New Labour – Page 23

That’ll calm fears about the national database

Published on November 20, 20071 Comment

Customs and excise loses 25 million records when two computer discs go missing in the post:

Alistair Darling has blamed mistakes by junior officials at HM Revenue and Customs after details of 25 million child benefit recipients were lost.

The Chancellor said information, including bank details of 7m families, had been sent on discs to the National Audit office by unrecorded delivery.

The discs had never arrived at their destination, Mr Darling told MPs.

He apologised for what he said was “an extremely serious failure” but insisted people were not at risk from ID fraud.

The records include parents’ and children’s names, addresses, dates of birth, child benefit and national insurance numbers and in some
cases, bank or building society details.

He said the missing data was not enough to access accounts on its own but anyone who thought they had been the victim of fraud would be
reimbursed by the banks.

It’s not just the fact that the discs were lost that’s so bad, but also that junior officials apparantly can hand out this information willy-nilly. The same sort of sloppiness will happen again if a national database is implemented as Labour wants to, but on a larger scale. I’ve worked on a few highly sensitive IT systems myself, but I’ve never ever encountered this sort of incompetence. You just don’t sent discs –“password protected” or not– out over the post when they contain this sort of data. That would’ve been a firing offence in any project I worked on even if it was just the data of one person, let alone a couple of millions.

This sort of fuckup is only possible because New Labour fundamentally just does not understand IT or what basic competence in these matters entails. Because this grasp is missing from the top down within government, junior officials were allowed to handle sensitive data in this way.

Comment of the Day – A Consummation Devoutly To Be Wished

Published on November 11, 2007

In comments to Nick Cohen’s Observer column this morning:

conorfoley
November 11, 2007 2:37 AM

The day that we finally meet I am going to beat the shit out of you Nick.

Hmmm, how about Euston as a venue?

Euston seems highly appropriate for the comeuppance of the beyond odious Observer hack Nick Cohen who’s long deserved a good slap. But who’s going to adminster it? Someone who’s actually been in a warzone, unlike Cohen, who merely sits on his ass and cheerleads while others do the dying.

It’s not some outraged Dave Spartalike doing the threatening – said Conor Foley is one of Cohen’s fellow Guardian/Observer columnists:

Conor Foley is a humanitarian aid worker. He has worked for a variety of human rights and humanitarian aid organizations, including Liberty, Amnesty International and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He currently lives and works in Brazil, and is a research fellow at the Human Rights Law Centre at the University of Nottingham.

I can’t imagine threatening other writers with violence is a usual thing for Foley, as angrily critical as he has been of Cohen in the past.

But is it really Foley, or a sockpuppet?

Granted this is the comments section to an online newspaper but it’s there in black and white; as the comments are moderated and commenters registered and it’s been up there 7 hours or so without being deleted, I think it’s reasonable to say, without seeing his IP, that Foley is who he says he is.

But it wasn’t just that one-liner; Foley follows up an hour later:

conorfoley

November 11, 2007 3:46 AM

Incidentally moderator I think that, in context, my above comment does not breach the talk policy (or at least no more than the original article).

I have lost several friends in Afghanistan, including Bettina Goislard whose anniversary is this week. She was shot dead at point-blank range while driving in a clearly marked, but unguarded, humanitarian vehicle. Several more of my friends and colleagues have died in similar circumstances, while others have been kidnapped.

I am also likely to return to Afghanistan in the near future and so the sentiments expressed here have a direct impact on my own health and safety.

Nick Cohen ‘feels strongly about things’ and expresses his views in ways that other people ‘might find extremely offensive or threatening’. He has, for example, criticised those involved in human rights and humanitarian work in ways that are factually inaccurate and harmful.

Since this particular article is on the threats of physical danger facing those working in conflict zones, I think that the views of one such person about its author are ‘on topic’ and make a relevant contribution to a ‘hearty debate’. Let me also, again, extend an invitation to Nick to discuss this topic with me directly here, something he has, so far, been rather reluctant to do.

Cohen’s quick enough to advocate violence as long it suits his political purpose and it’s kept at a safe physical and political distance from his comfy metropolitan life. I wonder, does he have the guts to even debate Foley online or in the pages of his own paper, let alone meet him in the flesh?

Well, I don’t wonder at all really. That’s just a rhetorical device. What I do know is that Cohen, like his fellow chickenhawks and Eustonites, lacks both courage and conviction and will bottle out rather than ever riisk his precious skin putting his so-called principles into practice.

