Daily Mail article 21 November 2007
 

Stephen Glover Daily Mail

A ruling class whose staggering incompetence is matched only by its arrogance

00:19am 21st November 2007
 

Alistair Darling is quickly turning out to be the most hapless - some would say the most maladroit - Chancellor for many years.

On Monday he intimated to the Commons that billions of pounds of government loans to Northern Rock might never be repaid.

Yesterday he stood in the same place to reveal one of the biggest acts of administrative incompetence committed by the British State in modern times.

The loss of two computer discs containing personal information about 25 million people is not something to be pinned on half-witted junior employees at HM Revenue and Customs, as Mr Darling shamelessly tried to do yesterday.

It is symbolic of an ingrained dysfunctionality on the part of this Government.

There exists between citizen and Government a precious contract. We hand over personal details in the absolute assurance that these will remain confidential. It is the same with our banks or our employers.

Think how we would feel if they mislaid private information of this sort that might enable others not only to filch money from our bank accounts, but also to commit identity fraud.

It is true there have been cases of banks leaving sacks of old bank statements and such like, containing private information, to be collected as rubbish, but these pale into insignificance compared with the loss of two discs containing personal details about nearly half the population of this country.

Full Daily Mail article

BBC News

Six more data discs 'are missing'
BBC article

Mirror 26 November 2007

A dad got a letter of apology from civil servants over the lost data fiasco - filled with private information about another parent.

Mirror article

Telegraph
Alistair Darling is embroiled in a cover-up row after Whitehall e-mails revealed that a senior civil servant was involved in the blunders that led to the lost data crisis

Full Telegraph article

Woman kept benefit discs 'for more than a year'

David Smith
Sunday December 2, 2007

Full Guardian story

BBC 02 December 2007

Timeline: Child benefits records loss

Full BBC article

BBC - Benefit data lapse 'disturbing'

Full BBC article

BBC 11 December 2007

Thousands of driver details lost

The Driver and Vehicle Agency in Northern Ireland has lost the personal details of 6,000 people.

Full BBC News item

Grantham Journal

Health staff data accidentally sent to firms

A union has claimed the personal details of hundreds of its members' were accidentally sent to four companies by their Merseyside health authority employers.

Full Grantham  Journal article

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British Government EDM 670

EDM 670 British Government

EDM 670   ENGLISH PARLIAMENT 17.01.2007   Field, Frank   20 signatures
 

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Early Day Motion 670 Frank Field
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Entered 09 September 2007: Independent 09 September 2007

Independent  article

Jackson backs 'IoS' campaign and sets his sights on Brown

The former army chief says PM shoulders blame over Iraq

By Cole Moreton and Marie Woolf

Published: 09 September 2007  

Gordon Brown is responsible for running down the British Army so that it is not ready for the new "generation of conflict" that soldiers now face, says the army's former boss General Sir Michael Jackson.

The man who retired as Chief of the General Staff just a year ago attacks Mr Brown in his new autobiography, Soldier, to be published tomorrow, saying the promises made by Tony Blair when in power were not kept because of the attitude of his Chancellor. "The Prime Minister was quoted as saying that the Army could have anything it needed – to which the cynical response was, 'Tell that to your next-door neighbour'."

In an exclusive interview Gen Jackson told the IoS: "That quote means it's all very well for the [then] Prime Minister to make such a generous statement but it has to be backed up with money. And we all know where the money comes from."

The general said he backed "wholeheartedly" the IoS campaign to repair the Military Covenant – the contract between soldiers and society – which has been broken by poor housing, inappropriate care of the wounded and injury compensation levels he said were "almost insulting".

Nearly 40 high-ranking military officials are now behind the campaign, including the former chief of defence staff Lord Bramall and the former commander of UN troops in Bosnia Colonel Bob Stewart. Serving and former soldiers and their families have flooded the newspaper with messages of support. "Military operations exact costs in blood and treasure," said Gen Jackson. "Our soldiers pay the cost in blood; the nation must therefore pay the cost in treasure."

