Discombobulated Government
Nov 22nd, 2007 by Eats Wombats
Steve Bell’s cartoon in The Guardian is the best thing I’ve seen yet about the lost discs fiasco, dubbed the Winter of Disc Content by BBC Radio 4’s Today program this morning, namely the government’s losing data about half the adult population and a large number of dependents.
More discs have gone missing. All this comes shortly after National Identity Fraud Prevention Week has come to an end; sponsored by, yes, you’ve guessed: HM Revenue and Customs. It would make a cat laugh.
Particularly astonishing is the apparent lack of or failure to use broadband connectivity, which 90% of Internet users in the UK now enjoy, in government agencies. It would take me less than 10 minutes to download the data at home. Predictably, some wag advertised the discs for sale on eBay during the day. “One careless owner” it said, until the ad was removed.
As we have a child at home, details of our family and bank accounts are included in the lost data, so we are potentially affected. Incredibly, thousands of people have apparently used a child’s birthday as a PIN code and they are now calling their banks desperate to change them before fraudsters make use of them.
As has been widely noted, this was an accident waiting to happen. It’s a bit depressing that this government ignored repeated advice on this subject from several sources, including an excellent report on IT security prepared by the House of Lords Select Committee on science and technology earlier this year. Again and again, the decisions seem to trace back to Gordon Brown. A fine intellect maybe, but increasingly he’s portrayed as a flawed political control freak. He may yet regret his loss of courage over the election. The stench of decay and incompetence is overpowering now.
Confidence in the government is collapsing, with a new scandal or manifestation of incompetence surfacing almost daily. Time to subscribe to Private Eye perhaps. There will be some royal entertainment in the next few weeks for sure. Meanwhile, BBC journalist Nick Robinson’s blog is worth following.
Mick Fealty blogging for the Telegraph writes
But what is happening, slowly, but surely to the Brown government is a form of death by a thousand tiny little cuts. The latest cock up is major enough. The Chancellor describes the loss of two CDs of data containing the personal information of up to 25 million people “catastrophic”, “unprecedented” and “unforgivable”, adding that the incident had shaken his confidence. In Ireland, we have a more ominous term for that: ” grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented”, or gubu for short.
The gubu story is one of the oddest of all the political shenanigans in Ireland in the last century. Gubu is not a Hiberno-English term, but an acronym coined by Conor Cruise O’Brien in 1983 in an editorial in The Times after former Taoiseach Haughey referred to the discovery of serial killer in the flat of Government Attorney as “grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented.” The gubu era was Ireland’s last of many winters of discontent.
I saw a BBC program entitled Hammer and Tickle last night, on subversive humour under communism. Many of the jokes can be found here, but not the one I liked best which they kept to the very end.
I’ll shorten it. It’s about a man who goes into a restaurant and keeps asking for a copy of Pravda with each course. Finally, when the waiter brings him his coffee and is reminded again, and he again explains, with annoyance, that the communists have gone and there is no Pravda, his customer replies
Yes, I know, but I like to hear you say it.
Like those nostalgic for the good old days of communism, there must be a few Labour MPs wondering now what they have done in getting rid of Blair.
What next I wonder? Things don’t really come in threes do they?
On the positive side, this incident will likely ensure that the government and civil service get serious about data security and that plans for national identity cards will be shelved for now.