Foley’s balls are out on the table, if I may be so indelicate. Where’re Cohen’s?

UPDATE

Foley’s original comment has been deleted :

conorfoley

November 11, 2007 2:37 AM

This comment and those referring to it removed by moderator.

I guess that’s Cohen’s response then. Like I said he would, he bottled it.

Foley has followed up again:

conorfoley

November 11, 2007 11:41 AM

Darkhorse: It is an emotional subject and my guess is that the moderator’s have recognised it as such.

I spent almost a year and a half in Afghanistan. Around 40 aid and reconstruction workers were killed while I was there and I had several narrow escapes, which probably left me with mild PTSD. I turned down a job in Iraq to go there and several of my former colleagues from Kosovo were killed in the bombing of the UN compound in Baghdad. Everyone agrees that the major reason for the decline in security in Afghanistan was linked to the invasion of Iraq (diversion of troops and resources and propaganda boost for the Taliban) and that is one of the reasons I was so strongly opposed to it.

Since the invasion of Iraq Nick Cohen has written a string of extremely inflammatory articles on the issues of torture, human rights and humanitarian intervention. I have responded to some of them, but this piece just brings forth a howl of outrage.

More….

UPDATE: The entire thread seems to have disappeared or maybe it’s my crappy browser or connection, though if, as one commenter claims, Cohen moderates his own comment threads then he really did bottle it, diidn’t he?

Luckily I saved ithe whole exchange in a text file: If anyone wants it, email or drop a note in comments.

All Hail to The Dutch Water Engineers

Published on November 10, 20072 Comments

The Netherlands really dodged a bullet climatewise this past week. An unlucky confluence of tides, wind and low pressure was predicted to produce a storm surge comparable to the Great Storm of 1953. Luckily it wasn’t that bad and the defences held.

Although parts of East Anglia’s coast were inundated by the storm surge and wave of up to 20 ft high battered the Dutch sea defences, the worst didn’t happen. Phew. The surfers had a great time and none of Northern Europe’s major mercantile cities and ports were badly affected, though of course it did disrupt shipping and transport.

Beachuts at Southwold

The largest swells were in Felixstowe, Suffolk, where sea levels rose to 2.84m (9.3ft) above average, and Great Yarmouth at 2.8m (9.2ft).

The water levels in Felixstowe and Great Yarmouth were the highest since 1953 when 307 people died after high tides and a storm saw a tidal surge of 3.2m (10ft 6in).

Though I’m sure those shovelling crap out of their living rooms in Norfolk this weekend don’t feel very lucky, it could have been so much worse. That it wasn’t a rerun of 1953, when there was no warning and huindreds died, when whole villages disappeared and thousands were made homeless overnight, is largely down down to luck and chaos theory. If the pressure had gone up or down a millibar, or the wind speed slackened or eased at the just the right moment, we could’ve all been swimming in seawater (or worse) this morning – or at least London and lhuge swathes of southeest England would have been.

The Dutch, (whose entire government system is based on the common management of water and land) sensibly closed the sea defences at the first sign of trouble:

They well remember 1953 and the devastation caused. These are the areas that would have been flooded during the storm surge, if it had not been for Dutch sea defences:

‘Sea defences’ sems such an inadequate word for the immensie series of constructed barriers that run almost the whole length of the coast closing off the North Sea from the flatlands. The huge Oosterchelde surge barriers that protect the islands of Zeeland, in the watery estuarine south:

1 Top beam, under which water flows when gates are open
2 Steel gate is lowered when sea level reaches “danger” height
3 Sill beam at foot of giant piers is embedded in sill
4 Sill comprises 5m tonnes of 10,000kg stone blocks, for stability
5 Voids in pier bases filled with sand after positioning
6 Synthetic “mattress” filled with sand and gravel laid on top of compacted sand to strengthen sea bed

The Oosterscheldebarrier is the biggest barrier and the most difficult to build: a 9km (5.6-mile) hydraulic wall with sluice-gate doors that are normally left open to protect the area’s delicate tidal habitat.

Another wall, the. Consisting of two hollow doors the size of the Eiffel Tower, the Maeslantbarrier, protects Rotterdam, the Netherlands’ second city with a population roughly the same size as that of New Orleans Maeslantbarrier was the Delta Project’s final instalment.

