Tag Archives: falsify

Coronavirus: UK government death figures are FALSE

The Tory government has been providing false death figures since the start of the coronavirus crisis, according to the Office for National Statistics.

ONS figures released today (March 31) show that the government has been ignoring any deaths that took place outside hospital.

So by March 20 (the cut-off date for the ONS figures), the total number of known coronavirus deaths was 210, not 170 as the government had claimed. That’s around 23.5 per cent more.

Today’s official death figure stands at 1,408. But if the proportion of deaths outside hospitals has remained consistent, we need to expect the real figure to be 1,739.

There is no reason to believe that the proportion of deaths outside hospitals has been consistent, of course. It could be much higher.

This is important because it shows that the Tories have been lying about the seriousness of the pandemic in the UK.

It means claims that the virus’s spread in the UK is slowing – based on hospital admission figures – cannot be trusted.

This Writer’s concern is that the government may use such figures as a reason to lift the lockdown prematurely – and give the virus a new lease of life as our isolated population socialises once again while the disease is still very much present, and remains deadly.

Source: Coronavirus: Total UK deaths higher than figures released daily by government, new stats reveal | The Independent

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Firms that falsified thousands of benefit assessments set to get contracts to falsify thousands more

With apologies to the makers of The Simpsons.

Can anyone think of a single rational explanation for the plan to renew the contracts for Atos and Capita to carry out assessments of sickness and disability benefit claims?

Between them, over the last two years, these firms deliberately falsified around 7,300 claims in order to deny disabled people vital payments, forcing them towards poverty and the worsening of their conditions.

Who knows how many of these people have been induced to end their own lives as a result of this discrimination?

But instead of penalising the perpetrators by removing their contracts, the Tories are planning to pay them more than £1 billion to continue their persecution for three more years after their current contract runs out in 2021.

Who knows how many more claims they’ll be able to falsify, doctor or otherwise fake in that time? How many deserving people they’ll drive to poverty? How many will die?

Source: Discredited firms poised to rake in more than £1 billion from new PIP contracts – Disability News Service

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Tories caught doctoring video footage in flat-out lie to the electorate

This is intolerable. Never mind it being irresponsible for a political party to mislead the public – it would be utterly irresponsible for anybody to give such an organisation their vote.

The Conservatives took video footage of an interview between Labour’s Keir Starmer and the Good Morning Britain team – about Brexit – and edited it to make it seem that he hesitated over a question.

The intention is clear: to lie to the electorate about Labour’s policy on Brexit, and to lie about the abilities of Labour’s leading members.

Fortunately, Full Fact was on the case:

The Full Fact article states:

“The Conservative Party today shared footage of Labour MP and shadow Brexit minister Keir Starmer on Good Morning Britain, which had been edited by the Conservative party to make him seem unable to answer a question posed about Brexit. The clip has been retweeted hundreds of times at the time of writing.

“In the video shared by the party’s Twitter account, Mr Starmer appears to be unable to respond at the end of the clip when asked by Piers Morgan “Why would the EU give you a good deal if they know that you’re going to actively campaign against it?

“However, this is not what actually happened in the interview. When asked the question by Mr Morgan, Mr Starmer replied immediately.

“The footage seemingly showing Mr Starmer apparently being unable to answer the question seems to be taken from earlier in the interview, when he is actually listening to a question.

“By editing the clip in this way, the Conservatives have created a false narrative. It is irresponsible for a political party to mislead the public like this. We’ve previously fact checked the Conservative party when it ran a Facebook ad with a misleadingly edited headline and will keep fact checking all political parties throughout the election.

“Everyone deserves clear and accurate information from campaigns so they can make their own minds up about who to vote for.

“The Conservative party press office subsequently replied to criticism about the video by saying “this car crash interview did really take place”, and sharing a clip of it from the Good Morning Britain Twitter account. However, this clip cuts before Mr Morgan finishes asking the full question so Mr Starmer’s response can’t be seen.”

So, even after being shown up as liars, the Tories still doctored their clip.

This episode has even led Piers Morgan to stand up for the Labour Party – criticising the Tories openly on Twitter:

And Paul Shilly’s comment is the most revealing of all.

While Labour offers new ideas, new policies and a vision for the nation, the Conservatives have nothing but self-serving lies.

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By-election for Brecon and Radnorshire after MP convicted for falsifying expenses

Expenses faker: Chris Davies.

A by-election will take place in This Writer’s constituency of Brecon and Radnorshire after Tory MP Chris Davies was convicted of falsifying expenses claims.

