On Wednesday, Rishi Sunak opened his tiny mouth wide, as wide as it could possibly go, and announced “a new plan to stop scams at the source and help make it easier for people to protect themselves from fraudsters”. Meanwhile, his former boss Boris Johnson, who had persuaded some mug to pay for his wallpaper and the British taxpayer to pay for his Partygate legal costs, frolicked around on the lawn like a dog with two defence lawyers.
It’s hard to imagine how the political, or even literal, fraudsters that comprise the Conservative government could appear any more comically unselfconscious. Perhaps they could have launched their anti-fraud initiative with a short animation of a cartoon fox advising us on how to protect chickens, while seated on a huge throne made of chicken bones, licking chicken blood off its own fingers and ostentatiously wearing a hat that is just a dead chicken.
They are doing this sort of thing on purpose now, surely. Is the slowly auto-asphyxiating Tory party desperately tightening a pair of Nadine Dorries’s old tights around its neck in search of one final sick thrill before it passes out for ever? In its breathless, priapic death thrash, Sunak’s government has reached the stage where the announcements it makes either indicate an impossible lack of self-knowledge, or else they are intended to make people like me waste privileged column inches, which should instead highlight the stripping-away of the right to protest, perhaps, sneering at the latest inane Tory communique. In which case I, like some woke north London tofu-munching Wile E Coyote, have just walked into another Tory Acme™® trap.
The Conservatives are going to protect us from fraudsters? Really? Hoo ha! Perhaps the energy secretary, Grant Shapps, who once ran an online business called How to Corp under the false name of Michael Green, endorsed by glowing reviews from people who appear to be entirely fictitious, can help catch the fraudsters? If not, perhaps the punters who gave Shapps’s fake identity such great endorsements – Corinne Stockheath of Surrey, Dr JLM Richards of the Wallerson Trust in Dallas, or Richard Warton of Tektriox in New York – could be enlisted to help. They shouldn’t be too busy, due to the fact that there is no sign that any of them exist.
It should be noted, in the interest of fairness, that in 2013 the police concluded that Shapps’s sale of software “may constitute an offence of fraud” but they decided not to follow up their investigation. Perhaps Sunak’s promised “new powers” will make it easier for them to do so. I expect they will be too busy arresting teenagers for demonstrating against the climate crisis to investigate Shapps, last seen wasting energy resources buzzing around on a ride-on lawnmower that was a metaphor for how great Brexit is. Or something.
Sunak has at least changed the Tories’ previous position on fraud. In February 2022, the then business secretary and morning-news-radio-interview-round punchbag, Tufton Steet’s now quietly disappeared economic Jimmy Hat, Kwasi Kwarteng, justified fraudulently removing fraud from the official statistics by fraudulently saying it wasn’t “a crime that people experience in their day-to-day lives”. But even as Kwarteng fraudulently used the fraudulent removal of fraud from the now fraudulent official figures to fraudulently drive the official crime rate down, the 2021 telephone-operated crime survey for England and Wales named fraud as the crime people were most likely to experience. Viewers in Scotland suffered their own forms of deception.
Investigating the government’s own Action Fraud service in 2019, itself outsourced to an American company called Concentrix, an undercover reporter found call handlers were trained to let callers think their cases would be investigated when most were ignored, while managers mocked the public as “morons”, “screwballs” and “psychos”. All Sunak’s new fraud initiative has to do is remove dishonesty and active contempt for the victims from the equation and it will be an improvement.
“We will take the fight to these fraudsters wherever they try to hide,” Sunak crowed, despite having lost about £16bn to fraud on his own watch during the pandemic’s demonstrably leaky emergency loan schemes. In February 2022, reflecting on that missing £16bn, a treasury spokesperson said, “the taxpayer protection taskforce is expected to recover up to £1bn from fraudulent or incorrect payments”, as if it were worth saying.
To be fair to Sunak, it is not always easy to find people, “wherever they try to hide.” But it’s lucky that the Conservative peer and bra magnate Michelle Mone, who with her children secretly received £29m in profits from a PPE firm favoured by a government VIP channel, is not wanted for fraud, as she has been inconspicuously hanging out in plain sight in a white bikini on a luxury yacht.
It’s encouraging, however, that Sunak aims to ban “SIM farms that can send thousands of texts in one go”, and to “stop spoof calls, which trick people into thinking they’re speaking to legitimate businesses”. This should be easy for the Conservatives. During the 2019 election campaign, 88% of their most-shared Facebook advertising contained false information, compared with 6.7% for Labour. The Conservatives fraudulently re-edited footage of Keir Starmer and cynically and fraudulently rebranded their own Twitter account as if it were an independent fact-checking service, or a “legimate business”, as Sunak said in his statement condemning fraudsters. Meanwhile, the people of North Shropshire thought they were electing a local MP, when in fact they were effectively electing a paid lobbyist in disguise. All Sunak needs to do to stop industrial-scale fraud is look at how his own party have defrauded the electorate on a similar industrial scale in recent years, learn some lessons, and work backwards. It’s not rocket science.
Basic Lee is on tour, including six dates at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in June and July, and a fun-size ™ ® version of the show at the Stand’s New Town theatre, Edinburgh, 11-20 August
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