I was struck by this interesting spin appearing in a BBC news report (not the BBC’s fault, they just printed what the spokesman said):
The Commons public accounts committee, headed by Edward Leigh MP, said urgent action was needed to ensure an adequate service was provided.
Its report said the electronic patient clinical record, central to the project, was already two years late.
But the government said the MPs’ report was based on out-of-date information.
Does this mean the system is less late than it was, and that time flows backwards in the NHS? No. Not even the current administration would try to sell that.
Has it been completed in the meantime? No. Limited trials begin in Bolton sometime soon (so Lancastrians in particular should attempt to opt-out while they can).
Does it mean there will be more up-to-date information presented by the government to prove the committee wrong? No. The government resists providing information about ongoing projects as much as it can, even to the public accounts committee. Giving out detailed evidence voluntarily (let alone in a checkable form) is unknown.
What it means is the government wishes you wouldn’t pay attention to the committee report at all, and wants you to believe it is of no value. Since the committee relies entirely on material presented by the government, simply saying it is wrong presents some problems. That might be taken as admitting government numbers are unreliable. But by saying “out-of-date”, it implies some fault in the committee without specifying quite what. You are invited to believe its conclusions are not valid and discount everything it says on that basis.
Isn’t this the standard government tactic to put down anything they don’t like?
To which Dr Hanley would simply say “James Madison owed slaves”.
Of course such Founders as John Adams did not own slaves (although it was lawful to do so in Mass at the time), but Dr Hanley would just produce another excuse as to why John Adams’ belief in equality before the law was not valid.
At the time of the 1964 Federal “Civil Rights” Act (which compelled people to trade with – employ black people if they did not wish to) and before this time with various State Civil Rights measures (such as those of New York State), people were told that such regulations were needed to correct past injustices (slavery and the Jim Crow regulations).
But more than 40 years later people like Dr Hanley are still comming out with the “structural discrimination” line. It is this line that is the “bullcrap”.
Dr Hanley does not favove “positive discrimination” (and so on) because he wishes to “correct” slavery or Jim Crow – he favours such things as “positive discrimination” because he hates freedom – period.
No doubt Dr Hanley would reply that freedom is not “true freedom” it is just “capitalist freedom”, but this is more “bullcrap”.
I would hate anyone to think I am defending the Government here but there is some logic to the “it’s less late than it was” argument, under certain circumstances.
In project planning it is possible, and actually quite common, to say that something is “late” in advance of that actually being the case.
This is because project plans show the expected time between the current moment and a future delivery date. If it becomes known that tasks on the critical path between those two points are going to take longer than initially envisaged, the timeline extends and thus the future delivery date becomes “late” in relation to the original plan.
Should action be taken by the project team to mitigate or avoid the critical path task delay (which is the point of having a project team), then the future delivery date can move backwards in time, thus becoming “less late” than it had been – even though none of the activities in question have actually even started.
It is possible, although in this case highly unlikely, that the Committee’s claim that the project was two years late was based on a version of the project plan that had been produced after a critical path task delay was identified but before remedial action had been taken.
In case you’re wondering, I am head of communications for a business whose stock in trade is project delivery – hence am reasonably well versed in this argument!
Clearly it has not proved possible to move my above comment to the correct thread. I apologize for my lack of coordination and concentration.