Town hall staff and the equipment they use racked up 282,961 attempts to access streaming services including Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video over the last year, according to a Freedom of Information blitz from the TaxPayers’ Alliance. Over 47 councils…
There were 88,651 attempts to reach Netflix, 80,061 for Disney+ and 114,249 for Amazon Prime Video. Amazon was the single most popular destination, with more than 114,000 hits recorded across authorities…
Mid Ulster District Council topped the table with 63,583 streaming attempts. Cambridgeshire County Council was close behind on 57,433. In London, Redbridge Council recorded 34,713 attempts. The numbers cover attempted access on council networks and devices, meaning workers were reaching for boxsets and films on time and kit funded by council tax payers…
Concerningly across the councils that responded there were 162,037 attempts to access pornography in the last year, mostly from Wandsworth Council. Callum McGoldrick, Investigations Campaign Manager at the TPA said:
“Town hall staff have been caught with their pants down. While council tax hits record highs, bureaucrats are busy searching for hard-core content instead of doing hard work. It’s high time councils stopped making a mockery of taxpayers and focused on their day jobs.”
It’s not just taxpayers who are feeling blue…
Brussels has slapped Google with a whopping €890m (£759m) fine for supposedly shoving its own services in front of rivals in search results. According to the European Commission, the search giant violated the EU’s new Digital Services Act by restricting consumer choice and giving itself an ‘unfair advantage’ over competitors. Google isn’t alone – they also handed out a €120 million fine to Musk’s X last year…
The ‘Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for Technological Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy’ (still a ridiculous title) Henna Virkkunen said:
“After this decision, we want to make sure that there is more competition and also other companies are able to innovate…”
The reality is Google is now following other tech companies in restricting its services in Europe, rather than bothering to jump through all the ridiculous hoops Brussels tries to impose:
“To comply, we are having to strip away real-time Search features Europeans love – like instant pricing and direct availability for hotels, flights and restaurants – and dismantle safety protections on Google Play…”
OpenAI delays the rollout of its most advanced ChatGPT tools to Europe. Apple’s upcoming AI features won’t launch in the continent at all. Europe is a regulatory nightmare and it will get left behind very quickly if this carries on…
Angela Rayner is refusing to pay back a penny of the £16,876 severance pay she received after resigning last year, despite returning to the same job just ten months later. And after attacking the Tories for “a staggering lack of shame” for doing the same back in 2022…
She told Matt Chorley on BBC Radio 5 Live today:
“No, my severance payment was given to me at the time. I’d worked in government for a period of time, and then I came out of government for just under a year, I think is the timetable, and I’ll be delivering in government again. But on the Conservatives who took their severance, we’re talking weeks. Some of them were even, you know, a very short period of the time, and I think that chaos and that wider point about delivering for the British people is what we’re focused on, is not having that chaos. Not looking like we’re in it for ourselves, but actually delivering on the promises that we made in 2024 in that general election.”
That money is of course courtesy of the taxpayer. Admittedly Angela had quite a tax bill of her own to pay recently. At least she knows how to work her benefits…
Andy Burnham said in Glasgow:
“Keeping the public safe will always be my top priority. I am working closely with the new Justice Secretary and have instructed my team to put a pause on the changes that were due to start in September.
No prisoners will be let out under this policy until we have conducted an urgent review and done everything we can to minimise risk to the public. Where changes are needed, we will not hesitate to make them.”
Got to build more prisons now…
Ed Miliband has left behind a squad of his proteges and allies running DESNZ. He’s got two departments for the price of one…
Miatta Fahnbulleh is a personal protege of Miliband’s. She worked as a personal policy adviser to him from 2013 to 2015 and they remained close while she headed up the NEF and worked at other think tanks. She is widely seen in Labour as Miliband’s underling and perhaps more zealous on net zero than him. She was made an MP in 2024 and put straight into DESNZ, before being shuffled out to housing. She is now the Energy Secretary…
Polly Billington was a SpAd to Miliband from 2007 when he was working on party policy and election strategy. She went on to be the media director for Miliband’s leadership campaign. She was made an MP in 2024. Billington is now Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at DESNZ…
Katie White is a former eco-campaigner and civil servant in Miliband’s old department. She worked for Friends of the Earth co-designing Miliband’s Climate Change Act and had a stint at DECC – the department he founded. Before entering parliament she was executive director of advocacy and campaigns at WWF. She said in 2024: “I’ve worked with Ed Miliband both on the Climate Change Act and at the Department for Energy and Climate Change.” She was made an MP in 2024 and appointed Miliband’s PPS – his eyes and ears. White has been promoted from Climate Change minister to Minister of State at DESNZ…
Martin McCluskey is another former adviser to Ed Miliband and ex-political director of Scottish Labour. He was also chairman of the Scottish Fabians. He was made an MP in 2024 and appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in DESNZ as minister for energy consumers in September 2025. He has retained his post…
Baroness Margaret Curran is back as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State after leaving for health reasons last year. Ed Miliband appointed her Shadow Scotland Secretary in 2011 after brining her into his front bench a year before. She is a senior Scottish Labour ally of Miliband’s…
Michael Shanks is another Fabian and was only made an MP in 2023. He was Minister for Energy and as the MP for Rutherglen was a dutiful errand boy for Miliband in Scotland. He’s done his job of trying to sell the net zero destruction of the Scottish oil and gas industry and is thus being kept on as Minister of State in DESNZ…
The one exception might be Blair McDougall, who is another 2024 intake MP. He’s been been appointed a part-time minister shared between DBIST and DESNZ. Previously he was minister in DBT only. Formerly an anti-Scottish independence campaigner, McDougall was an associate at Labour-linked lobbying firm Arden Strategies and also served as SpAd to James Purnell when he was culture minister. Is Purnell keeping an eye on Fahnbulleh’s activities with a part-time spy in the department…
It is striking that the large majority of DESNZ ministers have close ties to Miliband and are so junior. No elected minister in the department has been an MP prior to 2023/24. Suspicious levels of juniority…
The Spectator’s Tim Shipman reports that scorned Miliband’s price for accepting Foreign Secretary and not Chancellor was to install Fahnbulleh in DESNZ. It looks like his penetration of the department goes much further than the head…
At least the insurance claim will be straightforward…
Tom Baldwin, author of Starmer’s hagiography, spoke to Times Radio:
Tom Baldwin: “I think he’d like to do something. He’s very dutiful and driven by service. That’s why he came into politics. I think that’s characterised his time as prime minister. He hasn’t always sought popularity or been good at being popular. But I think he has some of the necessary qualities that we actually do want in a prime minister. That resilience, that relentlessness, that ability to carry the weight and the job really does weigh very heavily on people and he carries that weight very, very well.”
Jo Coburn: “NATO Secretary-General?”
Tom Baldwin: “I think that’s something that he would be interested in. I think it probably requires Andy Burnham’s government to support him in that and these are some of the questions which Andy Burnham has to resolve quite quickly.”