Posts tagged with Big Brother

We have seen in recent times how secure our national databases are. HM Revenue & Customs, the Ministry of Defence, the Department of Health, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have all been reprimanded for serious ‘lapses’ that have put at risk the personal data of millions of UK subjects. On a wider scale, The Information Commissioner reported in January that there had been over 400 data breaches by government and the NHS in the past two years. Last month, the national children’s database, which records details of England’s 11 million under 18 year olds, was described as ‘not stable’ – official-speak for yet another security breach. Our national databases, it seems, are about as secure as a paper bag full of water.

We are seeing the first blowback from the introduction last autumn of the Government’s absurdly over-egged Vetting and Barring scheme. Children scheduled for surgery are having their operations cancelled by zealous apparatchiks blocking surgeons who – despite CRB clearance in one trust – are being refused entry to others, where they would otherwise be able to operate. The var, one might say, between stooge and surgeon is on, and all operation bets are off.

On a benign view, this is an example of goal displacement – a triumph of process over outcome. One could leave it at that, were it not for the fact that this triumphant process has trumped real kids needing real operations by real surgeons. And so we have a scheme designed to protect children perversely achieving the opposite result – harm to children.

Totalitarianism does not arise spontaneously. It arrives instead by a series of steps, each one small enough; and, like the journey of a thousand miles that begins with a single step, many small steps can take us a long way from home; until one day we arrive in a strange world where the pigs walk on two legs, all are equal, but some more so that others, and the clocks strike thirteen.

One of the tenets of totalitarianism is the central importance of the State, and it is but a short step from that central importance to move towards notions of enemies of the State, and so to traitors in our midst. And so it is that the machinery of totalitarianism seeks to know the each and every detail about the lives of each and every one of us, lest we be the traitor in the midst. We move from a liberal default position of trust, to one of mistrust, and then distrust. No one can be trusted at face value; only the State can collect the data and decide who is trustworthy and, who is not.

The ever-interesting Witch Doctor has made a welcome return to the blogosphere. It seems that while she was away in the witchosphere, she spent time contemplating one of her persistent themes – that of creep. The Witch Doctor, she says, believes in creep. So does Dr No. But, it appears, not everyone is familiar with the term as the Witch Doctor and Dr No use it. A little while ago, one of Dr No’s confidants – a well read and intelligent woman - was reading a post and remarked on what she read as a grammatical error. Dr No had missed out a subject to the verb creep. She had not before come across the word creep used as a noun to describe a social process. Dr No wonders if there may be others unfamiliar with this usage.

There has of late been some sharp discourse over the health of the UK medical blogosphere. JD kicked off with Where are they?, featuring a man with a worried back peering anxiously downhill. Many lively comments followed. A few days later the irrepressible RP popped up with Club Culture – which provoked JD to accuse her of doing a “hatchet job” on him, which she denied (and DN is with RP on this one). Meanwhile over on the NHS Exposed blog, JL was re-activating the long running fear of official interference in blogging activity.

Alan “You’re Fired!” Johnson, who appears to belong to the shoot-the-bastard, simple-but-effective school of ministerial authority, is now finding that, far from cracking the Nutt, he appears to have instead shot himself in the foot, and produced an outcome that is neither simple, nor effective. Or, for a minister, desirable.

The ever intriguing Witch Doctor has been exercising her formidable intellect lately on matters which, it appears, are more tangled than a witch’s spell.