Today I’m going to rewrite a blog I wrote 6 years ago about the utter stupidity of building HS2 in a tiny country like Britain:
Ask the wrong questions – you get the wrong answer
Let me bore you with why I think the idiots in Westminster have blundered into yet another horrifically expensive disaster.
There are two questions our politicians should have asked when considering building the catastrophically expensive and unsuitable HS2:
Question 1: Do we need more rail capacity between the South and North of England?
The answer is probably yes, although new communication options may mean that in the 20 to 30 years it takes to build the HS2 disaster, people will be doing less physical travelling and more on-line communication. But let’s for a moment accept that there is a need for more rail capacity from South to North. Then there’s a second question:
Question 2: Does that train line need to be ‘high speed’?
Now let me explain why it is totally ludicrous to build a high-speed train in a tiny country like England
I’ll make this part of my blog today simple so, were any politicians to be reading it, even they might understand.
France is a big country – about 640,000 km2. The UK is a small country – about 242,000 km2. England is an even smaller country – 130,000 km2. France has an extensive high-speed rail network – the TGV. It makes sense to have high-speed trains in a large country. It doesn’t make sense to have high-speed trains in a small country.
Now let’s go a bit deeper. The French train route from Paris to Lyon to Marseilles can probably be seen as comparable to the UK train route from London to Birmingham to Manchester in terms of how it connects major cities. But the differences in distances are huge. Paris to Lyon is 292 miles, whereas London to Birmingham is only 128 miles. And Lyon to Marseilles is 488 miles, whereas Birmingham to Manchester is just 86 miles. In fact, the distance from Birmingham to Manchester is so short that the train would probably have to slow down as soon as it reached its ‘high speed’:
The much greater distances in France justify a high-speed rail network. But squandering over £100bn on cutting just a few minutes off the train time from London to Birmingham and then even fewer minutes off the train journey from Birmingham to Manchester is utterly ludicrous.
What is the best and most economical way of delivering that extra capacity?
As we had no need for a new ‘high speed’ (199 mph) line, the increase in capacity could have been delivered at much lower cost. For example, modernising signalling on the existing line might allow more trains to run on the existing track. Alternatively, building a traditional line along the same route as the current train line would have been a much cheaper option. HS2 will be much more expensive than a new traditional line because high-speed lines have totally different engineering requirements such as longer straight sections and much higher performance requirements. Moreover, high-speed trains are much more expensive than traditional Intercity 125s.
But our worthless politicians didn’t ask these two simple questions. Our politicians got the two questions mixed up together and so got the wrong answer.
There are many better things the Government could do with £100bn+ than the ridiculously unnecessary HS2 (vanity?) project. They could, for example, have just built another conventional (125 mph) line and maybe saved £40bn or more.
But that would have been sensible and therefore not something our dumb-arse stupid politicians would have considered.
Here’s a story I don’think any of our mainstream media will, be covering.
Have you ever wondered why our supposed regulators – Ofwat, Ofgem and Ofcom – seem to be so utterly useless? Well perhaps you need to look no further than the regulators’ employees’ bank accounts. I’m sure employees of regulators like Ofwat, Ofgem and Ofcom get very nice civil-service-style salaries and gold-plated pensions. But they can earn much more by moving to the companies they are supposed to regulate. Basically, they can move from being reasonably-paid gamekeepers to being much more highly-paid poachers. And if you’re an employee of a regulator hoping to get a well-paid job in one of the companies you’re supposed to be regulating, you’re not going to make yourself unpopular with your targetted future employer by regulating too aggressively.
It might seem odd to an ignorant outsider like myself that none of our regulators collect (or admit to collecting?) figures on how many of their employees defect – join the companies they used to regulate. After all, if say about 1% of a regulator’s employees leave to take up much more lucrative jobs with the companies that they were supposed to regulate, that shouldn’t be a problem. But if the figure is say 10% or even more, then clearly management at the regulators have a serious issue they need to address. Therefore, it could appear more than astonishing that regulators don’t collect (or claim to not collect?) this information.
But we do know that 6 of 9 major water and sewerage companies in England have hired former Ofwat directors of corporate strategy or heads of regulation for top roles.
