Veterans
Let me tell you a little story..
Once upon a time there was a rotund man called Simon Harris. Simon Harris didn’t have any skills so he decided he’d give social media a try. He was a parent so he decided to try to be a parent blogger on Facebook. To be fair to Simon Harris, at the time he started on this endeavour Facebook was the most popular social media platform and more than 10 people followed him on Facebook.
He started off doing hysterically funny satirical pages. Now this is where i’m feeling a kinship with Simon, he started with Southend News Network and he was totally anonymous, he wore a gorrila mask and referred to himself as “The Editor” or just “Editor” can’t be bothered to check if the word the was actually involved. Anyway, It was actually the Guardian article that is in the previous post that unmasked him. Up until that 2017 article he was anonymous just like what I am. So it wasn’t until 2017 that the world found out about Simon Harris, I don’t believe anything is planned yet for the ten year anniversary of this monumentous event next year, but I will keep you all posted.
From there he went to the dizzying heights of Man Behaving Dadly after a falling out with some Mum Bloggers. More on that in another blog, i’ve been compiling a very long list of everyone that Simon has fallen out with.
Then he decided he was going to make his fortune from all of this parent blogging and became intent on becoming a social media whore. A late 2010’s version of a 1990’s it girl, except Simon’s breasts are bigger. He went and did some social media networking. This social media networking was done at in person events to show how effective social media networking is. That is how he met Kirsty O’Callaghan who was then working at Essex County Council The rest is history, along with everything else that has ever happened.
Simon Harris then started to be the recipient of contracts from the aforementioned Essex County Council, this started in 2019. Then in 2020 something amazing happened, something that opened the purse strings of both central and local government, it was a wonderous moment! They called it a pandemic, people were getting rich all over the place. Yeah, lot’s of people died, lots of companies went under, mental health suffered, education suffered, children suffered, but a small amount of people got rich so it’s all good.
It was a public health emergency KERCHING!
Essex needed a hail Mary before we all died because nobody in Essex can understand instructions like “Stay at home” and “keep 2 metres away from people” and “stop licking strangers eyeballs”, that last one may have just been aimed at me though. Luckily for the people of Essex Simon Harris existed or we all would have died! The only way the people could understand these instructions was via the medium of Facebook. This was so successful and saved eleventy billion lives so of course Essex County Council wanted to expand this whole way of working.
Here is the story of Simon Harris and the veterans page, which as we all know had no content on it.
Simon was paid £15,000 for what was essentially an empty page, but it wasn’t a lump sum. The contract was renewed every 12 months for 3 years. The first payment was in 2021. This is the contract that goes with that first payment:
Here is the project scope and deliverables:
That’s a lot of words that don’t really mean much. Simon Harris was never anything more than a data entry clerk. I’m not being sarcastic, i’m not being rude, Simon said himself in the interview with Phil from A different bias that his job was to take the information he was given by whoever and basically cut and post it. That’s what Simon got all of that money for. The project scope for the veterans project doesn’t say that though.
Simon was meant to be doing all of that. It’s actually not a lot of work given that Simon is the ultimate social media God. He said he didn’t want to be inadvertently offensive, which is the weakest excuse i’ve ever heard. I was listening to Hail Mary by Tupac earlier, hence why that phrase appears in this post. I’ll be happily sitting here singing along but I damn well know what words I cannot sing. I’m whiter than white, I have Irish blood i wouldn’t even say that word if I was totally alone.
It’s easy to not be offensive, you just don’t be offensive. Though I have no idea how you can accidently say something offensive to a veteran, is there some kind of slur that is used against veterans that I haven’t heard about? I am a bit stupid if i’m being honest. I’m lying, i’m a lot stupid.
So Simon has the first year long contract in place which would end at the end of March 2022, I have seen zero evidence that when the contract that i’ve linked above was signed that it was planned to be a 3 year thing. Simon MUST have some correspondence that shows more than the contract does, but he has yet to show anything that would make what he says about the veteran project more believable.
I’ve also seen nothing which would explain to me exactly what the facebook page was going to do to support armed forces personnel and veterans, which shows how terrible the whole lack of paperwork and lack of work on the page was. There should be something somewhere which would make this clearer.
A screenshot from the contract showing what the consultant (Mr Simon Harris) was liable for:
Please take note of the wrong date regarding the payment, it’s clear they were just copying and pasting information into the contract templates.
6.4 though, what’s that all about? The money should be refunded if the consultant just sits on his rather generous buttocks instead of actually working? Yup, that’s the way I read it as well.
I’m not going to sugarcoat anything in this blog, mostly because i’m terrified Simon would try to eat it if I did, but he didn’t do the work, why does he still have the money?