The 63-year-old said the present Ministry of Defence budget would not give soldiers the resources needed to fight the long campaign expected in Afghanistan. The only way to afford the war under current spending plans, he says, would be to axe "big-ticket items" such as aircraft carriers to free up funds for ground troops.

He is calling for an immediate defence budget increase of 10 per cent – about £3.4b a year – and a review of MoD spending.

But asked if he expected that to happen under the present PM, Gen Jackson said: "I don't know whether the change from Chancellor to Prime Minister will give Gordon Brown a different perspective on the armed forces."

Yesterday the Ministry of Defence announced that the 250 members of the King's Royal Hussars Battle Group would leave Iraq early this month, and another 250 troops by Christmas, to reduce numbers to around 5,000 after the withdrawal from Basra Palace.

The current head of the Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, told top soldiers last month that they must prepare for a "generation of conflict" in Afghanistan. Yet the support for our campaign at the highest level of military life expresses anger at Whitehall thrift undermining troops.

Now the IoS has learned that the MoD told insurance companies bidding to provide life cover for soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan to "dissuade" personnel from increasing the amount of insurance they took out before they went to war and decreasing it when they came home.+

Full Independent article

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08 September 2007:  From Spectator 16 November 2006

Spectator article

Welcome to Red Tape Britain

Ross Clark

Welcome to Red Tape Britain, a land that's drowning in incredible and ridiculous rules. In the past 12 months, there have been 3,621 regulations introduced, running to a total of 98,600 pages: that’s 70 times longer than War and Peace.

There are now 279 different tax forms for businesses alone, asking a total of 6,614 questions. The notes explaining the Treasury’s “simplified” pensions regime ran to 1,369 pages. The Sheep and Goats (Records, Identification and Movement) (Wales) Order 2006, regulating the size, shape and colour of eartags on Welsh sheep and goats, ran to 45 pages.

The law allows you to kill a bullfinch or give one away, but not to sell or barter it. A woman from Kilbride was given an anti-social behaviour order forbidding her from answering the door in her underwear. The list goes on and on, and no less remarkable is just how little of this mountain of regulation is ever debated in parliament.

Instead, thanks in part to our membership of the European Union, the changes increasingly come in the form of regulations, amendments to existing Acts, and other “statutory instruments” – laws which ministers can enact without primary legislation.

In 1988, the Conservative government – itself far more prone to acts of petty regulation than is commonly remembered – passed 55 public Acts of parliament. In addition, it introduced 2,311 laws by statutory instrument. Last year, the UK government introduced 23 public bills before parliament, and put forward 3,601 statutory instruments.

Typical were the Working Time Regulations. There was a time when a measure which inflicted legal limits on the working day of employees would have come about only by Act of parliament. Not any more. The rules limiting most workers to a 48-hour week were introduced by diktat in 1998. Opposition was subdued by the granting of exceptions, which the government then proceeded to chip away with amendments.

The original regulations contained an exemption for workers whose working time was “partly unmeasured or determined by the worker himself” – in other words for the likes of senior managers for whom the distinction between time on-duty and time off-duty can be blurred.

Needless to say, a piece of common sense has now been abolished. Senior managers who want to work more than 48 hours a week must now – in theory at least – sign an agreement with themselves saying that they wish to put in the extra time; they must also keep a log of how many hours they actually work.

But how do you do this? Is that half-hour you spent in the bath, working through some complex problem, time spent on-duty or off-duty?

The distinction between work and leisure is certainly one which ministers find hard to make. John Prescott memorably told us that he was working as he was photographed at Dorneywood with a croquet mallet in his hand. Maybe he was busy discussing business between hoops; but was he taking care to clock off every time he bent down to take a shot?

Of course, to fill in a log of working hours properly would then add hours to the working week, defeating the very ill – overwork – which it sought to cure.

Equality is another area where new laws are now routinely imposed upon businesses without any parliamentary debate. Most recently this occurred with the Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006, which came into force on 1 October.

Among other things, these regulations make it an offence to advertise a job as being especially suitable for a particular age group. It raises the prospect of companies being taken to a tribunal should office banter draw attention to an employee’s age.