Under Parliamentary rules, the conviction meant a “recall” petition would be opened automatically and Mr Davies would lose his seat if more than 10 per cent of the electorate here voted to oust him.

That petition has now closed and it has been revealed that the target number of 5,303 signatures has not only been reached but nearly doubled. 10,005 people signed.

A by-election will take place in the near future.

Mr Davies will be eligible to stand again – but the seat is considered a target for the Liberal Democrats and Labour may use it as a testing-ground for its Brexit policy. Will the party’s local members be able to get their message across on the doorstep?

On a personal note, I’m delighted. Mr Davies was among the first to condemn me – with absolutely no evidence – when I was falsely accused of anti-Semitism in 2016 and it is significant that while I was – and remain – innocent, he is now a criminal.

As an MP, I do not believe he represented the majority of people of Brecon and Radnorshire – but he is not alone in that. During the Coalition government of 2010-15, the Liberal Democrat MP he replaced also carried out the demands of the Conservative-led government and did not hear the pleas of his constituents. I recall the controversy over the anti-lobbying Act in particular.

The Liberal Democrats lost credibility as a result of their alliance with the Conservatives against the people of the UK and I think that is why Roger Williams lost Brecon and Radnorshire to Mr Davies.

But people have short memories – and some may even wish to allow a Lib Dem back in, simply to stop a Conservative, whether Mr Davies or someone else, from regaining the seat.

This will be interesting!

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BBC judges Robinson’s falsified report as ‘balanced and impartial’. Outrageous.

If you visit the BBC Complaints website to report the article on Harry Smith’s speech (see BBC uses unattributed quotes from Tory ministers and reports them as facts – Pride’s Purge), you may find yourself making another complaint also.

The complaint site’s reception page features a link to a report on Nick Robinson’s now-infamous piece of fiction about Scotland’s then-First Minister, Alex Salmond. Here’s what it states:

“We received complaints from viewers who felt Nick Robinson’s report on the Scottish First Minister’s press conference implied that Alex Salmond had not answered a question put to him.

“The BBC’s Political Editor Nick Robinson asked Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond two questions at his press conference on Thursday 11th September. The first question centred on the tax implications of RBS moving its legal headquarters to London; the second on why voters should trust a politician rather than businessmen.

“Nick Robinson’s report showed the second question on trust, with a script line noting that Mr Salmond had not answered that point.

“Mr Salmond’s answer on tax was lengthy. Since it was not possible to use it in full in a short news report, a series of clips were included making his central points – the job implications of the re-location of RBS, the accusation that the Treasury broke rules by briefing market sensitive information and his request that the BBC should co-operate with an enquiry. In addition Nick Robinson’s script pointed out that the First Minister said there would be no loss of tax revenue.

“The BBC considers that the questions were valid and the overall report balanced and impartial, in line with our editorial guidelines.”

This is not acceptable, for one obvious reason: Robinson’s report states, clearly, “He didn’t answer.” If the BBC Complaints people are saying the answer was “lengthy”, this clearly conflicts with what Robinson stated in the report – yet the BBC’s judgement is that “the overall report [was] balanced and impartial”.

What a lot of nonsense! No – it’s worse than nonsense. It’s a flat-out, blatant lie.

Having read this piece of make-believe, Yr Obdt Srvt sent in a complaint about it as follows: “You claimed that ‘Mr Salmond’s answer on tax was lengthy. Since it was not possible to use it in full in a short news report, a series of clips were included making his central points […] In addition Nick Robinson’s script pointed out that the First Minister said there would be no loss of tax revenue. The BBC considers that the questions were valid and the overall report balanced and impartial, in line with our editorial guidelines.’

“In fact, the report states: ‘He didn’t answer.’ Even if the report did feature a series of clips putting his points across, the message ‘He didn’t answer’ is what people heard. As you yourselves have stated that he not only answered but answered at length, it is clear that Robinson lied to the viewing public and his report was false.

How does “He didn’t answer” put across the main points of a seven-minute reply? It doesn’t. Your response to the complaint about Mr Robinson is therefore misleading.

Undoubtedly, you will want to complain (yet again!) to the BBC. Here are the necessary details (again):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/complain-online/

Phone: 03700 100 222 *
03700 100 212 * (textphone)
*24 hours, charged as 01/02 geographic numbers

Post:BBC Complaints
PO Box 1922
Darlington
DL3 0UR

Perhaps Vox Political should put up a permanent page – ‘How to complain about biased BBC news coverage’?

