'But Since That's The Plot Of Every James Bond Film, They Didn't Think It Mattered'

A secret inquiry by MI5's watchdog concluded the security service knew an abusive agent it defended in court was a misogynist who was "obsessed" with violence, the BBC can reveal.

Hard to see why they’d feel they had to care about that… 

The inquiry took place after BBC News originally exposed how MI5 had covered up for the man - a neo-Nazi informant known publicly as agent X. The government took the BBC to court in 2022 in a failed attempt to block our investigation, but it won agent X legal anonymity.

Useful in a spy, but didn’t he already have it? 

Following the BBC story, the office of the investigatory powers commissioner (IPCO) Sir Brian Leveson launched an inquiry, which - like much of IPCO's work - was secret. Details of the inquiry can now be reported for the first time.

• IPCO - which oversees the use of covert investigatory powers, including the UK's intelligence agencies - concluded: "Strong indications" of agent X's interest in violence, including video footage of him threatening his girlfriend with a machete, did not lead to an MI5 review of his suitability of as an agent.

•  IPCO said it "should have done" (sic) agent X was "openly misogynistic" with his MI5 handlers, who knew he was involved with a "pick up artistry" movement that seeks to exploit women for sex, but "none of this attracted much attention" from the handlers MI5 knew agent X was "obsessed" with violence, because he told them, and there were indications he might be a threat to others "arising from his general interest in extreme violence". 
• But IPCO said there was a "lack of sufficient professional curiosity" about him by MI5.

Frankly, if he was a good agent, should it have mattered at all?

I Must Have Missed The News That Hungary Was A War-Torn Nation

A Hungarian teenager broke into the bungalow of an elderly couple in a terrifying raid that left their beloved dog dead.The teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, admitted charges of robbery and assault occasioning actual bodily harm.

Is he a refugee? There's no war in Hungary, is there? Why is he here?

The boy was not charged with any animal cruelty offence and police treated the dog's death as unexplained.

More lazy policing. 

The teenager fled with Mrs Thompson's mobile phone and purse but was soon arrested in a park.

In a statement issued at the time, South Yorkshire Police said: 'Violence and abhorrent acts of this kind have no place in our communities and will not be tolerated. 'An elderly couple has been physically and mentally affected by this incident, and we will do all we can to ensure justice is served.'

Well, you didn't in this case, dis you? And the rest of the so-called 'justice system' didn't do any better. 

The boy was handed a two-year detention and training order at Sheffield Magistrates' Court on July 1.

Pathetic, but surely to be followed up by a deportation order? 

Oh, and that police promise? A lie, like every statement they make these days:

Police refused to disclose his nationality, claiming doing so was not in the public interest.

What would they know of the public interest, since it's clear they no longer serve it? 

Cruel, Maybe...

 

...but apposite! Matt always has his finger on the pulse

Sunday Funnies...

 "House of the Dragon" costumiers had to get inspiration from somewhere...

Well, Yes, 'Trying To Wipe Away The Evidence Of Their Mistakes' Is What They Always Do!

Children who were groomed, sexually abused and then prosecuted for crimes, including prostitution, are still being failed, the author of a landmark report has said. Baroness Louise Casey, who led the national investigation into grooming gangs, called on the government last year to quash any convictions of victims who were criminalised when they should have been protected.

We really shouldn't have expected anything else of this failing government, should we? 

"Everybody told me that I was this problem - that I was guilty and I had committed a crime," she said. Her criminal record of more than 40 prostitution convictions has prevented her from applying for jobs, going to college, travelling abroad and even volunteering at her children's school. Joanne and thousands of people like her are due to be pardoned for loitering or soliciting, following the new legislation. However, she said the law change does not go far enough.

She has soliciting convictions from when she was aged 18 and was still being trafficked. However, the change in the law does not recognise adult convictions, so those will remain.

They had to draw a line somewhere. And they chose to draw it here.

