The government has managed to lose data on 25 million people this week. An impressive achievement, you must agree. Question: what information about yourself would you most hate losing? I think my bank account number comes top of that list.
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Not since Sue Lawley invited him on to Desert Island Discs can Gordon Brown have agonised for so long over his CD collection. November 23rd, 2007 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Grayson Perry to be exact, a Brit artist, of the sort that makes you want to reach for the sneer quotes. But, I do give this Other Perry two cheers if not three for saying even this much:
This may seem like a half-arsed attack on Islam and/or Islamism, but it is way better than nothing, I think. Half an arse is better than no arse at all. These kind of remarks are adding up. The project of denouncing Islam as the evil crap that it is gradually gains ground, inch by inch, and what Other Perry says is another inch advanced. And I do mean attacking Islam, rather than merely those accused of ‘betraying’ it by… doing what it says. The word is gradually spreading. If you are a serious Islamist, who does believe in doing what Islam says, we infidels, even our artists, are starting seriously to understand you. Watch out. We take our time to understand these kinds of things, but we get there, and when we do… On the other hand, if you are, as so many Muslims are, a nice person, and accordingly not a serious Islamist, but if you merely say periodically in a self-hypnotic way that you do believe in Islam, then for goodness sake read the damn stuff properly and stop saying that you believe in it. You are trying to have it both ways. Stop this. Stop encouraging something that you say you don’t believe in. Make up your mind. A good first step in denouncing Islam as the scary stuff that it is is to admit that you are scared of it, and not in any ‘phobic’ way but for good solid reasons. Grayson Perry has admitted this, and rather than complaining that he goes no further, I say, good on you mate, for at least going this far. November 22nd, 2007 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am old enough to remember the run-up to the 1979 general election, and a lot of what swung that for Thatcher was the feeling that our country seemed about to descend into a state of South Americanness. This extraordinary lost data discs business is, I think, particularly wounding to the Brown regime, for it gives off that same vibe, of a government descending into anarchy, and not in a good way. The whole world is now sniggering at Britain. However, good news for Brown comes from a commenter on this posting at Guido’s:
Oh, only seven million. That’s okay then. This comment reminds me of an amazing peacenik meeting I once attended, almost as long ago as the 1979 election, in which the speakers on the platform all took it in turns to explain how ghastly a nuclear explosion over a built-up area would be and that therefore we should chuck away our nuclear weapons, and a particularly bonkers middle-aged woman in the audience, called Daphne if I remember it right, got up to explain that actually, if you got lucky with the prevailing wind, and if proper civil defence measures were taken, it might not be that bad. The looks on the faces of the platform speakers were truly treasurable. I got up and said that the speakers certainly had me convinced me that nuclear war would indeed be rather nasty, and how about the replacement of Soviet communism with liberal democracy, as the least implausible way to end the nastiness? But that’s another story. Getting back to this lost discs thing, I agree with everyone else here who is, quite rightly making such a fuss of this business. Don’t collect the damn data into these huge compulsory gobs in the first place. Whatever David Cameron, says now …
… his conclusion if and when he becomes Prime Minister (which this whole thing makes that much more likely) will presumably be that it will be a sufficient answer for his noble self to be in charge of the government’s compulsory databases, and that all will then be well. But it does occur to me, just as Black Wednesday saved the pound from being swallowed up by the Euro – which it surely did, whatever you think about that – this fiasco might just have done something similar to the database state. Not abolished it, or even reversed it seriously, but at least thrown a bit of a spanner into its works. Suddenly, ID cards are looking truly scary, combining malevolence with incompetence – Soviet even – to Mr and Mrs Average. I wrote that before reading what Guy Herbert said in the previous posting but one here, and I see that he reaches an identical conclusion. If so, good. Campaign for Database Disarmament anybody? November 22nd, 2007 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
A story on the UK news last night gave statistics on trauma patients. Those are the seriously injured who must be transported from an accident site to a trauma centre. The percentages of trauma patients who die are: UK – 43% Draw your own conclusions. I happened to be near a TV last night and was so stunned by the numbers that I pulled out my clipboard and wrote them down. The news feature also noted that ambulance first responders were insufficiently trained and often did not carry out measures such as clearing air passages. It also discussed the idea of having specialist regional trauma centre’s. If any one else was watching last night, their inputs on this TV report and the data behind it are welcome. The only thing I have found so far on the net is this November 22nd, 2007 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
You cannot trust any agency with people’s personal data. The quote of Britain’s political week. There is a massive breakthrough in the public understanding of the database state, and the Government is finding it a real struggle to contain it. BBC journalists (Eg. Newsnight, The World Tonight, etc) are making an explicit connection between the three real monsters: the National Identity Scheme, Connecting for Health, and ContactPoint. My personal touchstone for success is when Criminal Records Bureau disclosure starts to be criticised in the public presses. Bonus quote:
