Seven deadly sins are nowhere near enough in the Twenty-First Century
The seven deadly sins according to the Catholic Church in the New Testament are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.
These are the missing bits:
mendacity, sexual depravity, power mania and narcissism.
Of course there is a degree of overlap: pride is close to narcissism, although taking pride in your work is hardly a sin....and it fails to describe the narcisisstic smartphone selfie. Equally, although power mania is part of gluttony and greed, these Papal sins were declared a long time before internet tracking and New World Order megalomania. The two profoundly unpleasant factory-fitted elements of our species are fully connected in that context.
Equally, lust was a cover-up of the propensity of 13th French Popes to have little boys singing treble under their cassocks.
However, the one appalling sin that sticks out like the dog's bollocks is mendacity: the use of hypocritical self-expulcation among corporocrats to lie their backsides off in return for thirty pieces of silver.
Get a load of these sick-making excerpts from the hagiographic interview bilge put out by the onanists at Civil Service World. At one point, DWP boss Peter Schofield answers
"...although in the Treasury I was doing things like saying no to transport projects, it was really about choosing how to invest people’s money in transport. Working on business policy was to create jobs for people. The housing role was about creating places for people to live. Even in the finance job in DWP, it was about providing the resources to enable people to feel supported.”
On and on it goes:
'...One senior DWP official – when contacted by CSW for their verdict on the perm sec =, describes Schofield as “a class act…he’s had a serious economic and commercially focused career but somehow pulls great leadership out of the bag, setting a really positive and can-do culture across DWP”.
'The third part of Schofield’s leadership journey has been learning the role of “potentially boring things” like process and governance, and also “how to set a culture using things like values”.
But let the last word go to bonus-scoffer himself:
"Our five values as a department are: we care, we deliver, we adapt, we work together, we value everybody. We set them during the pandemic. It had been such an extraordinary period for us, in terms of the demand on our services. Millions of people were coming to DWP for the first time and we rose to the challenge – staff felt really empowered and proud of what they’d done. And so we thought: how do we bottle that? How do we describe what the DWP is like when we are at our best? And that’s where the values came from.”
So lets return to the appalling reality that puts that Civil self-serving World in a dark and shady place where all ethics and morality long ago left the theatre of dystopian wet dreams.
This was the DWP's mendacious response last week to my demand to know why my State Pension had been stopped AGAIN just four months after being reinstated....apologies for the small print: such is the nature of any contractual agreement in 2025, attention to the small print is the difference between getting what you paid for, and what THEY get bonused for...
This is my response sent by gmail yesterday:
Dear Danny,
Your email response to me is inaccurate and mendacious , and the forms attached to it are merely another attempt to persuade me that a State Pension is a benefit.
To summarise:
1. 'your United Kingdom State Pension has been suspended because you have not replied to a form that we sent to you'. That is not true: I have received nothing from you, and you know perfectly well my exact address here in The Gambia, because it remains unchanged from the address I gave you [and you accepted] in November 2024. I should make clear to you that the latter correspondence has been kept and lodged at my bank in the UK and with lawyers in The Gambia, along with the information despatcher receipts kept by DHL....which your Department at first denied having received, until I threatened to go public, at which point my pension was restored.
2. I quote from your Life Certificate form [my emphasis]: 'Because you live outside the UK, and receive a UK pension, you must now send us proof that we should be paying you'. That is 24-carat UK Constitutional ignorance: I paid 42 years of National Insurance tax and I am under no obligation at all to tell you other than my address. The pension is paid into a UK bank account and it is none of your business to know other than that.
3. This second and completely unjustified suspension comes just three months after I complied totally with your last attempt to make me jump through hoops. I am not going to jump through any more, so get used to the idea. This email will be blind copied to the UK National Audit Office - an organisation that has severe problems with your unelected arrogance as follows:
'This is the worst performance across Whitehall and is regularly criticised by us at the National Audit Office'
4. Your spurious "reasons" for wanting more information are just so much hogwash: why do you need the same information I spent £360 last September [accepted by you in November]? Why by the following February do you need it again? Why do you not keep case files? Why do you lie about having received information you request?
Read this email carefully Danny, and then convey the following information to your bosses so shamefully bonused for depriving loyal UK 1950s born women of their entitlement, and citizens like me living abroad trying to help the less well-off in the Third World get clean water, better salaries and protection from African corruption....while shamelessly accepting the bonus blood money they're awarded.
The DWP is a national disgrace - as very clearly described here...
and here
https://davidhencke.com/2024/06/21/dishonorable-gongs-do-the-former-parliamentary-ombudsman-and-permanent-secretary-at-the-dwp-deserve-their-knighthoods/
Your employer makes me ashamed of my nationality.
John Ward
As a result of this head-on non-stop attack on evil forces in my homeland, for the time being at least I am going to have to forego sixty per cent of my retirement income. This isn't the opener for a 'Poor me victim please send cash' appeal: The Slog remains free to sign up to and free to read.
There will be more posts on this developing scandal in due course