Reinforcing precisely the point I made about VAT fraud, you get thieves making off with "hundreds of millions" of our money, and the media barely mentions it.
Yet, a "gem heist" taking a "mere" £40 million – no doubt covered by insurance – and the news goes straight to the front page.
There is something very distorted about media values. Over term, VAT fraud has robbed EU member states of at least £10 billion (if not more), which is crime on a colossal scale. Yet none of our hacks – much less the politicians – seem to be able to take it seriously.
The lesson for potential crooks is obvious. Don't bother with the high-profile heists. Just rip off the taxpayers of Europe (taking as your role model the politicians) and the chances are you will get away with it unnoticed – and certainly unreported.
COMMENT THREAD
Another post on Defence of the Realm - a long one. Just for the record, this one has taken over five hours to write and prepare for posting, not including the background research that went into it.
I am pleased to say, however, that there are signs of this effort being rewarded. Following the makeover of the site, the hit rate has soared, matched by a measurable increase in visitors, at a time - during the holiday season - when we normally expect a fall-off. Not only that, readers appear to be spending more time on the sites, which indicates that people are actually reading what we write.
Nevertheless, there have been a few (very few) complaints about the emphasis on military matters on EU Referendum, so I am trying to vary the fare a bit more, although once the "silly season" is over, there will be more EU posts. With the whole of the Continent on holiday, there is not much to report at the moment.
On a small housekeeping note, we (mainly North Jr) are continuing to clean up the minor technical glitches that have cropped up after the makeovers, while I am starting the process of indexing both sites. You will see that, at the bottom of the sidebar here and on the bottom of DOTR, there are now index sections, which I am expanding and updating. Unlike the search function (which is erratic), the index actually works.
We are also rebuilding the blogrolls, and are adding new sites daily. If you feel your blog should be included, please let me know and I will add the appropriate link.
Meanwhile, thank you all for reading our sites, and for adding to the vastly inproved Forum section, which is attracting some high quality discussion.
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