There are, of course, no figures for how many Ofgem employees have joined electricity companies nor of how many Ofcom employees have joined communications and media organisations. But knowing human nature, I think we can guess that quite a few have left the supposed ‘regulators’ in order to help regulated companies outwit the regulators.
And finally we have the two main financial regulators – the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) and the PRA (Prudential Regulation Authority). Again, no figures are available of how many financial regulators have left to get much more lucrative jobs in banking and investment companies. I did find that around 1,000 employees left the FCA in the years 2020 to 2022. I will leave it up to your imagination to guess where these around 1,000 financially-qualified individuals went to work after leaving the FCA.
So, if you’ve ever wondered why our supposed ‘regulators’ appear to be incapable of regulating anything, perhaps you need to look no further than reasonably-paid gamekeepers wanting to become extremely well-paid poachers?
Most readers will probably be aware of the shenanigans around Thames Water.
Drowning in debt
The current situation is that Thames Water has massive, unrepayable debts. Thames Water’s ballooning debt—reaching approximately £18.5 billion—is currently at the center of a tense battle involving major hedge funds and distressed-credit investors. As the utility struggles to stave off financial collapse, the government has had to intervene to protect consumers from bearing the brunt of these rescue deals.
The vultures look for easy pickings
What seems to have happened is:
when the water companies were first privatised, their debt levels were around 5% to 10%.
the owners of the water companies, including Thames Water, loaded the companies with massive debts. This increased debt levels to around 80%. The owners used the loans to pay themselves eye-watering dividends
much of that debt has now been bought by ‘vulture funds’ (hedge funds) at hugely-discounted rates and now those vulture funds stand to make vast profits by blackmailing the UK government into either allowing the water companies like Thames Water to massively increase prices to consumers to help pay off the interest on those debts or to nationalise the companies thus handing over billions in profits to the vulture funds who bought the ‘distressed debts’ at rock-bottom prices.
I warned you
It’s never satisfying to say “I told you so”. Actually, that’s a lie. It is rather satisfying to say “I told you so”. Here’s a small part from my book GREED UNLIMITED written in 2012 about how the water companies, and in particular Thames Water, were fleecing us:
Thames Water provides an excellent example of how the supine, impotent, self-serving Ofwat is allowing water companies to fleece us. In 2000, the company was bought by the German RWE for £6.8 billion. Over the six years of its ownership, RWE pocketed around £1 billion in dividends. It then sold Thames to an Australian company for £8 billion. So RWE made around £2.2 billion – about £30 million a month or £1 million a day -from its brief ownership of Thames. Yet during its ownership RWE was allowed to increase water bills well above inflation by claiming it needed the money to invest in reducing leakage. In addition to its exploitative high prices, for years Thames has further increased its profits by selling off land and facilities to people like property developers. When asked why it had closed twenty five bulk water storage facilities, Thames explained, ‘all these sites were shut down when they became surplus to operational requirements following upgrades to our network’. At the same time as Thames was saying this, it had imposed a hosepipe ban due to a lack of water.
At the moment we don’t know what will happen with Thames Water – either a nationalisation costing us taxpayers billions or massive increases in water bills costing Thames Water customers billions. The only certainty seems to be that the vulture funds will make billions at our expense.
Here he is – one of the most famous multi-cultural enrichers we have had the good fortune to let into our country:
How lucky we are that this gentleman chose our country as his home rather than his native Cr*pistan.
This person received concurrent sentences of 22 and 19 years for raping children as young as 12, whom his gang groomed at two takeaway restaurants in Rochdale. Concurrent sentencing is when a judge allows a convicted defendant to serve multiple prison terms for separate crimes at the same time instead of stacking sentences back-to-back (consecutive sentencing). So basically, this could seem to be a way a judge can pretend to punish someone severely while actually giving them the shortest punishment possible for their particular crimes. This meant that this creature got off free from most of his crimes. Two-tier justice anyone?????
Most White British probably view this thing with revulsion and want him deported to his native Cr*pistan rather than spending the rest of his life in Britain possibly living comfortably off benefits that we’ll pay for. Cr*pistan’s government, naturally doesn’t want this thing in their country.
