21 November, 2007

The lost records

Scarcely any need to inform readers of the latest cock-up: perhaps 25 million personal records lost, details of every child in the country. But we are used to government-created disasters, particularly when they involve computers and however awful, it will soon be forgotten. There is talk in the British press that this will bring about the end of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alastair Darling, but I am not so sure. I don't know much about the man, but I expect he is the same as the other New Labour apparatchiks, who have clung to their jobs while the edifice of public confidence collapses around them under the weight of their own incompetence. If he does go he will be able to say that he was told not to make any decisions without consulting his boss, only to find that the top man was incapable of decision making. Brown's fingerprints are too much over this to hand him the pistol and the whisky bottle right now.

No, what interests me is how the government happened to have all these details on disk - 25 million people! - and be posting them somewhere else. The answer leads us again back to Gordon Brown. His policy has been that everybody should be dependent on the state: there are examples of people earning £50,000 a year and still able to get government handouts, and he won't stop until Jonathan Ross is on some income supplement (the rest of us won't stop until he's on unemployment benefit but that's another matter). It is quite absurd that payments should be made to people who don't need them and the result is a bloated - and incompetent - state, hungry for information about you, eager to turn you into a dependant, a welfare junkie. And worse: they know who you are, where you are and what you're doing.

Applied for your ID card yet?

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