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BBC’s Tricky Nick Robinson’s Misreporting of Alex Salmond on Scottish Independence – Beastrabban\’s weblog

Let’s keep up the pressure on the BBC’s Tory Reporter – sorry, that’s Political Editor – Nick Robinson and his misreporting of Alex Salmond. Here’s Beastrabban on the subject:

The debates over Scottish independence, leading up to the referendum last Thursday, threw the BBC’s pro-government bias into sharp relief. The Corporation’s reporter, Nick Robinson, selectively edited and then completely falsified his report on a question he asked Scotland’s then-First Minister about the possible damage independence might have to the nation’s finances.

As you might expect, Scottish Nationalists are massively unimpressed with this blatant falsification by the BBC, and there are several videos about it on Youtube. Here are some I found that make the case particularly well.

This video, The BBC Is Killing Democracy, gives footage of what really happened when Robinson asked his question. It then gives Robinson’s own highly selective report, pointing out how it has been altered and edited to present the answer Robinson wanted, rather than the one he got. It then moves on to Robinson’s final report, where he lies and states that Salmond didn’t answer the question. It then concludes with a brief resume of Robinson’s and Salmond’s careers, pointing out that Robinson was first head of the Young Conservatives in Macclesfield, and then national head of the organisation.

There were protests against the BBC’s biased reporting of the independence campaign outside the BBC’s headquarters in Scotland on the 1st and 29th June 2014. This video below, Protest Against BBC Scotland Referendum Bias shows pro-independence Scots discussing the Beeb’s bias, and their disillusionment with the Corporation.

.

One of the women speaking is actually an English person living in Scotland. She states that she is voting for independence for Scotland because she is worried about the Westminster establishment’s destruction of the NHS and tuition fees. She states her daughter will not be able to afford to go to uni, and the only people that will, will be the elite.

Robinson’s deliberate falsification of Salmond’s answer is important far beyond the immediate debate about Scots independence. Regardless of one’s personal opinion of that particular issue, it should concern everyone worried about the Beeb’s pro-establishment bias. It’s clear and undeniable evidence that the Corporation has blatantly lied in order to serve the interests of the Tory Westminster elite. It also shows how Tricky Nick Robinson really is little more than a Corporation apparatchik spouting propaganda, and that the BBC is now well and truly the establishment’s equivalent of Pravda and TASS, the state news agency in the Soviet Union or the various state-controlled newspapers and broadcasters in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

There’s more video in the Beast’s article.

Notice that the Beast singles out the Tory Westminster elite. The Tories were pulling out all the stops to make sure they could salvage something from the referendum, if only by fouling the reputation of the BBC, which they hate.

In this context, it is also easy to believe they tried to foul Labour’s good name north of the border by putting Labour representatives up as the faces of the ‘No’ campaign and then stabbing them in the back. For example, fears voiced by the ‘No’ campaign on pensions were torpedoed by the Coalition government – an organisation which was not only supposed to be part of the ‘No’ camp but should also have been, reasonably, expected to provide correct information to that group’s other representatives on any particular subject.

What a stitch-up.

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Jail the DWP fraudsters who tried to fix UK unemployment figures!

[Image from a post on Facebook]

[Image from a post on Facebook]

Iain Duncan Smith and everybody else associated with this scam should be facing charges and the possibility of imprisonment, rather than re-election next year.

Let’s be honest about this: The government hasn’t messed up by omitting Universal Credit claimants from the official unemployment benefit claimant count – the Department for Work and Pensions messed up by admitting this had happened.

It means we may be looking at a long-term attempt to defraud the electorate. The plan seems clear: When the general election finally takes place next year, Iain Duncan Smith would have claimed that his policies have been a brilliant success in creating jobs and cutting down the number of people claiming benefits.

If people are convinced that the DWP has succeeded in cutting the amount of money being paid out in benefits – the burden on the taxpayer – then they are more likely to vote for the Conservatives. Electoral victory means more money for everybody involved – what’s known as a pecuniary advantage.

But the claim has been made by deception. Obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception is the dictionary definition of criminal fraud.

There can be no doubt that the omission was deliberate. When it comes to fiddling the official figures, the DWP has ‘form’ going back for years. Look at the lies about the benefit cap pushing people into work; the way people on ESA were encouraged to say they were self-employed and claim tax credits – even though this is not permitted and they were racking up a huge overpayment.

Look at the abuses of the sanction system; look at the abuses of the IB/ESA work capability assessment; look at the number of successful appeals against the DWP that have been kept out of official figures.

