Wales
Joined December 2009
- Tweets80.5K
- Following3.9K
- Followers2.5K
- Likes167K
Pinned Tweet
A child that, after blowing the whistle, had to hide in a cupboard whilst the social workers at cyngor Gwynedd waited for the correct form to be filled in before they allowed the police to be called to Ysgol Friars...
l8inagain.wordpress.com/2026…
L8in retweeted
🔴 EXCLUSIVE: After *five-year* legal battle, Democracy for Sale has forced the government to reveal who referred firms to lucrative Covid PPE ‘VIP lane’ for 'politically connected'
30+ senior Tories are named, plus ex Duchess of York, and many more 🧵
democracyforsale.substack.co…
L8in retweeted
🧵
More than 30 senior Tories named in new Covid PPE ‘VIP lane’ records
Democracy For Sale reveals full details of ‘politically connected’ fast track lane for lucrative PPE contracts released after Democracy for Sale reporter's five-year legal battle.
By Peter Geoghegan and Jenna Corderoy
Eight members of Boris Johnson’s cabinet named in full list of Covid VIP lane referrals.
More than 30 senior Conservatives are named in newly released records of companies referred to the government’s controversial Covid PPE ‘VIP lane’ back in 2020, following a five-year fight by Democracy for Sale to force the government to divulge the information.
The documents identify hundreds of businesses – and the politicians, ministers, senior civil servants and other figures who recommended them for the ‘VIP lane’ to lucrative government Covid contracts.
Among those named are eight members of Boris Johnson’s cabinet, Sarah Ferguson and the banking giant Santander.
Four of those cabinet ministers in the documents had not previously been named: then foreign secretary Dominic Raab, justice secretary Robert Buckland, Welsh secretary Simon Hart, and housing secretary Robert Jenrick, who is listed only as a ‘possible’ referrer.
Companies referred to the VIP lane were ten times more likely to secure contracts, according to the National Audit Office. Around £1bn of the £1.7bn spent on PPE from VIP suppliers was wasted on supplies later deemed unfit to use.
The release of the records brings to an end a fight for transparency that began in February 2021, when now Democracy for Sale reporter Jenna Corderoy submitted a Freedom of Information request seeking the names of every company referred to the so-called ‘VIP lane’ and those who had recommended them.
The government resisted disclosure for more than five years. In February 2025, a tribunal ordered it to name the unsuccessful suppliers and rejected its argument that identifying their referrers would cost too much.
The Cabinet Office still withheld the referrers’ names until Democracy for Sale appealed to the Information Commissioner’s Office, who ruled last month that they should be disclosed. They were finally published on Thursday.
The Cabinet Office has warned that it cannot completely verify the accuracy of the reconstructed referral data, and some individuals are identified only as ‘possible’ referrers. There is no suggestion that making a referral was itself improper.
Among other things, the documents show:
Raab recommended a Cambridgeshire toy maker who had only a single employee at the start of the pandemic. 'Honest Bob' Jenrick, now Reform UK treasury spokesman, is listed as ‘possibly’ referring an export packing firm.
Graham Brady, then chair of the 1922 committee of backbench Tory MPs, referred an interior design company near his Altrincham and Sale West seat. Brady told Democracy for Sale that he had “no recollection of this but given the location, I assume I was passing on an approach from a constituent. I have no involvement with the company and never have had.”
Owen Paterson, who later left parliament after a lobbying scandal, referred a Birmingham biotech firm working on pregnancy complications. None of these firms were given contracts.
Then health secretary Matt Hancock is named against 27 companies, three of them marked ‘possible’.
Former Conservative party chairman Lord Feldman is recorded against 21 (three ‘possible’) and
Cabinet Office minister Lord Agnew against 14 (four ‘possible’).
Grant Shapps and Michael Gove also referred firms, including, in Gove’s case, Meller Designs, run by donor David Meller, which received £164m in Covid contracts.
Sarah Ferguson, then the Duchess of York and ex-wife of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, referred Biz Trading Ltd, a small London-based pharmaceutical company that was dissolved in 2022, according to Companies House.
Continued...
democracyforsale.substack.co…
L8in retweeted
Someone stole 420 million of our tax dollars in this money laundering scheme. We spent 70 billion overall and all we got was our healthcare cut.
L8in retweeted
Two more Aboriginal females have been shackled to hospital beds since the major parties voted against a law to prohibit the barbaric practise.
sydneycriminallawyers.com.au…
L8in retweeted
He was fourteen years old when they took him in and questioned him, and he came out of that room having confessed to a double murder.
