Black Knights of the Realm who cheated 1950s-born fair damsels, and the cost of Whitehall Whitewash Hogwash
Givers and Receivers in the aberrant world of unelected power
Some people have been asking me when my "vendetta" against the UK's DWP is going to end. My answer remains, "When its depraved values have been scattered to the four winds". And as the hits and size of comment thread attest at The Slog, I am far from being a lone voice in my detestation of injustice.
But there's a talented bloke out there who has been bashing the bandits involved in this calumny for some time now called David Hencke...whose site Westminster Confidential published a post 'Dishonourable Gongs' on the 21st June last year .
I urge you all to read his stuff, and with full credit to him now I present some startling extracts from that post [my emphases]:
'There are two people who simultaneously received knighthoods which are open to question. They are Robert Behrens, the retiring Parliamentary Ombudsman and Peter Schofield, the current permanent secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions.
Both were at opposite ends over the huge controversy over whether 3.6 million people born in the 1950s should get restitution for maladministration and discrimination over the six year delay in getting their pensions.
Robert Behrens was responsible for compiling a report on whether there was maladministration ( his remit did not have to consider discrimination) over the ministry’s handling of the delay. It was the Ombudsman’s biggest report and he took years to do it, awarded only partial maladministration, and funked giving an award because of ministry opposition, leaving MPs to have to decide whether they get any money.
Peter Schofield was in charge of the department, which was not only totally opposed to giving them a penny, but under his leadership put in a submission to the Ombudsman exonerating his ministry, saying it had not made even one mistake, should not be questioned by MPs about it, and further the 3.6 million seeking any money were likely to be fraudsters putting in false claims.
Let down 3.6 million women
Both of them let down 3.6 million law abiding women safe in the knowledge that sooner or later most of them would be dead. But for the government of the day, this was manna from heaven, saving them billions of pounds owed to the women, on top of inevitable pay outs to contaminated blood victims and sub postmasters. I suspect the fact that they were elderly women, who wouldn’t blockade the roads or disrupt public life like Extinction Rebellion and unlikely to be sprightly enough to climb on the roof of Rishi Sunak’s house in protest, was also a factor in their calculations.
No wonder a grateful Establishment would reward those who saved them a lot of money. Of course there is no mention of this in the citations given for the awards, which would add insult to injury. Instead it is tactfully avoided and the awards are for other matters.
The Ombudsman’s press office reaction to his handling of the 50s women’s case was: “We have set out our findings following a robust, thorough and detailed investigation regarding how changes to the State Pension Age were communicated. It is now for Parliament to take forward and intervene to hold the Department for Work and Pensions to account and provide woman affected with the quickest route to remedy.” I’ll leave you to judge whether that is an adequate explanation.
34 years spent by the DWP producing inaccurate accounts
Now the award to Peter Schofield has to be taken against the background of the ministry’s 34 years of failure to produce accurate accounts because it cannot produce accurate figures on benefits. It is the worst performance across Whitehall and is regularly criticised by the National Audit Office who audit their accounts. According to the citation his award is for the speedy delivery of benefits, especially during the pandemic and for a culture encouraging innovation. I have asked the department to spell out what this means but have had no reply to date.
I notice the delivery of pensions is not cited as a reason to give him a knighthood. This is hardly surprising since the ministry is in the middle of having to pay out millions of pounds to existing pensioners, mainly women again, who have been shortchanged because of the ministry’s mistakes in calculating them. It also has a history of not wanting to implement decisions from the Ombudsman in anything but the most rudimentary way such as over the guaranteed minimum pension .
So do both of them deserve a knighthood? I think the handling of the 50s women pensions fiasco should have been a factor in NOT awarding one because of the huge number of people who have so far been left with nothing.'
Amen to all of that, David.
But there remains an element of blatant misogyny in everything about both the UK Treasury (and its Frankenstein creation the Department of Work and Pensions) that continues to nag at me....especially in the light of correlations between the perfidy of absolute power and aberrent sexuality.
This history of fiscal Civil Rights cheating, bonus greed and State as Scrooge has a common factor. That factor is the career of Sir Peter Schofield. Clearly, Schofield doesn't like women. Note the observation in David Hencke's piece, 'not only totally opposed to giving them a penny, but under his leadership put in a submission to the Ombudsman exonerating his ministry, saying it had not made even one mistake'.
In fact, throughout the Waspi pension fraud scandal during his time at the Treasury, Sir Peter persistently advised venal politicians that the Waspis' pension start time delays were entirely justified because the women had been given plenty of notice.
It's a puerile argument and always was: following this sociopathic logic, serial killer John Christie would have been found Not Guilty at his trial for murdering six women, if he'd claimed that he told his victims in advance what he was going to do.
Still, I'm happy to announce that there is a charitable side to "Sir" Peter Schofield. It is, you'll be unsurprised to know, a charity for Civil Servants. Charity for Civil Servants Chief Executive Graham Hooper told yet another Whitehall in-house propaganda sheet, 'Peter has dedicated his life to public service, both within his work at DWP and as our Chair of Trustees. We are delighted that his passion and dedication for making a difference to the lives of people in need has been recognised by His Majesty in this way.'
Indeed, one entirely creditable way of saving money would be to shut down every Whitehall Whitewash Hogwash magazine devoted to telling themselves how absolutely squeaky-clean and loveable they are really.
How much Whitehall spends per annum on inhouse publications 'is not readily available' claims elite-loyal search engine Gargoyle. But the reason why the exculpators in Sir Humphreyland need to spend a lot on internal PR to justify their parasitic expansion is not hard to see.
The Institute for Government notes the following:
*In June 2016 the civil service had 384,230 full-time equivalent roles. Over the following six years it grew by 25% – or nearly 95,000 roles
*The Home Office has grown 31% in size since September 2010 - as a reflection of 'additional capacity required to administer migration, citizenship and borders services'. As we can all see, they're doing a fine job on those fronts. [NB, for 'Home Office', read Secret State spooks]
*Gov.UK does however record 605 inhouse publications relating to 24 ministerial departments - that's an average of 25 publications per department.
Yet still, the misogyny in all this irks. Why does Sir Peter Schofield dislike women so much?
Over and over again, one investigates the aberrent sexuality that seeks power in our depraved world: Sir Keir Starmer [also gonged] is bisexual and uses rentboys; Vlodomore Zelenskyy is bisexual and has been caught out 'cruising' during Moscow visits; Emannuel Macron is blackmailed by the CIA because he uses negroid rough trade and pursued his wife Brigitte while she was his headmistress at school; US Vice President JD Vance uses eye make-up and comes from a familial background of appalling sexual abuse; Mao Tse Tung was a serial paeophile; Peter 'Baron' Mandelsohn [another gong] pursued dubious sexual affairs in Budapest that led to his reputation of being "Hungary for boys"; and Elon Musk prefers IVF to sharing bodily fluids when it comes to a 'Lebensborn' habit of trying to breed his own electors.
Atypical sexuality - as I discovered forty years ago when working with the Dept of Health - represents at the very most no more than 8.5 per cent of Homo sapiens. Yet these people seem to be running the world. And this is nothing knew: Hitler was a coprophiliac - ie, a shit fetishist whose lover Geli Raubal killed herself because of his perversion. Powerful connections covered it up. The result was 68 million dead over the following twelve years.
It simply won't do to write off that empirical observation as homopohobia or copraphobia - any more than religious fanaticism can be excused by the term Islamophobia.
The suffix 'phobia' has been weaponised....along with almost every other propagandised media takeover in the Twenty First Century.
My suspicion today is that Sir Peter Schofield is being protected. Time will tell.