Our (IMHO) UK-loathing government claims it is putting pressure on Cr*pistan to take this creature back. But at the same time our useless government has just handed over more than £150 million in supposed ‘foreign aid’ to Cr*pistan with no strings attached. As for this £150+ million, given that Cr*pistan is one of the world’s most corrupt countries, we can expect some/most/alll (delete as appropriate) of this money will be stolen by venal Cr*pistani politicians, bureaucrats and business people.
But while we White British may view this enricher with utter revulsion, are these feelings shared by this enricher’s own community? Due to political correctness, I doubt there is a single journalist who will ask this question as they might suspect they will not get the answer political correctness requires.
I must stress that I have no idea how this (IMHO) revolting creature will be judged in his community. But there may be a few/some/many/most (delete as appropriate) people in this creature’s community who view us Kafirs (Arabic: كافر Unbelievers) as lower than pigs and dogs. Moreover, there may be a few/some/many/most (delete as appropriate) people in that community who view females/women as being inferior to men and even worthless. So such individuals might feel that the vaginal, anal and oral rape and beating and torturing of Kafir girls is the right or even the duty of any man from that community.
And so, there might be a few/some/many/most (delete as appropriate) people in that community who view this most famous enricher as a hero and not a villain.
However, there is one certainty: our UK-loathing government will bleat that it is trying to deport this gentleman. But actually it will do everything it can to allow him to remain in Britain further enriching our brilliantly successful multi-cultural society probably while living comfortably for the rest of his life on benefits.
In my Tuesday-Wednesday blog I wrote about the likely consequences of the West’s (except for Poland and Hungary) ‘suicidal empathy’. So now might be a good time to remind readers of soul-singer Al Wilson’s 1969 song ‘The Snake’.
The song seems to be clearly based on one of Aesop’s fables (number 176) titled “The Farmer and the Viper”.
One winter morning, a farmer goes for a walk. He spots a viper (a poisonous snake) freezing to death in the snow. Out of kindness, the farmer picks up the snake and places it inside his clothes to warm it up. When the snake wakes up and gets its energy back, its first instinct is to strike. It bites the farmer with a deadly bite. As the farmer lays dying, he realizes his mistake. But he only got what he deserved for helping a naturally cruel creature.
It has the moral that kindness to evil will be met by betrayal and is the source of the idiom “to nourish a viper in one’s bosom”.
Some people (not me, of course) may see this story (and thus Al Wilson’s song) as a chilling allegory of the ‘suicidal empathy’ the West is displaying as it welcomes in millions of people who seem to loathe us, hate our culture, despise our freedoms and want to dominate us and subjugate us by imposing their ‘culture’ and way of life on us.
I couldn’t possibly comment on what such people may or may not believe.
So next time there’s an atrocity and another atrocity and another atrocity, you can expect two reactions from our rulers:
Feigning total astonishment and claiming nobody could possibly have foreseen there atrocities
Denying that these atrocities had anything at all to do with our rulers’ deliberate policy of making White British a minority in their own country by bringing in an invading army of migrants from the world’s most primitive, backward, corrupt, and violent hell-holes
When this happens, please remember the closing lines from “The Snake”:
“I saved you, ” cried that woman “And you’ve bitten me, even why? And you know your bite is poisonous and now I’m gonna die” “Oh, shut up, silly woman, ” said that reptile with a grin “Now you knew darn well I was a snake before you brought me in”
Readers have probably all heard the term “suicidal empathy”. Wikipedia tells us:
Suicidal empathy is a purported phenomenon in which excessive, misdirected and pathological forms of empathy are claimed to be destructive for the party that exhibits it. This is often claimed to happen through prioritizing compassion, understanding and empathy over logic and long-term consequences.
The term was coined by Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad in his book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. According to Saad, suicidal empathy is the inability to implement optimal decisions when one is psychologically conditioned to prioritize empathy or displays of empathy over a rational course of action. He argues that suicidal empathy prioritizes minority groups such as illegal immigrants at the expense of survival and security of one’s own groups and values.