One insurance broker has already been moved to ban birthday cards which contain such expressions as “over the hill”, on the basis that it could lead to a claim against them. But worse still, the new regulations make it impossible for firms to keep within the law.

The Department for Trade and Industry has warned employers that they should not ask for an employee’s age on a job application form. But at the same time employers need to know the date of birth of employees – both for tax purposes and for vetting applicants under the child protection laws.+

Full Spectator article
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05 September 2007 Daily Mail

Daily Mail article

Britain slips to 17th place in the quality of life league table

 By COLIN FERNANDEZ - More by this author »

Last updated at 11:42am on 5th September 2007

Britain is slipping down the world rankings for quality of life, a survey suggests.

The UK is now only 17th in the international league table, a fall of two places from last year.

Norway remains the best place to live, according to the authoritative research, followed by Iceland and Australia.

Britain shares 17th position with Italy, one place behind France.

The research is based on the United Nations' Human Development Index, which looks at adult literacy, life expectancy and income levels.

It is intended to give a broader picture of a country than just the size of its economy. Britain has the fifth biggest economy in the world, after the United States, Japan, Germany and China.

However, per head of population, the British are only the 16th richest, with £18,043 per head, compared to sixthplaced Ireland at £24,412 and superwealthy Luxembourg at £38,567 per head.

The research is revealed in the Economist's Pocket World in Figures, an annual look into 200 categories covering 183 countries.

It shows that Britain is one of the world leaders in crime figures. It has 9,767 recorded crimes per 100,000 population, behind New Zealand's 11,152 and Finland's 10,243. South Africa, for all its lawless reputation, is in eighth place with 7,967 crimes recorded.

One area where the UK beats everyone else is in spending on music CDs and downloads, at £18 per person - although many will feel this is because CDs cost more here than elsewhere.

Full Daily Mail article

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 04 September 2007 American Thinker

American Thinker article

The Psychology of the Self-Hating Liberal

By Graham Cunningham

The good news is that, after a whole century of heading in the wrong direction, a moral and intellectual challenge to the bleeding-heart version of liberalism is finally welling up in the West. This is in no small part thanks to the liberating force of the Internet that has made freedom of expression possible again after decades of suffocating mass media orthodoxy.

There is however a tendency to focus only on the effects of the West's philosophical malaise. The rampant spread of our parasitic victim-culture and our impotence in the face of Islamic terrorism - these are both symptoms. The root cause lies in the psychology of sublimated self-hate that has come to be the prevalent psychic condition middle class liberals and especially those in media and academic circles. The truth is that virtually the entire ‘social justice' project of the last century - driven by middle class liberals on behalf of ‘the oppressed' - was motivated not by something noble but by something weak and creepy.

Its roots are a self-hating neurosis that, in different forms has afflicted the European intelligentsia since the time of Rousseau. I first became aware of the strange mind games of the self-hating middle class liberal at university in the 1970's. It is a mindset that did then (and still does) dominate academic life. Students and their tutors alike - mostly the beneficiaries of upward striving family backgrounds - were consumed with a phony and entirely self- absorbed infatuation with something they called ‘the working class struggle'. 

Through its disproportionate hold on academic and media culture this mindset has now become mainstream.   As it has spread through our culture it has been diluted and sublimated, Paradoxically this has made it even more poisonous by making it more difficult to apprehend. It has become a gossamer web of vaguely held attitudes. Here are some of them:

Being middle class is something to be slightly ashamed of. Being working class on the other hand - or better still affecting to be working class - makes you seem more heroic......As long as you are ‘left wing' you are not only a nicer person but you are also ‘radical' and therefore not boring. If on the other hand you are ‘right wing', well that means you are ‘reactionary' and mean......Business enterprise is essentially disreputable whereas getting a living off the public purse or in the arts and media is highly civilised. Being an engineer or a scientist is OK too, up to a point - for boring people anyway.....And of course all the problems of people in the rest of the world are the fault, not of those people themselves but of the prosperous West. More specifically, the blame lies with ‘the capitalist system'; not you personally of course. You show how much you care by going to Live Aid concerts and that makes you feel much better about yourself.

