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’s 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 Grand Theft Auto online! Pearls audibly clutched, the Telegraph describes GTA Online as “a violent video game involving shooting, driving fast cars and evading the police.” The story continues in this vein, gasping that “civil servants joined the game’s players through the internet, and spoke to them about their experience while taking part in GTA ‘missions’. 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.” 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 “uncovered” the blog post that serves as its source, although it doesn’t bother to link to the post in question—perhaps because it transpires that Policy Lab, the experimental U.K. government unit responsible for the GTA 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, “people-centered” policies, the body isn’t 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 published two years earlier.