We seem to see this suicidal empathy everywhere in the West:
Two-tier policing and ‘justice’ prioritising minorities over the indigenous population
Better treatment of illegal migrants than of members of the indigenous population, for example our own military veterans
Committing economic suicide with Net Zero causing de-industrialisation and impoverishment
Allowing the invasion of European countries by millions of Third-worlders who hate us, our culture and everything about our way of life but still want all the economic benefits of living in the West
Turning a blind eye to the mass rape of thousands of often-underage white girls to supposedly avoid inter-community tensions
I’m sure readers can think of many more examples
Here are a group of (IMHO) idiots displaying an excellent example of “suicidal empathy“:
And here’s an example of the welcome our queer friends can get when visiting the more fundamentalist Arabian countries:
The limp-wristed, leftist, West-hating Guardian supposed ‘newspaper’ discussed Saad’s book among other works critical of empathy, characterizing the topic as a right-wing effort“…to dismantle and discredit one of the essential tools for any society – our capacity to recognize and respond to suffering. We should see the campaign against empathy by Trump supporters for what it is: a flashing red light warning of fascist intent“.
What I found rather jolly in the Wikipedia explanation of “suicidal empathy” was the list of suggested closely-related topics. I think these tell us more about “suicidal empathy” than the Guardian ‘newspaper’ article:
I’d like to spend just one more day focusing on the new mayor of the US’s reportedly wokest city – Seattle. Why? Because I believe this ‘economic genius’ is not just a problem for the benighted citizens of Seattle who voted for her, but because I have the feeling that she is a doppelgänger for almost all our Labour MPs.
If the citizens of Seattle and Britain want to vote for politicians who will crush anybody who works for a living with punitive levels of taxation in order to squander billions on their main voter base – the idle, the useless, the feckless, the unemployable, the can’t-be-bothered, the parasitic – that’s the voters’ choice and they must live with the consequences. But what is worrying is that politicians like this fine lady seem to have no idea that her city will need people with money to pay the billions in taxes she will need to fund her planned squandering:
Driven by their class envy, people like her loathe anybody who has made a success of their life. In fact, she is so filled with ideological hatred for those who achieve something, that she doesn’t even want them in her city. And she doesn’t seem to realise that her favourite social groups – the idle, the useless, the feckless, the unemployable, the can’t-be-bothered, the parasitic – tend not to pay much in tax. So, if she drives out the wealthier, where is she going to get the money she intends to flush down the drain?
We see the same attitude with Labour MPs. Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden seemed to sum up their attitude when he wrote to Peter Mandelson in apparent frustration about his meetings with backbench Labour MPs, writing: “Every meeting I have [with Labour MPs] is: ‘Who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?“
We saw the same class envy with Starmer’s and Reeves’s assault on private education. As many predicted, this led to (if I remember correctly) about 35,000 children being withdrawn from private schools and pushed back into state education thus putting more pressure on education budgets. As for the thousands of new teachers this class-envy tax was supposed to fund, well Labour seem to have gone pretty quiet about how ‘successful’ that was.
As we await the coronation of King of the North – Andrew ‘bugger-the-bond-markets’ Burnham – there’s one thing we can be sure of – there will be a massive class-envy-driven tax-raising attack on anyone not already dependent on handouts from our increasingly socialist/communist government. Figures of anywhere between £39 billion and £125 billion are being floated to prepare us for the coming shock.
For Labour’s main voting base – the the idle, the useless, the feckless, the unemployable, the can’t-be-bothered and the parasitic – the future looks bright. For the rest of us, ever-rising taxes, increasing impoverishment and national bankruptcy beckon.
Hopefully readers all noticed how quickly we were told that the prime suspect in the alleged murder of politician Ann Widdicombe, was a “white British man”. This has been repeated in every report since the discovery of the alleged crime. How different this ‘openness’ is when the suspect of a crime is a multi-cultural enricher! When a multi-cultural enricher is the suspect either we’re given no details of the suspect’s colour/ethnicty or else we’re deliberately misdirected: the Southport slaughterer was supposedly “a Welsh choirboy”, the Belfast beheader was supposedly “a Belfast man” (actually he was Sudanese) and so on.
Britain’s two-tier policing yet again and again and again and …..
Will Burnham ‘do a Seattle’ on Britain?