The claimant count, which provides the headline unemployment figure, is the number of people claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance every month – and has been for many years.

But Iain Duncan Smith’s flagship (if the ship was the Titanic) Universal Credit is up and running – on an extremely limited basis – in certain pilot areas of the country, and people without a job in those areas should be included in the claimant count.

This has not happened. It is possible that this is yet another oversight by Mr Duncan Smith, the government’s top bungler (indeed, he was recently voted favourite cabinet minister by ConservativeHome, so he must be doing something right, and the thing he does most often is make mistakes).

Mr Duncan Smith himself would disagree, however. He has claimed repeatedly and vehemently that his department does not make mistakes with statistics; that everything done on his watch has been justified and that everybody at the DWP is entirely competent.

So we must accept that there was a decision to keep Universal Credit claimants out of the claimant count, meaning that there was a decision to make it seem there are fewer people unemployed than is actually the case.

This seems to be supported by the complaint from the Office for National Statistics, which publishes unemployment figures. The wording runs as follows: “The DWP have not been able to supply ONS with this information in a way that has allowed its inclusion within the Claimant Count [italics mine], resulting in the exclusion of UC claims from this measure.”

This implies that the DWP is perfectly capable of supplying the figures in a manageable way but has deliberately done otherwise.

Further indication that DWP officials knew exactly what they were doing comes from a spokeswoman’s response to this affair, published in the Daily Mirror: “We have been fully transparent in publishing the number of people claiming Universal Credit.

“To ensure consistency the Department released these figures alongside the employment statistics. Universal Credit is both an in- and out-of-work benefit so some claimants may be working.”

In that case, the DWP cannot have been “fully transparent”, can it? Transparency would have required the department to separate UC into “in-work” and “out-of-work” claims, and we have no evidence that this has happened. Until it does, neither the ONS nor the rest of us have any way of knowing how many people are unemployed in the UK.

This has been going on for nearly a year, as Universal Credit was rolled out in its first pilot area in April last year. This means that all unemployment statistics since then have been falsified by the DWP and unemployment figures have been higher than claimed.

The Labour Party has tried to paint this as incompetence, but it is wrong to do so.

This was deliberate, premeditated disinformation.

Now the deception has been uncovered, they are unrepentant.

Perhaps someone should remind them that fraud is still a crime.

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The Coalition is creating serious problems and distracting you with phantoms

140124earnings

According to the beauty industry, women must now start deodorising under their breasts.

I kid you not – it was in The Guardian.

Columnist Jill Filipovic hit the nail on the head when she wrote: “I can already hear your objections: ‘But the area under my boobs doesn’t stink!’ or ‘What kind of marketing genius not only came up with the term “swoob,” but actually thought half the world’s population might be dumb enough to buy into it?’ or simply, ‘This is a dumb product aimed at inventing an insecurity and then claiming to cure it.’

“You would be correct on all three points.

“In fact, inventing problems with women’s bodies and then offering a cure – if you pay up – is the primary purpose of the multi-billion dollar beauty industry.”

The simple fact is that you don’t really need to worry about smells down there – a good old soapy flannel will cure any such problems.

That’s not the point, though. The aim is to get you thinking about it and devoting your energy to it, rather than to other matters.

Now let’s translate that to politics.

We already know that all the scaremongering about Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants storming the country from January 1 was a crock. That bastion of good statistics, The Now Show, told us last week that the total number of Bulgarian immigrants in the last couple of weeks was “around two dozen so far”, according to their ambassador. In the first three months after our borders were opened to Croatians, 174 turned up.

Yet the government wanted you to believe they would flood our immigration service in their millions, “taking benefits and yet simultaneously also taking all the jobs”.

My use of language such as “storming” and “flood” is not accidental. By far the more serious threat to the UK in the early days of 2014 was the weather – and, guess what, not only was the government unprepared for the ferocity of the storms that swept our islands, the Coalition was in fact in the process of cutting funding for flood defence.

This would have gone unnoticed if the weather had behaved itself, because we would all have been distracted by the single Romanian immigrant who was ensnared by Keith Vaz in a ring of TV cameras at Heathrow Airport.

Now the Tories are telling us that our take-home pay is finally on the rise for all but the top 10 per cent of earners, with the rest of us seeing our wages rise by at least 2.5 per cent.

The government made its claims (up) by taking into account only cuts to income tax and national insurance, using data leading up to April last year, according to the BBC News website.

This kind of nonsense is easily overcome – New Statesman published the above chart, showing the real effect of changes to weekly income for people in various income groups, and also provided the reason for the government’s mistake (if that’s what it was).