Full American thinker article

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 02 September 2007 Daily Mail

Daily Mail article

PETER OBORNE: The rise of the sleaze-ocrats in Britain's ruling class

Last updated at 22:53pm on 2nd September 2007

Five years ago I spent several weeks in Zimbabwe reporting on the way that President Mugabe was brutalising his people, in part thanks to the inertia and complicity of the Tony Blair government.

After I returned, Sir Patrick Cormack, a Conservative Party backbencher, invited me to his room. He wanted to ask what questions he should put to a government minister who would soon be giving evidence on Zimbabwe to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, of which he was a member.

So I told Cormack about a strange event that had occurred the previous month. President Mugabe had been invited to Paris by President Chirac for a summit meeting. This example of European approval of a barbarous dictator caused uproar.

When Downing Street was asked about the episode, it gave the impression to reporters that it had neither been consulted nor informed, while ministers spoke out angrily against the invitation.

In fact I was able to show Cormack evidence that the British government had known all along about the invitation, raised not the slightest objection, that its protestations of ignorance were false, and that the angry pronouncements by ministers were no better than a cynical device. I suggested to Cormack that he should expose this wretched business at the Foreign Affairs Committee, and offered to draft him a list of questions.

Sir Patrick gazed around his large and beautifully appointed Commons office. He looked appalled. "Oh, I could never do that," he stated. "It might embarrass the Government."

Since then I have often noted Sir Patrick nod with vigorous approval from the Conservative side as Tony Blair spoke from the dispatch box. I have seen him cross the floor of the House to offer sympathy and support to a government minister in trouble.

I have also been reliably told that he wrote a letter of rebuke to a younger Tory MP in a neighbouring constituency who attacked the Government. "That is not the sort of thing we do in Staffordshire," declared Cormack.

Cormack has his fans who believe that he represents a 'civilised' kind of politics. I cannot agree. Voters put their MPs into Parliament to represent their interests and articulate their concerns, and sometimes anger, not to form part of a comfortable club, or to collude with opposition parties.

Sir Patrick is one of hundreds of Members of Parliament who now belong to a Political Class that has become entrenched at the centre of British politics, government and society.+

Full Daily Mail article
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02 September 2007 Independent on Sunday

Independent on Sunday article

IoS campaign: Honour our troops

Cameron backs 'IoS' call to honour the Military Covenant

By Andrew Johnson
Published: 02 September 2007

A major campaign backed by servicemen and women, their families, senior military figures, politicians from all parties and armed forces associations is launched today to press the Government to honour its obligations to the British personnel risking their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Independent on Sunday campaign calls on the nation to honour the Military Covenant, which stipulates that in return for putting their lives on the line, British troops, airmen and sailors should be given adequate equipment to do their jobs, the best treatment possible if wounded and the assurance that their families will be looked after if they die in their country's service.

David Cameron is among politicians backing the campaign. He told the IoS: "The Military Covenant is an unbreakable bond of identity, loyalty and responsibility. I don't want the nation to let the Army down."

The Government faces unprecedented criticism of its handling of the war and treatment of troops. The death toll stands at 168 British troops in Iraq, and 74 in Afghanistan. New figures obtained by the IoS show the total number of casualties airlifted out of both countries now stands at 1,741, with field hospital admissions at 2,942.

Several families have instructed lawyers to mount a class action over the continued use of "soft target" Snatch Land Rovers, which are considered vulnerable to roadside bombs because they have no armour. About 20 troops have died in this way. Tomorrow, they will demand a meeting with Des Browne, Defence Secretary. +

Full Independent on Sunday article

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Telegraph article

Critics said that the men, who were hit by a 500lb bomb in Helmand, should have been pro-tected by high-tech systems to identify them to friendly forces.

“The era of the Disunited Kingdom is coming to an end”.

For parties to argue on the one hand for "localism", more "direct democracy" and an end to "top-down" government, such a stance is risible.