Supposedly to monitor benefit claimants – bad enough when the people committing mass fraud and tax evasion hide their money offshore – planned new duty on banks will mean them snooping on all personal customers
Keir Starmer’s conference speech yesterday contained nothing that was both positive and substantial – everything that was substantial is bad for the people, from his ‘Great British Energy’ scam to set up a hedge fund to enrich corporations, to his plans for red-Tory ‘Austerity 2’ on the same promise of magical ‘jam tomorrow’ if we only all submit to his programme of further cuts and privatisation.
But one of the most nakedly sinister was his plan to force banks to snoop on private bank accounts. Supposedly this is meant to identify benefit fraudsters and tax dodgers – but to identify the supposed fraudsters and dodgers, banks will ‘need’ to monitor everyone’s accounts, with no ‘reasonable cause’, a massive intrusion on the privacy of ordinary people.
Particularly when the real fraudsters and dodgers – the companies, billionaires and multi-millionaires who cost the UK revenue around £36bn a year in tax evasion (perhaps as high as £58bn), compared to the ‘peanuts’ of around £6bn in benefit fraud and error – park their money in offshore tax havens outside the reach of the snooping. The new plan creates an environment in which state spying proliferates and with potential for injustices and wrongful prosecutions, and the tragic consequences they bring, that would make the Post Office scandal look tiny.
Big Brother Watch commented on the plan that:
…to force banks to constantly spy on benefits recipients without suspicion means that not only millions of disabled people, pensioners and carers will be actively spied on but the whole population’s bank accounts are likely to be monitored for no good reason.
A financial snoopers’ charter targeted to automate suspicion of our country’s poorest is intrusive, unjustified and risks Horizon-style injustice on a mass scale.
Pointing out how anything other than blanket snooping will be hugely discriminatory against disabled people whose conditions force them to receive benefits and that Starmer’s supposed ‘safeguards’ are always going to be inadequate, the Organise Network said:
Keir Starmer says there will be ‘safeguarding measures’ but no details about what these are and it’s a slippery slope – once these powers are granted there’s no going back.
What disabled people spend our money on is a private matter and we shouldn’t have to justify ourselves to anyone.
Skwawkbox has warned for years that Keir Starmer and his authoritarian and police-state leanings posed a serious threat to the freedom and wellbeing of millions in the UK if he ever got into power. He is not wasting any time turning threat into real and present danger.
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount as it has to be entered by us). Alternatively, if you prefer to make a one-off or recurring donation by simple card payment, please use the form below:
Make a one-time donation
Make a monthly donation
Make a yearly donation
Choose an amount
Or enter a custom amount
Your support is hugely appreciated.
Your support is hugely appreciated.
Your support is hugely appreciated.
DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearlyThanks for your solidarity so Skwawkbox can keep doing its job of inconveniencing the right and helping to build the left!
If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.
Are the supermarkets still sharing their CCTV with the DWP?
Too many, despite all Sir Keith’s actions, STILL won’t accept he’s the dedicated Establishment enforcer.
He’s not just any tool. Sir Keith is a super keen tool willing to do any and everything to feed the military industrial complex no matter how many millions of brown and black kids are killed with UK made armaments and technologies.
WTF do you care?
The last time you went to
fortnumslidl**?YOU voted for this.
**lidl in blighty, in case youre gonna be your usual smartarse self .
Your credibility reached an all-time high of zero while you weren’t posting.
It would’ve stayed that way, but you just can’t help yourself.
Above reply ended up in the wrong place, but no prizes for guessing who that was directed at
Oh do stop bellyaching like a mardy five year old, Billy.
You should count yourself fortunate you were able to afford to shop at Lidl’s as there are plenty of people who cannot even afford to shop even there. Who have to rely on food banks and send their children to school hungry in the mornings.
And under the administration of your Furher, Herr Starmer, busy focusing on the needs of the parasitic financial sector and their lobbyists – whose pockets he and his entire administration are in – this number is set to increase.
Pensioner’s having to choose between keeping warm or going hungry as energy prices and profits soar from an economic war of choice our oligarchs engineered, children deprived of nourishment, whilst corporate tax dodgers get a free ride and war profiteers rub their hands whilst selling substandard not fit for purpose systems with no efficacy at inflated prices.
Piratised water companies dumping ever increasing amounts of sewage into our environment whilst increasing prices and, like every other body corporate, acting as a private equity hedge fund borrowing huge amounts of money – which ends up with the taxpayer and what is left of the real economy – to buy their own stock to increase the asset price for short term gain for the 1% rentier class which is killing the real economy.