“The data used … takes no account of the large benefit cuts introduced by the coalition, such as the real-terms cut in child benefit, the uprating of benefits in line with CPI inflation rather than RPI, and the cuts to tax credits,” writes the Statesman‘s George Eaton.”

He also pointed out that other major cuts such as the bedroom tax, the benefit cap, and the 10 per cent cut in council tax support were introduced after April 2013 and were not included in the Coalition figures.

Once all tax and benefit changes are taken into account, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that almost all families are worse off – and the Coalition also appears to have forgotten the five million low-paid workers who don’t earn enough to benefit from the increase in the personal allowance.

Skills and enterprise minister Matthew Hancock compounded the mistake in an exchange on Twitter with Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). Asked why his analysis “ignores more than four million people in work (the self-employed)”, Mr Hancock tweeted: “Analysis based on ONS ASHE survey of household earnings data”.

Wrong – as Mr Portes was quick to show: “Don’t you know the difference between household and individual earnings?”

Apparently not. ASHE (Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings) is a survey of employed individuals using their National Insurance numbers – not of households or the self-employed.

So the Coalition – and particularly the Tories – were trying to make us all feel good about the amount we earn.

That’s the distraction. What are we supposed to be ignoring?

Would it be David Cameron’s attempt to bribe councils into allowing shale gas companies to frack their land? Councils that back fracking will get to keep all the business rates collected from the schemes – rather than the usual 50 per cent.

He has also claimed that fracking can boost the economy and encourage businesses into the country, in a further bid to talk down dissent.

Or is it the growing threat of a rise in interest rates, which may be triggered when official unemployment figures – which have been fiddled by increased sanctions on jobseekers, rigged reassessments of benefit claimants, a new scheme to increase the number of people and time spent on Workfare, and the fake economic upturn created by George Osborne’s housing bubble – drop to seven per cent?

It seems possible that the government – especially the Tory part of it – would want to keep people from considering the implications of an interest rate rise that is based on false figures.

As Vox Political commenter Jonathan Wilson wrote yesterday: “If the BOE bases its decisions on incorrect manipulated data that presents a false ‘good news’ analysis then potentially it could do something based on it that would have catastrophic consequences.

“For example if its unemployment rate test is reached, and wages were going up by X per cent against a Y per cent inflation rate which predicted that an interest rate rise of Z per cent would have no general effect and not impact on house prices nor significantly increase repossessions (when X per cent is over-inflated by the top 1 per cent of earners, Y per cent is unrealistically low due to, say, the 50 quid green reduction and/or shops massively discounting to inflate purchases/turnover and not profit) and when it does, instead of tapping on the breaks lightly it slams the gears into reverse while still traveling forward… repossessions go up hugely, house prices suffer a major downward re-evaluation (due to tens of thousands of repossessions hitting the auction rooms) debt rates hit the roof, people stop buying white goods and make do with last year’s iPad/phone/tv/sofa, major retail goes tits up, Amazon goes to the wall, the delivery market and post collapses… etc etc.

“And all because the government fiddled the figures.”

Perhaps Mr Cameron doesn’t want us thinking about that when we could be deodorising our breasts instead.

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Are the Tories planning to bury us in debt when interest rates rise?

Don't look so smug, George - we know what you're trying to do.

Don’t look so smug, George – we know what you’re trying to do.

It is surprising that they don’t seem to think we can make the connections.

Two articles have leapt from the national media to trouble us this week. The first, in the Telegraph, states that the economic recovery that has made George Osborne so proud is built on mounting consumer debt and a housing bubble.

(This is something that has been known to us for several months, in fact. Osborne’s ‘Help to Buy’ scheme is the principle cause of the bubble, and it was recently revealed that there is no way to slow it down. Let’s not forget that the taxpayer is underwriting the scheme – so when the bubble bursts we will have to pay both as individuals and as a nation!)

The second article is on the BBC News website, which tells us that up to 1.4 million extra households could face “perilous” levels of debt when interest rates begin to rise – in addition to the 600,000 families already in that situation.

(It adds that mortgages are the largest source of household debt.)

Vox Political has long held the belief that the Conservatives have been trying to increase personal debt. Whether the plan was to decrease the national debt in this way is debatable as the deficit has plateaued at around £120 billion for the last few years.

When Mark Carney became governor of the Bank of England, he said he would not raise interest rates until unemployment falls below seven per cent – which might provide a bit of breathing-room for those having to deal with mounting debt.