I am even angrier at Essex County Council than I already was. The contract states they were entitled to that money back as Simon didn’t do the work, but Essex County Council after they were busted for all of this money wasting did the bare minimum in investigating and didn’t even try to claw back any of the public money that was spent, as they were clearly entitled to do under the terms of the contracts.
Simon’s excuse for not doing any of the work he was paid to do was that nobody gave him anything to post. Nobody gives me anything to post on this blog yet I still manage to come up with things and i’m not being paid. You want content about the armed forces and veterans? It’s easy to find, there is something called google. He could have contacted the RBL, plenty of places would have given him information to amplify to armed forces personnel and veterans, instead Simon did nothing. Claims he went to meetings and sent emails, i’ve not seen any evidence of this, not saying it didn’t happen, just that I haven’t seen any evidence of this. I just know that if it was me i’d be posting all of it to prove that I gave it my best shot.
So between April 2021 and April 2022 he does the complete sum of sod all. He’s banked the £5k and the armed forces personnel and veterans of Essex have absolutely nothing to show for the money that was meant to help them. Simon blamed ECC for not sending him stuff. We cannot tell whether they were meant to or not as the contract doesn’t state it, but that is a poor excuse as to why it went on as long as it did. Simon blamed the lack of content on not wanting to say anything inadvertently offensive regarding Veterans. Of course that doesn’t apply to saying offensive things to women, just veterans.
So Simon did nothing for that first year because the local authority wouldn’t give him any content. So what did he do? He signed another contract to do exactly the same thing for another year:
Another year, another £5k paid to Simon Harris for a Facebook page that still had no content despite being active for a year.
Here we have the period between April 2022 and March 2023 and another £5k. So Simon had already been paid for the first year where he did absolutely nothing. Simon claims he spent a lot of time and effort trying to get whoever to give him content, if it didn’t work in the first year, why did he sign on the dotted line for the second year?
I’m a glass half full type person and even I would have come to terms with the fact that if they hadn’t given me any content the first year, the situation was unlikely to change during the second year. Here is the second year project scope and deliverables:
That’s just a load of rubbish, utter rubbish, that’s not a proper scope and deliverables it’s meaningless.
According to Simon, the situation did not change with regard to him being given content during the second year despite Simon claiming to have spent effort trying to get content sent to him, but no effort liasing with other services that would have been able to give him content, which is what I would have done.
So between April 2022 and March 2023 was spent with £5000 in his pocket without having done any work for that money and no evidence of him trying to get content has been evidenced. What a situation to be in. What would you do? what would anyone do? What would Simon do? Sign up for another year and pocket another £5k is what Simon would and did do,
Here is the contract for the year covering April 2023 to March 2024:
I apologise, just a slight technical difficuly, apparently I can’t take a screenshot of something that doesn’t exist. There is no contract published to cover the third year, and the third £5000 that Simon received for the Veterans page.
Do we all remember all those times that Dr Dave has said about there being no contracts and Simon has fought back by saying all the contracts were published and definitely do exist? It appears that Dr Dave was the one in the right. See for yourself, not all of the work that Simon was paid for had a written contract.
Here is the proof that Simon was paid it, this is in the Excel spreadsheet that ECC realeased to show who was getting what and when::
So that is the final £5000 of the £15000 that Simon received from ECC for a Veterans Facebook page with no content. Essex County Council should have gotten him to pay all that money back as per the terms of his contracts. Well the £10000 that was covered by contracts at least.
Clearly it is Essex County Council at fault here, they are the ones entrusted with the money and they wasted it, but I do feel that Simon’s actions are also at fault here. If what he is saying is true and that for whatever reason he was wholly reliant on someone sending him content to post, why didn’t he refuse to take any more taxpayer money when ECC didn’t hold up their end of the bargain? Why did he go on to renew his contract for that page twice?
This is not a good look for Simon. It’s a reasonable conclusion to say that Simon must have known within a month of signing the first contract that content wasn’t going to be forthcoming, by the end of the first year it must have totally obvious that he wouldn’t be getting any content to post, yet he carried on signing the contracts and pocketing the money while doing absolutely nothing to earn it. That is morally reprehensible. I had assumed he’d been handed £15000 for the whole project all at once. That it was a project that was renewed each year for £5000 each year is so much worse. How the hell do you accept £5000 when you must be almost certain you will be doing nothing for that money?
Before we go any further, could you all please take a look at my brand new Facebook page. It’s absolutely amazing and i’m certain you will enjoy reading it and will be thankful i’ve created it for you all.
https://www.facebook.com/womanbehavinggladly
You’re welcome by the way.
I will be doing a blog post about fundraising at some point but that takes a lot of thinking and i’m more than a little bit thick so it requires all 5 of my braincells.
Edit: the answer to the burning question is yes, yes I did, unintentionally, but yes. I’ll write about it later.