That’s what you voted for, Billy. A class war of the few against the many.
You have nothing of value to contribute here. The best survival strategy for ignorant and arrogant fools such as yourself is to crawl back under that stone and stay stum rather than rubbing people’s noses into the dirt from an (alleged) safe haven. Pissing down people’s backs and telling them it is raining.
More to the point, now that we have a “Labour” administration why is that this “Labour” administration is continuing to allow this to continue?
Particularly when the latest fraud figures from 2023 published by Crowe UK, Peters & Peters and the University of Portsmouth…….
https://www.crowe.com/uk/insights/annual-fraud-indicator
…..show that Social Security (Benefit) fraud was a mere £2.9 billion (not inclusive of errors on the part of the DWP) compared to £157.8 billion in fraud from the private sector.
Annual UK losses to the UK economy were a staggering £219 billion last year. 72% of which was from the private sector. Only 3.8% of fraud was down to individuals.
Local Government fraud at £8.8 billion was almost three times that of Social Security fraud.
And the tax gap is some £40 billion.
Tell us, Billy, why is the Starmer Junta, elected by only 20% of the voters, and which you have shoved down our throats, focusing on those costing the economy such a small amount whilst the much larger tax fraud and that of the private sector is treated with kid gloves?
Of course, as anyone with a working brain cell figured out a long time ago, Free Gear Keir and everything he represents is the biggest fraud of all.
Toffee – I’m struggling to see the relevance of your comment but yes we used to shop in Lidl for our basic food items. I can’t comment on Fortnum & Mason because I’ve never shopped there, have you?
I received a letter from hmrc yesterday.
They want to know about tax credits paid to me over 15 years ago.
That was when I got 2 separate bills from 2 separate tax offices demanding a four-figure sum for iverpayment.
This was despite me informing dwp that I had been taken on by the company from the agency and would be on a bigger wage.
I phoned the tax office at time of the demand and told them I wanted to dispute it, along with a full breakdown of the details of the supposed overpayment. They said they’d post them.
I got neither. Instead I got a chequebook like thing with a certain amount to pay each week (or was it month?).
Didn’t pay. Heard no more about it. The following year I got a tax rebate- even though I hadn’t worked in the following tax year – for a few hundred pounds.
Anyway, that was >15years ago and now they’re casing me again. Must be something to do with being forced to switch to UC recently.
No doubt they know how much I have in my account because I had to declare it to dwp.
And no doubt they’ll find me liable for repayment and will refuse to write it off despite it being from so long ago.
So not only did they allow me to go withoyt the £20 weekly coving payments, but they’ll want the tax credits THEY paid ME back.
They’d have the fucking moths from a corpse’s wallet.
But if you’re already brewstered, they’ll leave you alone.
I save this country thousands of fucking pounds per year, making meself ill in the process – and get shit on.
While them PARASITES hoard their ill-gotten, and live off freebies.
Bit I’m the ‘scrounger’. Fuck Britain.
Meanwhile, on the subject of fraud and protection from fraud, I’ve just had this from the organisation ‘Which’:
“Dave –
The payments regulator has just slashed the new mandatory reimbursement limit for fraud victims that would have forced banks to provide better protections.
In a disgraceful move, the regulator has dramatically watered down vital new rules for firms to reimburse scam victims – slashing the limit from a proposed £415,000 to just £85,000. This comes just weeks before the new safeguards were due to come into effect.
It is outrageous that the regulator is siding with fraud enablers in the payments industry at the expense of scam victims. This is a complete betrayal of scam victims and caves to months of lobbying from firms that refuse to take fraud seriously. Victims of high-value fraud, including house purchases, stand to have their lives destroyed by this screeching U-turn.
Our director of policy and advocacy Rocio Concha, said:
‘This decision puts all of us at greater risk of being targeted by criminals because it reduces the incentives for banks and payments firms to take fraud prevention seriously.’”
Is this Labour administration going to address the issue of protecting the vulnerable from these banking cartels and the regulatory capture by these financial banking parasites?
Or is he and his bought and paid for useless eater sociopaths just going to sit on their well paid arses and take the piss?
But keef used to prosecute fraudsters 🫤
Starmer’s role has always been to do things that the Conservatives would not dare do and then hand power back to them. That is what he is really about.
Starmer is the most dangerous PM Britain has ever had. Mass Indiscriminate Surveillance will expand under Starmer
*. Facial Recognition systems,
*. Bank Account monitoring, and
*. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).
As you said, Tony, Starmer’s here to do the things a tory Government couldn’t or wouldn’t.