When it was completed in 1997, the total cost of the project amounted to more than $5bn.

The Dutch know that climate change is likely to flood the country, but where else is there to go? It’s a tiny coluntry, but that would still mean the evacuation of millions to other parts olf Europe. Hence the necessity for using all possible human ingenuity to protect the populace and keep it where it is, whatever the cost.

Contrast Britain’s long term flood policy: the Brown government, like Blair’s administration before it, has decided absent of any democratic input to just write off huge swathes of low-lying land in the south-east and elsewhere.

They are planning for what they see as inevitable inundation, whilst simultaneously pushing the Thames Gateway housing and development project which will concrete over marshes and put an additional homes onto one of the country’s largest floodplains, with apapently little thought given to beefing up the infrastructure to cope, this to house the many thousands of Eastern EU workers attracted by the honeypot of London.

The development of the Gateway, stretching from Canary Wharf in east London to the mouth of the Thames Estuary in Essex, forms an important part of the government’s strategy to build more housing in the south east.

Ministers have set targets for 160,000 new homes to be built in the Gateway between 2001 and 2016. The number of homes delivered has risen from around 4,500 in 1995-96 to 6,000 in 2005-06. But the rate of increase is below that of the rest of the greater south east. The NAO says: “The build rate will need to double from now on if the target is to be met.”

It’s a potential environmental disaster in the making, despite the new and improved Thames Barrier that’s also planned. I remember when the existing barrier was predicted to potect the Thames Valley for centuries to come. and here we are already, needing a new one.

This is what Britain would look like should the sea level rise as predicted, but. the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ plan is not to maintain many sea defences on the grounds that they are ‘uneconomic’.

If the British government is going to keep adding more and more people to the population it has to consider channeling development elsewhere than to the southeast. Are they really plannoing to build all this, to concrete over a flood plain and fill it with people, only for it to be flooded? It seems so.

The insurers’ report, Making Communities Sustainable, said that as many as 108,000 proposed homes in Ashford, Milton Keynes, the M11 corridor and along the Thames Estuary were located on flood plains and 10,000 of them were at significant risk of flooding.

In three of the areas, with the exception of the Thames Gateway, all the houses could be located above the flood plain with careful planning, but not in the Thames Estuary, where most of the development land was on flood plains.

The report warns the Government that it has much to do to keep up the flood defences around London. It said that some five per cent of sea defences were in poor shape but a much larger proportion of river defences needed attention.

Without the proper planning measures being taken and the advice of the Environment Agency being acted upon, a substantial number of them would flood at a cost of an extra £55 million in the annual flood bill for insurers, said the report..

I can’t make my mind up whether such an apparent policy disconnect is deliberate – make as much money as you can out of the area before it’s too late and screw the consequences – or just horribly ignorant of science and common sense, a combination which has become a hallmark of this Labour regime. How can it continue to overdevelop the southeast, while at the same time planning long term to give the region (ironically for an area so water-poor) up to the sea? The insurers’ association says ‘the flood risks in the growth areas could be managed effectively.’ The question is, are they?

That remains to be seen.

Call me cynical but when so many people so close to government have so much, in terms of career and financial investment at stake in the Thames Gateway development they’re unlikely to let a little thing like a potential ecololgical disaster to get in the way.

The Dutch? Not so much. I know where I feel safer, despite being below sea level.

How’s This for A Comedy Double?

Published on November 2, 2007

The picture the police photoshopped to make an innocent dead man look like a terrorist.

I should be getting on with the comedy double right now- I’m nothing if not a creature of habit – but I just can’t. I’m just too bloody angry.

I missed the de Menezes police health and safety verdict yesterday for the prosaic reason of having gone to IKEA to buy a bed and the first thing I got up to this morning was Ken Livingstone on the Today programme defending overpromoted, self-righteous New Labour blowhard Sir Ian Blair, head of the Metropolitan police, who refuses to resign despite having been found guilty (as the personification of the police corporate body) of endangering the citizens he is duty-bound to protect, by a jury at the Old Bailey. (Listen to interview with Livingstone]

This is what Blair said immediatetly after the shooting:

Sir Ian told Sky News: “This is a tragedy. The Metropolitan Police accepts full responsibility. To the family I can only express my deep regrets.”