Now is not a time to rest. November 22nd, 2007 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The immense majority of our people consider economic freedom as radically immoral. It scandalises them in the fullest sense of the word. – Daniel Villey, “Economique et Morale”, in Pour une Economie Liberee (1946), quoted in Economics and Its Enemies, by William Oliver Coleman. The latter book is an astonishingly good piece of scholarship. Its passages on the persecution of economists in the former Soviet Union are harrowing. November 21st, 2007 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Samizdata readers who are bored senseless by team sports can scroll down – Okay, this evening yours truly watched as England’s football team lost 2-3 to Croatia in the qualifying stages of the European Championship to be held next year. As a result of the loss, England will not take part in the competition; England’s manager, Steve McClaren, who seems to be out of his depth in the role, will either resign – not yet at the time of writing – or be sacked. Many of the players, who often earn vast salaries to play for their Premiership teams, played with a lack of guile and commitment that was embarrassing to behold. I would like to put on an act and claim I do not care about all this, that it is “just a game”, blah, blah, but that would be lying. I enjoy watching football but England’s football team was abject, terrible. I wonder whether there are every any political or cultural implications of things like this – I am not sure. But the crapness of the football team does rather reinforce the glum mood of this country right now: lost data, Northern Rock and a rapidly cooling economy. Football is the English national game – even more than cricket or rugby union. But it might not stay that way much longer. November 21st, 2007 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
A commenter on Samizdata wrote the following lines, which got me thinking:
No I had not, but now that you mention it….
I do not have a problem with welfare for poor families – it is state welfare that is the problem. The all-important word “state” is the problem.
Indeed. As the late Ronald Reagan used to say, a state that is powerful enough to give the public everything it wants is powerful enough to take it from them too. And I think that one, perhaps unintended insight of this debacle is how it demonstrates that 25m British citizens receive some form of state benefit, or ‘tax credit’ (ie, benefit). That is a shocking statistic in its own right. 25m people, the vast majority of whom are not poor by any objective basis, now are caught into the welfare system. I am not saying, of course, that if the welfare system is rolled back, that disasters like this will not happen, but the need to hold so much data on us in the first place would certainly be greatly reduced, if not eliminated. It goes without saying that this fiasco is a gift to opponents of ID cards. The sun was shining on my way to work this morning. November 21st, 2007 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of my fellow Samizdatistas recently told me that whatever business model the porn industry is following now is what Hollywood is about to follow. To see the future of Hollywood, look at porn now. Porn, so I was told, now, already, distributes itself by being given away, and then if you like something you see for free you go to the originating porn site and pay a bit, either in cash or in advertising attention or for individual products, because that turns out to be an even better deal, and worth paying a bit for. Hollywood is slowly learning this lesson. But is it actually too late for them to learn? Look what is apparently now happening to the porn industry:
So, is that what is about to happen to Hollywood also? Will movie and TV entertainment of the clothes-mostly-on sort also be overrun soon by amateurs? WIth thanks to Instapundit for the link. November 21st, 2007 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
“You could argue, indeed, that the great lesson of the 20th century – desperately hard learned in less fortunate countries than Britain, but tough to swallow even here – is that the state does not have the answer to human problems in the way that so many hoped so naively for so long.” – Martin Kettle, at the Guardian. I love his expression “you could argue”. There’s no argument, Martin. The failure of the state is so total, so widely proven, that it is quite astonishing that it has taken some folk a while to catch on. November 20th, 2007 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Word got out today that Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue (ie the British tax service) managed to lose a CD containing ‘customer records’ for recipients of child benefits that was being sent to the National Audit Office. These included sort code and bank account details, national insurance numbers, dates of birth, and names and address details of a mere twenty five million people. These were apparently sent using the Civil Service’s hyper-secure ‘grid post’ system, which involves people putting unsealed and re-used envelopes in out trays in their offices. As the Register puts it.
When the CD sent this way did not arrive, they resent it, using the hyper-hyper-secure Registered Mail service provided by the Royal Mail (fortunately, this time it arrived). However, Alistair Darling has now set up an investigation. That makes me feel so much better. And Paul Smee, of the bank clearing system has said that we all enjoy protection under the Banking Code, so we will cannot suffer any financial loss. And anyway, the accounts in question have had “extra safeguards” put on them. All 25 million of them, presumably. That makes me feel so much better too. And does anyone at all seriously believe that the proposed system of ID cards and national identity databases is not going to deliver us debacle after debacle of this kind? Why do ministers and bureaucrats live in this deluded world in which they believe they are competent? November 20th, 2007 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
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