There was no lawyer. There was no parent.
Johnnie Savory spent the next thirty years inside.
Peoria, Illinois, January 1977. Two teenagers were stabbed to death.
Johnnie Lee Savory was fourteen. He was a friend of one of the victims and he had been at the house.
Police questioned him over an extended period. He was a child. He had no lawyer with him and no parent in the room.
He confessed.
He has said ever since — consistently, for decades, in filings and in interviews — that the confession was forced out of him, and that officers fed him the details.
He was convicted. His first conviction was overturned on appeal because of how the confession was obtained. **He was tried again, and convicted again** — and the second time around the physical evidence included a pair of trousers said to carry blood, and testimony about a pocketknife.
He was sentenced to fifty to a hundred years.
He went in at fourteen and he was released on parole in 2006, aged forty-three. He had spent roughly thirty years in custody — his entire adult life up to that point, and the back half of his childhood.
And he did not stop.
He fought for decades to get the physical evidence DNA tested. Illinois resisted. He had been released, which legally made it harder, not easier — a man on parole has less standing to demand testing than a man still inside.
Northwestern's Center on Wrongful Convictions and the Innocence Project took it up and pressed for advanced testing.
In January 2015, Governor Pat Quinn pardoned him on the basis of innocence, on his last day in office.
Savory then sued the City of Peoria. His civil case has been through the federal courts, and the Seventh Circuit revived it after it was initially dismissed.
Now hold the two ends of this together, because it is the whole point.
A fourteen-year-old was put in a room without his mother or a lawyer and came out confessing to killing two people.
It took thirty-eight years from that room to a Governor signing a piece of paper saying he did not do it — and in between, the State of Illinois fought him at every single stage, including after he was already out.**
The pardon is not the system correcting itself. It is one man refusing to stop filing for thirty-eight years.
The Ferret–publishing this information today in tandem with the Daily Record–also obtained details of Police Scotland’s command structure for the G8 Summit at Gleneagles in 2005 when the undercover Met Police officer Mark Kennedy was operating in Scotland.
theferret.scot/scottish-poli…
L8in retweeted
Alabama passed a law, 138 votes to nothing, that makes every phone user in the state prove their age before downloading a single app.
A 45-year-old who wants a news app has to hand ID to Google first. Existing accounts get no pass either. Every one of them must be verified by October 2027.
Teenagers will need a parent’s sign-off to install Wikipedia, Duolingo or a Bible app, and kids without a parent to ask get locked out completely.
Apple, Google and Amazon’s lobby group has now sued to block it on First Amendment grounds.
reclaimthenet.org/alabama-is…
L8in retweeted
Peter Mandelson was correctly removed from the Privy Council for bringing it 'into disrepute'.
The same action must now be taken against Matt Hancock, responsible for the generational slaughter in care homes during the pandemic.
⬇️Sign our petition ⬇️
c.org/xWgPym5KR7
The children's laureates for Wales and Ireland are to give their book royalties to Sally Rooney after she halted UK sales because of her support for Palestine Action...
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx24…
L8in retweeted
A food supplier in Gwynedd has been shut down and fined £27,000 after inspectors found a live rat at Bangor Cash and Carry during a recent visit.
L8in retweeted
How a Tory councillor used Snapchat to catfish young boys who were army cadets
Rylan Ray, 26, has been convicted of 28 sexual offences including sexual assault and making indecent photographs of children
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjzx…
L8in retweeted
THIS IS THE NEXT BIG UK SCANDAL
The Hidden Credit Line scandal has run since the 2000s.
NatWest (@NatWestGroup), Royal Bank of Scotland (@RBS_Help) and Ulster Bank (@UlsterBankNI) sold business owners loans with an interest rate swap attached.
It was marketed as protection if rates rose. It actually created hidden exposure against the customer's own assets that nobody clearly explained. When rates fell after 2008, banks used that exposure to call in debts, strip assets and push profitable businesses into insolvency.
Steve Middleton (@stevemiddi1) and Mark Wright, a former RBS manager, built BankConfidential (@BankConfidenti1) to collect the evidence.
Mark Wright put in about £60,000 of his own pension. Neither made a penny and both lost their careers for telling the truth.
In November 2022 they met the FCA (@TheFCA) with Lord Prem Sikka (@premnsikka) and derivatives expert Ian Tyler.
James Hurley (@jameshurley) of @thetimes had already written 4 articles calling it financial and accounting fraud. The FCA let NatWest review itself and concluded it was not technically criminal fraud.