However a few months ago, at the Conservative conference, we heard that George Osborne wants to falsify unemployment figures by putting the long-term unemployed on Workfare indefinitely.

If a person is put on Workfare, they are removed from unemployment statistics, even though they only receive social security payments for the work they do.

We already know that figures show a larger fall in unemployment than commentators had anticipated, so it now stands at 7.4 per cent, according to official statistics. Putting hundreds of thousands more people on Workfare should cut that figure below Mr Carney’s benchmark.

Meanwhile, household debt is due to rise to 160 per cent of income by 2018, partly because wages are dropping in comparison with inflation. The number of households using half their disposable income to repay debt could rise from 600,000 to 1.1 million if interest rates rise to three per cent (according to the Resolution Foundation, as quoted in the BBC piece) – and to two million if rates hit five per cent.

In the light of this information we must ask ourselves: Is this a Tory trap? Are they trying to create conditions in which more people on low or middle incomes become indebted to the rich, just by fiddling interest rates?

What do you think?

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Police: ‘To protect and serve’ their own interests?

Unfit to wear the helmet: How deep does corruption run within our police? Do most officers still uphold the law without prejudice? Or do they use the uniform to pursue their own personal vendettas against innocent members of the public?

Unfit to wear the helmet: How deep does corruption run within our police? Do most officers still uphold the law without prejudice? Or do they use the uniform to pursue their own personal vendettas against innocent members of the public?

When did you lose faith in the British police?

Was it after Plebgate, the subject of a considerable controversy that has resurfaced this week? Was it after Hillsborough? Do you have a personal bad experience with officers whose interpretation of their duty could best be described as “twisted”, if not totally bent?

The Independent Police Complaints Commission says that the row involving whether former Conservative Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell used offensive language against a policeman who stopped him from riding a bicycle through the gates of Downing Street should have led to disciplinary action for the officer involved, along with others who supported his story.

IPCC deputy chairwoman Deborah Glass questioned the “honesty and integrity” of the officers involved and said that West Mercia Police, who investigated the affair, were wrong to say there was no case of misconduct for them to answer.

Now, there is plenty of evidence that this police complaints commission is anything but independent, and that it provides verdicts as required by its superiors – either within the force or politically. But the weight of the evidence that we have seen so far suggests that, in this instance, the conclusion is correct.

The Plebgate affair began less than a month after serious failings were identified in the police handling of the Hillsborough disaster in 1989. It was revealed – after a 23-year wait – that serious mistakes had been made in the policing of the infamous FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, during which events took place that killed 96 people and injured a further 766.

In addition, post-mortem reports on the deceased were falsified and the police tried to blame Liverpool fans for the disaster.

These were both events that received national news coverage – but what about the local incidents that take place all around the country?

Sir Hugh Orde, chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers said, “130,000 police officers are delivering a good service” – but are they really?

This blog has already mentioned the experiences of several people here in Mid Wales who have had unsatisfactory experiences with the police, including victims of serious physical, psychological and sexual abuse who were told to go back and suffer more of this personal hell by policemen and women who either couldn’t care less or were complicit in the crimes. Years later, attempts to get justice fell on the equally deaf ears of officers who didn’t want to know.

And this week the front paper of my local newspaper (the one I used to edit) carried the headline ‘Hello, hello, what’s going on here then?’ over a story about two local police officers who, while on duty, seemed more interested in having sex than upholding the law.

One was an inspector; the other a (married) constable. The inspector, prior to her promotion, had been instrumental in sending a friend of mine to prison on a particularly unsavoury child sex charge. There was no concrete evidence and the case hinged on the opinion of a doctor that was hotly disputed by other expert testimony. But my friend’s path had crossed this policewoman’s before and she had failed to gain a conviction on the previous occasion. It seems clear that she had not forgotten him.

I have always believed that the jury convicted my friend because its members were worried that he might be guilty – despite the lack of evidence – simply because he had been accused. “There’s no smoke without fire,” as the saying goes. It seems likely now that this conviction reflects the policewoman’s preoccupations with sex, rather than any criminal activity on the part of my friend.

It also seems to be proof of the fear raised by Andrew Neil on the BBC’s This Week – that police have been sending innocent people to jail and letting the guilty go free.

My friend is still inside, by the way. He has maintained his innocence throughout the affair but, having been released on parole and then dragged back to jail for a breach that was more the fault of the authorities for failing to give adequate warning against it, he is now determined to serve his full sentence rather than face the heartbreak of having his freedom stolen with another excuse.

Who can blame him?