What Blair says today:

“It’s important to remember that no police officer set out on that day to shoot an innocent man. As the judge noted, the failures alleged were not sustained nor repeated. This case thus provides no evidence at all of systematic failure by the Metropolitan Police, and I therefore intend to continue to lead the Met in its increasingly successful efforts to reduce crime and to deter and disrupt terrorist activities in London and elsewhere in the United Kingdom”

But that’s just it: the verdict does provide evidence of systematic failure. ‘Mistakes happen’, Blair says. Was this a mistake?

Police accused of manipulating composite picture of De Menezes

“Scotland Yard was yesterday accused of trying to mislead the jury deciding whether it made catastrophic errors leading up to the shooting dead of Jean Charles de Menezes. The Old Bailey trial heard claims that the force had manipulated a picture presented to the jury which had been intended to illustrate the difficulties officers faced in telling apart the Brazilian victim and the suspected terrorist they were actually looking for.

Last week police produced a composite of one half of Mr De Menezes’s face placed next to one half of the face of suspect Hussain Osman. But Clare Montgomery QC, prosecuting, told the court that it had been altered “by either stretching or resizing, so the face ceases to have its correct proportions”. The judge, Mr Justice Henriques, told the jury: “A serious allegation has been made that a picture has been manipulated so as to mislead.””

That was no mistake, that was deliberate lying. Even at the trial the Metropolitan Police barrister, Ronald Thwaites QC, continued to smear Jean Charles de Menezes:

… last week, when the Met were in the dock at the Old Bailey, the tone was markedly different. In his closing speech, Ronald Thwaites, QC, the Met’s defence barrister said of De Menezes: “He was shot because, when he was challenged by police, he did not comply with them but reacted precisely as they had been briefed a suicide bomber might react at the point of detonating his bomb.”

Mr Thwaites went on to paint a damning portrait of the dead man: “Not only did he not comply, he moved in an aggressive and threatening manner.” He suggested that De Menezes might have been worried about traces of drugs or a phoney visa. “Did he fear he might have some drugs in his jacket and might want to get them out and throw them away when he was challenged by the police?”

Towards the very end of the trial, Mr Thwaites also tried to make the judge, Mr Justice Henriques, disqualify himself on the grounds that he was “entirely pro-prosecution, unbalanced and totally lacking in objectivity”.

Thwaites also alleged that the victim was a cocaine addict, as though in some way justified his murder.

So much for taking full responsibility.

The murder of Menezes and Blair’s refusal to resign are only the worst in a long list of debacles. The public and the press are calling for Blair’s head, the general consensus being that it’s about time someone took responsibilty for something in public life, and if you can’t take responsibility for sending armed men hyped up on adrenaline to run around on public transport in the rush hour and fire seven bullets into the head, execution-style, of an unarmed, innocent man, on video and in front of witnesses,then lying about it afterwards and smearing the dead man, even going so far as to wphotoshop his picture to make him look more like a terrorist – if you can’t take responsibility for that, then what the hell can you take responsibility for?

But if there has been a defining leitmotif of the Labour years it’s been this, this constant, mulish refusal to take responsibility for incompetence and error , this wilful blindness to one’s own fault and this utter certainty, despite all the evidence to the contrary, of one’s own rectitude. Anything to justify hanging on to power for power’s sake.

To much of the public it’s simple. Blair is responsible for the safety of the public. He didn’t do that, he did the opposite. He should go. Like his namesake the forner prime minister, Blair argues he’s not guilty of any personal wringdoing therefore he’s squeaky-clean and should stay in the job.

Anyone who gets up in the morning in a crowded city and gets on a metro or a tram or a tube system will have seen that CCTV footage of Jean Charles de Menezes’ extra-judicial murder and will have seen themselves in that blurry video, on the floor, scared out of their wits, about to have their brains very deliberately blown out on the carriage floor.

But Londoners have real cause to fear; their police chief thinks that the deliberate murder of an innocent man by his subordinates is not a serious matter enough to resign over. ‘Mistakes happen’.

When a man in charge of an organisation which has the power to shoot to kill and a paramilitary armoury bigger then some army units at it’s disposal has an attitude like that Londoners are right to be worried.

But if Ian Blair does not resign it has implications for all of us – because to other police forces it says do ‘what you like, there will be no comeback’. It pushes the boundaries of impunity yet further. The less that is taken responsibility for the more wrongdoing can be committed. Eventually the piublic becomes inured and cynical and that lack of truist extends to the lowliest pc. There is no policing without at least some form of consent and without it the police cannot do their job.