Baroness Casey said, one year on, the government had made "huge progress in many areas" but on the issue of quashing the convictions of child sexual exploitation victims, "they haven't gone far enough, quickly enough". She said she wanted to hold the government to account.

That's our job, the voters, and we do it by kicking the bastards out. Why don't you concentrate your fire on the people we have no recourse for, the unelected civil serpents who made the decisions?

Fiona said the government's decision to only remove convictions for child prostitution offences feels "like they're trying to wipe away the evidence of their mistakes and their incorrect labelling rather than actually trying to fix an issue".

It feels like it because that's always what they try to do. 

Not With Any More Taxpayer's Money, You've Had Quite Enough

The Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak now being fought across the region shows again what Africa already knows. When an emergency arrives, the continent cannot wait on distant supply chains or other people’s goodwill. It must make and move the things that keep its people alive. The fight to end Aids by 2030 runs on the same truth.

When is it going to start standing on its own two feet then? Instead of whining about people expecting them to do just that?

Africa has earned the right to set the terms of that fight. Over two decades the continent helped turn the epidemic around. Aids-related deaths have fallen by 59% since 2010 and new infections by 68%. Nearly 22 million Africans are alive today on daily treatment. Keeping them alive is a permanent commitment.

Only because the Western taxpayer was paying, and not voluntarily either!

That obligation now meets a hard fact. External health aid to Africa was estimated to have fallen by 70% between 2021 and 2025. The model that brought the response this far, in which Africa delivered while others financed and directed, is ending whether or not anyone plans for it.

And not a moment too soon. 

The Common Africa Position for this week’s 2026 High-Level Meeting at the UN in New York on HIV/Aids is Africa’s answer. Agreed across member states, experts and institutions, it speaks with one voice. It is built on the Africa Health Security and Sovereignty agenda, which heads of state adopted to treat health as a matter of sovereignty rather than charity.

It’s bad news for Mercedes & BMW, but every silver lining has a cloud… 

Really? In A Female Dominated Workplace?

Gender-based prejudices carry disturbing echoes of historical patriarchal assumptions and myths about the mysteries of female bodies. They lead to women being perceived as anxious, hysterical or irrational, and can result in their symptoms being dismissed as psychological rather than physical, if they are taken account of at all.

And that’s not all… 

This gender bias is compounded for Black and other ethnically non-white women by racial stereotypes. One of these, the belief that women from particular ethnic groups have higher or lower levels of pain tolerance, has the same outcome – inaccurate, mistimed or missing pain relief in labour.

People who have recently used maternity services, or visited an NHS hospital, may find this surprising, because the make-up of staff is invariably nearly 100% ethnic minorities. As well as usually overwhelmingly female!

It is vital now to implement ways to regulate for safer care in a learning healthcare system which recognises the valuable contribution to safe and compassionate care that women’s voices can make.

Better start recognising some home truths instead! 

So Shame Does Still Exist...

Four councillors who voted to allow a rapist taxi driver to keep his operator's licence have quit Highland Council's licensing committee.

Good!  

David Brown, 50, was jailed for six years and nine months in May after attacking an 18-year-old female passenger in December 2023. Last month, following a request from Brown's family, the committee's six male councillors voted to allow his operator's licence to continue, while its four female councillors voted against it.

 What were they thinking?

After criticism of the decision, the chairman Sean Kennedy along with John Grafton, Duncan Macpherson and Willie MacKay have resigned from the committee. Independent councillor MacKay has also resigned as a councillor, while Grafton has been suspended by the Scottish Liberal Democrat group on Highland Council.

SNP councillor Chris Birt, another one of the six male councillors, has been asked by his party's leader on the council, Raymond Bremner, to resign from the committee.

Asked? He should have been fired! 

Visceral Loathing Sums It Up Nicely

On a bone-chillingly cold morning in January, it felt as if I had suddenly found at least part of the reason for Keir Starmer’s chronic unpopularity. I was in the Mancunian constituency of Gorton and Denton, where the prime minister and his people’s decision to block Andy Burnham from standing was about to hand victory to the Green party. More specifically, I was in a forlorn covered market about to be regenerated into a “food and drink cluster”, talking to a sixtysomething man nursing a mug of tea.

