Professor John Robertson OBA

Leaping gleefully onto the allegations that 3 MSPs and ministers were spied on by SNP parliamentary staff, Dame Jackie Baillie has called for a probe. She shows little sign of wanting to probe Labour MSPs with paedophile pals or Labour councillors who are paedophiles.

So that we don’t think she is being a bit of a hypocrite will she also call for a probe into her own party’s plans to spy on millions of poor folk to make sure they really are poor, ie little in their bank accounts, with this:

The Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Act

Passed in 2025 — Introduced early in the year, progressed through Parliament (Commons and Lords), and received Royal Assent by December 2025.

Main Provision — Gives the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) powers to require banks and financial institutions to share limited data to verify eligibility for benefits (e.g., checking against savings thresholds like £16,000 for Universal Credit).

Here’s what Labour MP Neil Duncan-Jordan said of the Act:

This legislation would compel banks to carry out financial surveillance of welfare recipients [up to 9 m people] . Given the volume of accounts involved, this will be completed by an algorithm. If the software flags a possible overpayment, whether due to fraud or error, the bank will report the individual to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for further investigation.

Why should someone in receipt of benefits have fewer rights to privacy? And why are we asking banks to become an arm of the state?

These new powers strip those who receive state support of a fundamental principle of British law: the presumption of innocence. By default, welfare recipients would be treated as suspects, simply because they need support from the state.

The risk of a Horizon-style scandal on a massive scale is glaringly obvious when millions are being monitored. It will be disabled people, carers, pensioners and the very poorest people who are impacted by wrongful investigations and forced to endure burdensome appeals to prove their innocence.

It has been suggested that the powers would help identify overpayments more quickly, but the DWP already has ample data-sharing and data-matching powers at its disposal. The carer’s allowance scandal, when unpaid carers were plunged into debt and prosecuted for fraud because of the DWP’s own overpayments, provides an example of where the department was failing to use the access to real-time alerts of carers’ earnings they already had to stop overpayments. The government admits that if fraudsters spread assets across multiple accounts, they won’t be flagged.

The bill also grants the DWP draconian powers to apply to a court to have people stripped of their driving licences if they have outstanding debt, where all other attempts at recovery have failed. The government claims this will be a last resort where the debtor fails to engage with the DWP. In practice, it means officials will first attempt to deduct funds directly from their bank account. To do this, they must secretly request at least three months of bank statements from a bank without informing the individual, to assess whether the deduction would cause “hardship”. If it would, the person would eventually face the threat of losing their licence. That’s not justice – it’s a poverty penalty.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/25/spying-benefits-tory-labour-state-support

Oh yes and, Labour’s Colin Smyth trying to photograph bahookies in the loos!

What is Dame Baillie’s view?