Here’s a jolly story you definitely won’t see on the BBC, ITV, C4 News or any other UK mainstream media.
Seattle’s new mayor, Katie Wilson, took office on 1 January 2026 and was sworn in on 2 January 2026. Katie Wilson won by 0.7% over her nearest rival. Katie, like the New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, calls herself a ‘democratic socialist’. But as we should all know by now, socialists only use democracy to impose socialism. And once you’ve imposed socialism, there’s never any democracy.
Katie studied physics and philosophy at Britain’s Oxford University but dropped out about six weeks before her final exams. She then did several ‘important, high-level’ jobs such as working in boat repair, construction and as an office assistant.
Anyway, one of democratic socialist Katie Wilson’s key campaign pledges was to increase taxes on the rich. Here she is mocking the rich and saying to her appreciative woke socialist admirers at a talk she gave at some university that she doesn’t give a toss if the rich leave the city:
Although Katie’s new taxes on the rich haven’t yet been implemented, the rich have realised how welcome they are in Katie Wilson’s socialist paradise and many have upped sticks and left. There are reports of some high-profile figures and business leaders relocating—and an Association of Washington Business survey indicating 44% of state business leaders considered moving their personal residences. But official census or tax records do not provide a verified count of departed millionaires.
Moreover, several major corporations have moved thousands of their employees out of the reach of Katie Wilson’s new taxes. Starbucks moved over 1,000 jobs out of the city and some estimates suggest that around 30,000 jobs have been moved out of the city. Both residential and commercial real estate prices have begun falling as people and jobs leave the city. Tax revenues have already started falling and the city is facing a $175 million deficit in Katie Wilson’s first year in office and an estimated $488 million deficit over the next five years. City departments have been told to make 5% to 10% reductions in their spending plans.
I could go on detailing this great Seattle democratic socialist ‘success story’. But I guess you get the picture.
If you go to YouTube and search for: “Seattle’s mayor begs millionaires to return”, you’ll find plenty of videos showing Mayor Katie Wilson attempting to do a reverse ferret as it begins to dawn on her dim democratic-socialist brain that her great plan to ‘tax the rich’ is turning into a disaster.
Will the Manchester Messiah do a Katie Wilson?
It seems that Britain’s answer to Katie Wilson, the Manchester Messiah Andrew Burnham, is approaching the governmnet of Britain in the same way as the great Seattle mayor, Katie Wilson. He’s going to ‘tax the rich’ and ‘make those with the broadest shoulders’ pay a ‘fair share‘. The Messiah has a great advantage over Mayor Wilson – it’s much easier for people and corporations to leave Seattle for another city or state than it is for people and corporations to leave Britain.
But although this inertia will mean that the disaster in Britain will be slower than the Katie Wilson economic car crash, it will be similar. And as tax revenues fall and Britain gets even closer to bankruptcy, what will the Messiah do? Of course, he’ll tax and tax and tax more and more and more driving Britain further into an economic doom loop. Though I doubt the (IMHO) financially-illiterate democratic socialist Manchester Messiah can even spell the word ‘economic’ never mind understanding what it means.
So get in the beer and popcorn as Britain’s new prime minister ushers in Britain’s new disaster movie.
I try to avoid writing about my sad, boring little life on this blog. But two recent incidents gave me some understanding why nothing in Britain seems to work anymore and nothing ever seems to get done to fix this.
Incident 1: The permanently leaking beach shower
For various reasons, I haven’t been able to go to the gym for a while. So, to get some exercise, I’ve been doing a 7-mile walk along the seafront each afternoon. I noticed that one of the beach showers has been leaking water for more than a month. A couple of weeks ago, I reported this to one of the local council staff working/lounging (delete as appropriate) at the beach. He assured me he would report this. Of course, he didn’t bother and the leak continued.
But yesterday, hallelujah. I saw a van from an organisation called ‘Dorset Water’ parked outside one of the blocks of toilets at the beach and on the van in nice big letters, Dorset Water boasted about how they fixed water leaks and some other things like that. So, I got the driver’s attention and told him about the leaking shower. He looked at me with incredulity. And, shaking his head, he said that there was nothing he could do about that. I explained that all he needed to do was turn off the tap feeding the shower then the leak would stop.
