{"id":557,"date":"2026-06-23T22:45:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T22:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=557"},"modified":"2026-06-23T22:45:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T22:45:15","slug":"are-british-civil-servants-merrily-playing-gta-online-at-the-taxpayers-expense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=557","title":{"rendered":"Are British Civil Servants Merrily Playing \u2018GTA Online\u2019 at the Taxpayer\u2019s Expense?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>If the state of U.S. politics ever gets too depressing to handle, you can always cast a glance across the Atlantic and remind yourself that it\u2019s not exactly all sweetness and light in the old country, either. Why, just this week the Telegraph revealed that lazy British civil servants had used taxpayer money to play <em>Grand Theft Auto<\/em> online!<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=555\">Cate Blanchett Launches \u2018Human Consent Registry\u2019 to Help Protect Your Likeness From AI Industry Scraping<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Pearls audibly clutched, the Telegraph describes <em>GTA Online<\/em> as \u201ca violent video game involving shooting, driving fast cars and evading the police.\u201d The story continues in this vein, gasping that \u201ccivil servants joined the game\u2019s players through the internet, and spoke to them about their experience while taking part in <em>GTA<\/em> \u2018missions\u2019. Examples of the missions include stealing from a jewellery shop, detonating a bomb to kill the chief executive of a major company, and driving prostitutes to their clients within a specific time limit.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The shame of it all! How did the Telegraph manage to get a hold of such a scoop?? Er, well, the paper claims to have \u201cuncovered\u201d the blog post that serves as its source, although it doesn\u2019t bother to link to the post in question\u2014perhaps because it transpires that Policy Lab, the  responsible for the <em>GTA<\/em> project, has had a publicly available website throughout its decade-long lifetime. It also turns out, amusingly, that despite existing to pioneer outside-the-box, \u201cpeople-centered\u201d policies, the body isn\u2019t even the product of the kind of naive liberalism the Telegraph tends to vilify. It was set up under the Conservative\/Liberal Democrat coalition in 2014, as a result of a civil service reform plan .<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>The offending blog post itself was most likely this one, published in December 2024. The timing means that this would be less a case of the Telegraph\u2019s fearless journalists doggedly \u201cuncovering\u201d information and more of them \u201cnoticing something that had been sitting on the internet for 18 months.\u201d And on actually reading the post, it turns out\u2014shockingly!\u2014that the story isn\u2019t quite what the Telegraph is making out.<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>First, the researchers were actually inspired by a project called <em>Grand Theft Hamlet<\/em>, wherein two actors tried to develop a full production of <em>Hamlet<\/em> within <em>GTA Online<\/em>. Despite the reader clearly being led to understand that civil servants were involved in virtual thefts, murders and big pimpin\u2019, a careful word-by-word examination of the copy provides an alternative meaning, which is that these are in fact generic examples of missions with which <em>GTA Online<\/em> participants <em>might<\/em> be presented. #journalism, folks.<\/p>\n<p>And look, whatever you think of the merits and methodology of the actual <em>GTA<\/em> project, it\u2019s hard to fault the philosophy behind it. There\u2019s long been a fundamental disconnect between the world of new technology and the world of politics, largely because the most eager adopters of the former tend to be young, and the denizens of the latter tend to be relatively old. This results in a situation where legislators are tasked with regulating technology that they neither use nor understand.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=553\">A Program to Expand Rural Internet Access Now Looks Like a Slush Fund for Tech Billionaires<\/a><\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>With that in mind, governments should be encouraged in attempts to better understand how people use technology and to figure out how to meet people where they are. This appears to have been the goal behind the <em>GTA<\/em> project. The 2024 Policy Lab blog post explains that its aim was to explore how engaging with people within \u201cthe metaverse\u201d could \u201cdeepen our understanding of policy issues and engage communities who traditional methods may struggle to access.\u201d (Just to be clear, the authors interpret the term \u201cmetaverse\u201d in a fairly loose sense\u2014they use it a as blanket term for \u201cany virtual worlds where people connect socially, usually within a 3D digital space,\u201d a definition that encompasses games like <em>Fortnite<\/em> and <em>GTA Online<\/em> in addition to Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s legless horrorshow.)<\/p>\n<p>The Telegraph\u2019s story mentions none of this. Instead, it throws in a few shots at other Policy Lab projects and then moves onto the real business at hand: a professionally outraged quote from Mike Wood, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, who bleats, \u201cHard-working families will be in disbelief that their taxes are bankrolling this nonsense.\u201d (You can tell Wood is still learning his craft by his failure to crowbar a \u201cthink of the children\u201d angle into his quote, but he\u2019ll get there.)<\/p>\n<p>In summary, then, the story is a lazy piece of outrage bait. Its wording and framing of the actual event is disingenuous at best and deceptive at worst. It provides no context for its subject\u2014how large is Policy Lab\u2019s budget, for example? How much did the GTA project cost? And how many Boris Johnson wine suitcases does that cost equate to?<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Perhaps most depressingly, it also contains the obligatory quote from a browbeaten Labour spokesperson: \u201cMinisters did not sign off these projects and don\u2019t want to see taxpayers\u2019 money wasted on video games when there are bigger problems the public care about.\u201d In other words, the whole sorry business is a prime example of how the conservative media sausage is made. Outrage, heartstrings, repeat.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=551\">Meta Is Building a Prediction Markets App to Challenge Polymarket and Kalshi<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scandalous waste of resources or conservative media beat-up? Oh go on, guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":556,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Are British Civil Servants Merrily Playing \u2018GTA Online\u2019 at the Taxpayer\u2019s Expense? - Long Haul Moving Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=557\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Are British Civil Servants Merrily Playing \u2018GTA Online\u2019 at the Taxpayer\u2019s Expense? - Long Haul Moving Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Scandalous waste of resources or conservative media beat-up? 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