BankConfidential published its full report in November 2025. On 14 April 2026 it prompted a Westminster Hall debate led by John McDonnell (@johnmcdonnellMP), chair of the APPG on Investment Fraud and Fairer Financial Services (@appgonifandffs). MPs asked for a judge led statutory inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005. Six reviews had already produced no justice.
Ian Byrne (@IanByrneMP) said this scandal belongs alongside Hillsborough, Post Office Horizon and infected blood. He also noted the FCA is a private company limited by guarantee with immunity from civil liability.
Andrew Candy was hit with an undisclosed £70,000 break cost. He lost his business and family home and spent 17 years seeking answers.
Economic Secretary Lucy Rigby (@LucyRigby) replied that the FCA is independent and ministers should be careful about interfering.
The regulator failed for over a decade, and its independence is now the reason given for not investigating that failure.
Nobody has gone to prison... yet.
Sources: @stevemiddi1, @BankConfidenti1, @jameshurley, @thetimes, Hansard Westminster Hall debate 14 April 2026, @johnmcdonnellMP, @IanByrneMP, @appgonifandffs, @TransparencyTF, @TheFCA, @LucyRigby, @_moneymarketing
L8in retweeted
Scottish COVID-19 inquiry|October 2026
🎥video creator @biologyphenom
Overview of the past 4 weeks evidence from the latest impact hearing at the world first official COVID inquiry to reveal the truth to the lockdown.
There are no mainstream or ‘alternative’ media reports of this evidence.
As Remembrance day approaches, lest we forget? many victims of lockdown policy were World War 2 veterans or survivors.
But in September 2025, the Hertfordshire Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner stated that my conduct meant that “a criminal offence had taken place”. It just forgot to identify the offence, the statutory provision or the evidence establishing it...
janinawhite.com/iamnotcrimin…
L8in retweeted
#TimmsReview
#PIP
Final Timms Review Co Chair Update before the Timms Review Report is sent to Secretary of State for DWP Pat McFadden
Link here:
gov.uk/government/publicatio…
L8in retweeted
concerned that Govt Ministers who are due to make decisions about the future of the #spycops inquiry don't understand the reasons it's taken so long (i.e. delays caused by the police), a group of the 'non state core participants' have today written to them, asking for meetings...
Old skool letters going to ministers about #spycops consultation. Don’t let the Home Office cover-up this policing scandal.
L8in retweeted
The prosecutor's office that put him on death row asked the court to stop the execution.
The victim's own family asked the court to stop the execution.
Missouri executed Marcellus Williams anyway.
Felicia Gayle, a former newspaper reporter, was killed in her home in University City, Missouri, in 1998. Marcellus Williams was convicted in 2001 and sentenced to death.
The case against him rested substantially on two witnesses — a cellmate and a former partner — both of whom stood to gain, including from reward money.
No physical evidence tied him to the house. Hair and fingerprints recovered there did not match him.
The murder weapon was a kitchen knife left at the scene. DNA testing conducted years later found male DNA on the handle that was not his.
It later emerged that the knife had been handled by members of the prosecution team without gloves before trial — which contaminated the evidence and meant the one test that might have settled it could no longer settle anything.
The St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney's office — the office that had obtained the conviction — moved to vacate it.
The family of Felicia Gayle opposed the execution. They said they did not want it carried out in their name.
The Missouri Attorney General fought to proceed. The Governor declined clemency. The Supreme Court declined to intervene.
Marcellus Williams was executed on 24 September 2024. He was fifty-five.
Count who was asking for it to stop. The prosecutors. The victim's family. Jurors from his own trial, who said afterwards they would have voted differently.
And the state did it anyway.
Everything else we post about the death penalty is an argument. This one is not an argument. It is a receipt.
When even the people closest to the case ask the state to stop, and the execution happens anyway, what does justice mean?
Read our book and join us to confront these cases that raise questions we cannot afford to ignore
savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…
L8in retweeted
After several incompetent investigations and over two years of further investigations, the outcome of the SRA’s investigation into Mark Lewis is delayed by Carter Ruck v SRA. This is despite the crucial documents being in the public domain because I have published them. The SRA does not need to use s 44B of the Solicitors Act 1974.
The SRA won’t even say how long it will take to decide if Carter Ruck is relevant. It really is the most spectacularly useless regulator. It is only a matter of time before there is another scandalous failure of regulation.
@sra_solicitors @legalcheek @lawsocgazette @DanNeidle @Haroon_Siddique
The Treasury is disputing that Chancellor John Healey suggested to the BBC that the benefits bill will be cut before the next general election...
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm5y…