The leak repairman told me that he was there to fix a leak in the toilets, but couldn’t possibly deal with a leaking shower. The process was that I would have to report the leak to the council, the council would send someone out to check the cause of the leak, the council would then raise a job number, this job would then be assigned to Dorset Water and only then could the brave repairman look at the problem and either repair the shower or else turn off the tap feeding the shower.
In my naivety, I suggested that, as he knew the process and the people involved at the council and Dorset Water, could he report the leak. A look of total astonishment and shaking of his head. Of course, he couldn’t possibly report the leak. That was my job as a member of the public, not his job as a water leaks repairman.
It was a hot day and I was in no mood for a conversation with the human equivalent of a brick wall. So I gave up. It seemed that the shower leak would continue for at least another few centuries.
As I continued my walk I was approached by a gentleman who had been sitting in sun outside his beach hut.
He asked me what I had been talking with the Dorset Water worker about. I explained that I had told the hero from Dorset Water about the shower which had been leaking water for over a month. The gentleman then asked: Did he say “thank you very much sir. We know about that and will get it fixed as soon as possible” or did he say “thank you very much sir, we didn’t know about that, but I’ll report it and we’ll get it fixed”. I answered that unfortunately the Dorset Water repairman had (politely) suggested I get lost as being a water leaks repairman in Dorset he was totally uninterested in hearing about water leaks in Dorset. The gentleman walked away shaking his head and muttering about how his taxes were being wasted.
Incident 2: The great gas meter conundrum
Some workmen are currently replacing the old metal gas mains in the street where I live with new plastic pipes. As part of this, they have to run new pipes into my house. A couple of weeks ago, an ‘engineer’ and two workers from the utilities company carrying out the work visited me to see what work had to be done to connect my gas meter to the new pipes. When they saw my gas meter, there was much shaking of heads and discussion about problems with V16 gas meters and the difficulty of getting the pipes round ‘knuckle bends’. And I was informed that new holes would have to be drilled in my walls and cabinets removed and suchlike. Getting the feeling that I was dealing with some possibly incompetent ‘right-said-Freds’ who were about to wreck my house just to install some gas pipes I politely suggested they send someone who actually knew what they were doing.
A week or so later, three intrepid workers turned up to stand around discussing my gas pipes and gas meter. One was an engineer from SGN (my gas supplier) and the other two were from the utilities company carrying out the work. After a great deal of learned discussion they informed me that they could solve the problem with the ‘knuckle bends’ but that their job would be a lot easier if I had my old large V16 gas meter replaced with a more modern smaller V6 meter.
I replied, “OK, no problem, you’re welcome to replace my gas meter“. Once again (as with the Dorset Water leaks repaiman) looks of absolute consternation. They couldn’t possible replace my gas meter. The engineer from SGN was only responsible for the gas supply, the workers from the utilities company were only responsible for replacing the pipes. The gas meter was owned by Octopus Energy (my energy supplier) and only Octopus Energy could replace the meter. Again, displaying my naivety, I asked whether they could contact Octopus Energy and get the meter replaced. They looked at me as if I was mad. They couldn’t possibly do that. That wasn’t their job. It was up to me to contact Octopus Energy to get the meter replaced.
I did contact Octopus Energy and was told it would take 7 working days for a request from ‘Customer Services’ to reach the Engineering Department. Then the Engineering Department had up to 21 working days to set a date for the meter replacement. Clearly I couldn’t possibly get my meter replaced in the two weeks before the utilities company intended to carry out the pipe replacement
Broken Britain?
I have worked with a lot of engineers as many of the companies where I did projects were engineering companies – oil rigs, jet fighters, aircraft maintenance and office block construction – which were moving from ‘Cost Plus’ projects to ‘Fixed Price’ contracts. Managing a ‘Fixed Price’ contract requires quite different organisation structure and management systems compared to ‘Cost Plus’. And my, admittedly limited, experience of real engineers suggested to me that that ones I met from Dorset Water, SGN and the utilities company were less than professional and totally lacking in any form of initiative or taking personal responsibility for anything.