What a strange thing to go looking for, but that’s the Guardian for you! 

What, I wondered, did he think of the man at the top? He gave me roughly the same answer that I’d heard from a lot of my other interviewees: “I really don’t like him at all.” But like most other people I met that day, he couldn’t quite explain what fired his antipathy, which seemed to make it worse. His face scrunched into a mixture of scepticism and exasperation. “I don’t know why – I just don’t,” he said.

It’s visceral. It defies description.

The most specific answer I got from anyone else was: “He hasn’t done what he said he’d do.” So there it was: as well as a modern tendency to loathe politicians that regularly seems arbitrary, whipped-up and way over the top, a sense that Starmer’s sheer blankness – his painful lack of clarity and the absence of a halfway coherent story about his own government – was making a lot of people dislike and mistrust him all the more.

It is not unreasonable, I think, to see the entire Starmer project as one gigantic volte-face, given what he promised to the 275,000 Labour members who gave him the job of leader: a 10-point leftwing shopping list that included everything from multiple nationalisations to the defence of migrants’ rights.

And in the end, how many of them did he actually provide? 

When Starmer was the leader of the opposition, moreover, the public got a sharp flavour of his seemingly limitless flexibility. In June 2020, he and Angela Rayner were photographed taking the knee in support of Black Lives Matter; by 2022, Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum jubilee had begun Starmer’s passage into an increasingly bizarre world of flags and zealous patriotism. By that point, I could not help but think of a pearl of wisdom beloved of the market traders of the West Midlands: “Never make a mug of your punter.”

He stood for nothing, so he fell for everything. 

His government – and yes, it did quite a few good things, from gradual rail nationalisation to the Renters’ Rights Act, improved rights at work, more NHS funding and finally taking a step back towards Europe – was seemingly locked into regular bursts of confusion and absurdity: witness a reference on the Labour List website to “six milestones, five missions, [and] three foundations”.

And of course to the average Guardian reader, those do look like positive things. Back to the rest of us, and they don’t.

From such murk emerged the endlessly unfolding Peter Mandelson affair, and that was pretty much that. “No 10 symbolises the principles of public life in this country: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership,” Starmer said in 2022. If you were now to read those words out to the average member of the public, they would surely collapse in contemptuous mirth.

Such qualities, of course, are more important than ever. But in the era of TikTok, Instagram and all the rest (if you are old enough), people now favour leaders who are flamboyant, outspoken, capable of delivering surprises and able to look as if they enjoy what they do. Surreal modern levels of scrutiny also mean that basic consistency – or a talent for faking it – is usually an absolute must.

We’ll see how good bodybags Burnham does in the popularity stakes soon.

How Many More Of These Do We Have To Tolerate?

Two people have been arrested after a pit bull-type dog attacked a woman and seriously injured her pet.The unaccompanied dog attacked the victim's pet, near Hemlington Lake in Middlesbrough on Sunday, leaving it requiring emergency veterinary treatment.

The puppy, a German Shepherd, did not survive. 

Cleveland Police said the woman received hospital treatment after being bitten and due to the "potential risk to other people in the immediate area" a specially trained officer had to put the pit bull-type dog down near the scene.

And by ‘specially trained officer’ they been an ARV occupant, who shot the vicious mutt dead, causing howls of anguish from the usual suspects… 

The force said a man and a woman in their 30s were arrested in connection with the incident and have since been bailed.

Assistant Chief Constable Dave Sutherland said: "We understand anyone who witnessed the initial attack or the aftermath may have experienced shock or distress, however, the safety of the public is always paramount." The force has launched an appeal for information and is in contact with experts who will carry out tests to establish the breed of the dog which carried out the attack.

Tests that can be carried out on a dead animal, so why the need to take others alive?