So someone’s got to pay for this. We need metaphorical blood to expiate the actual blood spilt on the floor of that dusty rush-hour tube carriage. If Blair stays the public will be justified in having no confidence in the Metropilitan police. If the Met can’t protect the public from the Met itself, what use is it against terrorists? Why should the public co-operate with a police force that can kill anyone at will on the flimsiest of evidence and then just walk away?

But to get back to Ken Livingstone, the self-described champion of the poor and oppressed and the alleged voice of the the average newt-fanncying Londoner, who spent over 10 minutes defending this man. Jesuitical doesn’t even begin to describe it. I’m still fuming and cursing, even though it was over an hour ago.

But then he can defend Blair. Livingstone’s sitting pretty: he may be up for election but his opponent’s that amiable buffoon, Tory Boris Johnson. He thinks he’s secure for life and above accountability in just the same way all of the other New Labour responsibility refuseniks do.

Horribly cynical as I am I do wonder why Livingstone’s sticking his neck out in the face of popular opinion. It’s not like Ken not to go for the populist option whenever available, and the populist option at the moment is that Sir Ian be hung drawn and quartered, or at the very least handed his cards.

So why is he taking the contrarian position and sticking up for this disgrace of a police officer? I have a theory…

Met chief in phone recording row
Sir Ian also recorded calls with senior officials from the IPCC

Britain’s top policeman is being urged to explain why he secretly taped a phone call with the attorney general.

[…]

Sir Ian has also admitted taping calls with senior officials from the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

An IPCC spokesman said the taped conversations came to light as part of its inquiry into the aftermath of the shooting.

I wonder – who else has Ian Blair got on record and which other incidents might the Met may be able to shed light on? It’d certainly be interesting to find out. :

It’s obvious Blair can’t be trusted to keep private conversations private and that may well worry some politicians enough to want to stay on his good side. Who knows; hat Blair knows may just have some bearing on whether he stays in his job in the teeth of a gale of public opposition.

That’s the trouble with unstrustworthy senior cops who refuse to take reponsibility for their own mistakes and malfeasance – once you’ve lost trust in them for one thing, you’ve lost trust in them for everything, and no dishonesty seems impossible.

[Edited slightly to add links]

Miliband The Reverse Ming

Published on October 23, 2007

The sight of ~~Pitt The Very Very Younger~~ UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband snapping to to stand shoulder to shoulder with the incompetent and clueless (but much more experienced in ratfuckery) Condoleeza Rice over Turkey and Iraq fills me with foreboding, given the potential for a slide into regional war – which could then provide another pretext (if the others don’t work out) for a US nuclear attack on Iran.

Before this the boy wonder Miliband’s experience at high-level international diplomacy was a brief stint as environment secretary.

But the thing is, he’s young, or rather he has a youthful demeanour, and this government is all about the youth, baby, so much so that several cabinet and senior New Labour figures appear to have had makeovers recently, not least Gordon Brown himself.

Ruth Kelly was sporting a softer haircut and actual makeup on Questiion Time recently (does Opus Dei allow makeup?) Jack Straw got contacts and sleek new hair, Brown has had teeth and hair fixed and new suits in softer colours. Hazel Blears is a walking botox ad.

As boomers they fear encroaching age and know the culture of youth they have helped perpetuate will bite them on the ass if they don’t keep up, as it did Menzies Campbell, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, who was ousted as much for his lack of youthful charisma as much as if not more than for his policies. The new candidates for Lib Dem leader are virtually identikit, white, middle-youth, middle-class Miliband-a-likes and Cameron is a pink-faced public schoolboy.

The Brown government and Labour can’t afford Ming’s fate so they are desperately promoting the inexperienced young policy wonks who’ve never had a proper job, like Miliband and his brother Ed and others, to disguise the fact that this government, after ten years of screwing over the electorate, is old, tired and jaded.

But there are situations when a bit of gravitas and age-acquired wisdom and cunning are required and those Miliband has not got, for all his shiny teeth and hair.

Call it ageism if you like but to me he looks and sounds not only smugly naive but pliable and altogether too impressed with where and who he is. A volatile situation in a region where ancient enmities that could go oiff pop with the slightest provocation is not the time for an ambitious political protege, however well-connected, to be doing on the job training.