It’s rather lucky we didn’t have these (IMHO) useless, bureaucratic, initiative-free, blundering buffons running our country in 1939, otherwise we’d all have been speaking German long before the first soldier had been recruited or the first Spitfire had been built.
We’ll start in Thailand. Apparently to get a government job in Thailand and to agvance in your career, you need to pass a series of exams. A scandal has recently broken out when it was revealed that perhaps hundreds of candidates had been paying between 350,000 baht (£8,300) and 850,000 baht (£20,000) to cheat in the exams. I believe the higher the position, the more the candidate or candidate’s family, had to pay. Apparently the candidates were sending their exam answers to a group of corrupt civil servants who would correct any errors and then send the answers back to the candidates to be submitted. The prime minister has threatened to sack any government employees who cheated. But given that many cheating candidates will probably come from wealthy and influential families, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Now let’s go to Nigeria. The United Kingdom’s Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) has indicted 1,238 Nigerian nurses and midwives and is actively probing 717 others following a massive, widespread examination fraud scandal. The controversy centers on the Yunnik Technologies Test Centre in Ibadan, Nigeria, where data analysis by the NMC and its exam provider, Pearson VUE, uncovered “industrially scaled” anomalies. Candidates are accused of using proxy test-takers to complete mandatory Computer-Based Tests (CBT) in impossibly short timeframes—such as finishing 30-minute numeracy exams in under three minutes.
How about Pakistan? On 22 May 2020, Pakistan International Airlines Flight 8303, a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Lahore to Karachi, crashed while on approach to Jinnah International Airport Karachi, killing 97 out of the 99 people on board as well as an additional person on the ground. The aircraft, an Airbus A320 with 91 passengers and 8 crew members on board, was on an unstable approach to Jinnah International Airport, with an excessively high airspeed and altitude. The aircraft subsequently belly landed nearly half-way down the airport runway as the captain forgot to lower the landing gear. I’m not a trained pilot. But I imagine that lowering the landing gear when landing is a rather basic requirement. Then the flight crew conducted a go-around. During the go-around, both engines started to fail due to damage sustained during the belly landing. Whilst attempting to land back on the runway, the aircraft lost airspeed and crashed into buildings. Following the ‘accident; Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) grounded roughly 150 of its 434 pilots (nearly one-third) in June 2020 after an official government investigation revealed they held “dubious” or fake licenses. Aviation authorities found these pilots had cheated on examinations or paid others to sit the tests on their behalf.
Now Britain’s NHS. From the little I understand, many of Britain’s best doctors are leaving for countries like Australia, Canada and New Zealand where they can get a lot more money and a more relaxed lifestyle than Britain can offer. But this is apparently no problem as the NHS is recruiting many doctors from some of the world’s most corrupt countries. As far as I know, there has never been any investigation into how these doctors achieved their qualifications – whether honestly, or by cheating or by paying bribes. But given the morality of the countries many of these doctors come from, one might be justified in feeling concern about whether all these doctors are actually qualified.
We can perhaps get a hint as to whether there might be a more than minor problem by looking at the names of doctors given warnings by the General Medical Council (GMC)
July 2026
Chalint MOCHAMENT ALI SAOUGKI – qualified at The National Ribat University (Sudan)
June 2026:
Rhodri Sion DAVID – qualified at University of London
Yug SHANKAR – qualified at Kasturba Medical College Mangalore (India) Rotimi Abiodun AJALA – qualified at University of Ilorin (Nigeria)
Saker SAKER – qualified at University of Damascus (Syria)
Mohammed Zeedan KHAN – qualified at The University of Warwick
A ‘fingerspitzengefühl‘ looking at the list of warnings suggests that well over half of doctors given GMC warnings were educated in countries not particularly known for their moral probity.
While researching this blog, I was shocked/amazed to learn that approximately 42% of licensed doctors working in the UK were trained overseas. The General Medical Council (GMC) reports that roughly 138,400 internationally qualified medical professionals now make up the workforce.
So, is there a problem with possibly unqualified Third-world ‘doctors’ employed by our NHS which is the envy of the world? Have a look at the list of GMC warnings (link above) and make up your own mind.
David Craig, on July 27th, 2026
