why you want to go back to policies, and policies are indeed crucial. But that doesn't excuse having someone else pay for your clothes.

I'm not sure how that's relevant but you are welcome to sir.

My entire last video on Keir was about his policy failures.

Yeah, it was done after I recorded this. But to be clear, he said no more donations for clothing. So I guess everything else stands. 😂

@@BritishLandeur Fair point, so tickets to football and concerts are fine? Like everything they do they can dress it up, pardon the pun, to say it wasn't really clothes, but they were included etc. Duplicatios, sorry spell check, didn't help me there, but you know what I mean 😂.

Downpayments, not gifts.

It's like Boris Johnson again except he doesn't even make you laugh every now and then.

What he's done is all legal and within the system. It's the system that needs to change. I imagine the 'gifts' thing was originally designed for people who literally give you gifts. Like if I was Keir's mate and I buy him a nice tie, fair enough. But not for private companies with lobbying interests. Those aren't gifts, they're downpayments.

You make a fair point - how many hours of footy does 40k equal?

Naturally...

It's arguably not as bad as the Boris Johnson stuff, but Keir promised to bring about change...

Pension & topped up by the Lords, I bet he can't wait.

You joke, but that's probably the end result for me at this rate!

Pretty much, sadly. Imagine earning that much, after earning similar amounts your whole life as a barrister, and still begging daddy to pay for your glasses.

@@BritishLandeur you couldn't describe it any better, the guys a robot and those "Gifts" are an investment for favours and sooner or later they'll want a return on it.

Downpayment is a better description than gifts I think!

There are so many scandals these days that they never last in the public imagination for longer than a month or two... sadly.

Thank you for the sub!

I know, I even put a ** in the medpro text when I listened back to the audio. By then I had edited the full thing so I had to make a decision. Super annoying to make a mistake like that repeatedly. My apologies!

Well, after Swine Flu, the rest of Europe bought PPE as a group at a cheap price. As we were still members, even after the referendum, we could have bought PPE with them. The Government chose not to.

As I said, no politics mentioned in this video, just a respect for this scale of operation. This will be remembered for posterity!

Stuxnet

@@marktyler3381 Yes, it is a kind of computer virus which attacked Iran's nuclear bases. That's another example of intelligence on the part of Israel. But they need to apply it in their policies

Stuxnet was the only thing I can think of in recent history which has this level of scale and ingenuity.

@@BritishLandeur Agreed. The depth of this is shocking.

Exploding calculators at this rate!

There's always someone who will try and make money from a tragedy - just a shame when it's your own politicians.

Yeah, exactly. I can only assume that it got lost in the buzz of everything else that was happening. People cared more about Boris Johnson having a birthday party than millions of pounds being ripped off the public purse... make that make sense? Maybe we're fatigued and used to this stuff - but that would be a very sad reason.

Yep, watch your tweets or you'll get a couple of years. But if I slip my Husband a government contract and we make £65m that's okay? I understand the NCA is conducting an investigation and it will be interesting to see what they conclude. It would not surprise me that she is made an example of and the rest forgotten.

Thank you very much!

I genuinely believe there are some decent civil servants working hard, but I have worked with the civil service in a crisis setting (I can't / won't say anymore) and that specific bunch were beyond hopeless.

Very kind, thank you! Somebody once said the medium is the message, which I don't believe to be true, but it's certainly important. Laying things out in this way and just giving people enough information and where they can look for more should hopefully raise some deserved interest in these issues.

Legend! It's one of those topics that I think people sorta know about, but not the details. I just wanted to highlight how bad it is, and who the key players are, to as many people as possible. Thanks for the comment, always appreciated.

Sadly, yes. Any relation to Tyler Durden?

Took a look at yours too. You know I've never been to Liverpool...

Just looked into this - first I've heard about it and it's just another example. I wish I had known sooner as I'd have probably put it in this video. I'll look more deeply into it.

@@BritishLandeur thanks my good friend

Quadcopter gives me bad memories of smashing my £800 drone into a tree in Croatia mind you. You owe me a beer some time for triggering me.

Ah too kind, but 90% of the info came from the Good Law Project, they did the real hard work with FOI requests and court challenges!

Offer to pay everyone's salary and let them sit at home and you'll find people are quite compliant, it seems...

@@BritishLandeur sure. But I meant the level of obeying the rules. It was absurd. One day I walked through the whole of central London and barely a soul. It was like something from a post apocalypse movie. I just don’t understand why people just stayed indoors.

Looking back, it seems ridiculous, but when you're told you're doing it to prevent the spread of a virus which could kill your loved ones, you go with it. I don't mean to criticise you, but I personally think the social distancing stuff was the least of the COVID woes (vaccines, fraud, paying the salaries of half the country but leaving the self-employed to go bankrupt etc.) That being said, some of the scenes we saw of people walking out in remote areas of countryside being hounded by police drones was pitiful. I still don't think it's that surprising that people complied with lockdowns because for many people it was just easy. It was easier than going into work or whatever. Working from home in your pyjamas and there's nothing your boss can do? I think that's why you saw that level of compliance. It's interesting because there were behavioural models built prior to the lockdowns which predicted large-scale unrest that simply never came. As sad as it is, I think people are just overworked, underpaid, and addicted to the internet. If you tell people they can stay indoors and scroll TikTok all day, they'll do it. This wouldn't have worked pre-internet era in my opinion because people actually would have lost their minds. I suppose now I'm going through it all and typing it is quite disturbing...

@@BritishLandeur well yes. I just never realised until I saw it that we were a nation of compliant sheep. I agree that putting people basically on paid sabbatical made sense. But even in summer people were staying indoors. There was albeit the most minor disobedience of people lurking in parks beyond their allowed “exercises”. I thought it was sad and pathetic. Sweden had no lockdowns and the death rate per capita was a lot less turns out fresh air and exercise is good for the immune system and does incubate viruses. Who’d of thought. So we will never pay off the government economic damage done by Covid during our great grandkids lifetimes. But in Sweden, they hardly had any economic harm, negligible. We were going to adopt the same herd immunity program as them initially, with no lockdowns. But Dominic Cummings panicked Boris into changing course, but now as it turns out he had vested interest in lockdowns. Although his own disobedience of the rules were his political undoing.

Yep, certainly seems so. Investigations ongoing so I'll be curious to see what they conclude but the NCA don't freeze your assets for no reason...