ID Cards
So come end of the week the ID cards will be scraped, not holding my breath though.
UK hot-swaps leaders - Brown out, Cameron in
David Cameron took the keys of Downing Street this evening, ending uncertainty over the country's leadership and ushering in what promises to be a period of austerity for the UK's public sector and its IT suppliers. Gordon Brown stepped down as Prime Minister at around 7.30pm, having submitted his resignation to the Queen at …
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Give it a year or so
"The Tories promised to scrap ID cards, the National Identity Register and the Contactpoint DNA database. The LibDems made similar commitments, so the ID card scheme should be an early casualty."
Who, honestly, can believe the party of Law'n'Order to not have a scheme of identifying 'real' citizens? The coalition has 'saved' the NHS but it's expensive to run - how can they ensure that only those who are legally entitled to get treatment receicve it?
It'll be introduced as a one-stop proof of entitlement and used as I.D.
I expect to be nicked for not showing my 'Citizenship' card within a couple of years.
The only winners to this election are the losers, the Tories and Lib-Dems are now doing a Rincewind -- all I can hear is 'Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit' 'cos that's where they are.
Identifying Real Citizens
Probably like a lot of UK citizens, I am not of the opinion that one should have to identify themselves on a regular or routine basis to satisfy the wants of official beurocracy or legislation. According to figures produced by the Passport service last year, there are already some 52 million valid UK passports in circulation and I think it would be fair to say that a majority of UK subjects are in possession of one. Now that the UK ID card and it's attendent National Identity Register is set to be scrapped, I don't think that the new government has to look very far, should it have the need to, to find a new document that would fulfill the same role. For occasional official use and only where strictly neccesary, a Passport would, in my view, be more than adequate to take on the anticipated role of a personal identity card.
Non-EU overseas residents will still have their Biometric Resident Permits issued by our government to prove their legal status and EU citizens will already have their own ID Cards/Passports to do the same. Costing many billions of pounds to produce and roll out, ID cards to me seem like a very expensive hammer to crack a relatively small nut.
"That meant for a period, the UK had no elected leader."`
Brown never was an elected PM.
pedants' corner
yeah, I wanted to pick up on that - but I suppose it is technically correct in the sense that Brown was a leader who had been elected (for some purpose), albeit someone not elected as a leader. Although I suppose he was elected as leader by the Parliamentary Labour Party. Technically.
@Anonymous John
Not that old canard! Britain has NEVER had an elected PM. Sheesh! How many more times?
What leadership election?
The problem with the carping about Brown not being elected, and with the so-called Prime Ministerial debates is that we don't actually elect the prime minister. We elect our own local representative, who then has (somewhat) free choice to back whom-ever they choose as PM.
N.B. I'm neither a proponent or oponent of this system.
How long have you lived here?
Brown was an 'elected PM' in the same way that Cameron is now an 'elected PM' and Blair was an 'elected PM' before him. You need to read up on how the UK Parliamentary system works.
go to the bottom of the politics class
as usual, a post from somebody who doesn't understand how our electoral system works
Yes he was
He was elected as an MP by his constituents and as PM by parliament. Same as every British Prime Minister, including this one.
If you want to vote for a PM then press for PR when the time comes.
No PM is ever elected as PM
And Brown was elected as MP for his constituency.
The UK never has a leader elected by the people, we don't have a president.
Isn't the point
that he wasn't elected by the Parliamentary Labour Party either? He was 'appointed', as it were, by Blair, IIRC, since there were no other candidates for the position, at the time...
For my money
For my money the point is that Brown was not the leader of the Labour party when the Labour party got elected to power. A great many people vote for the party they want to rule the country, under the basic assumption that if they win, their leader will become PM.
Maybe I'm too young
But I don't recall there being the same bunch of misinformed idiots shouting that John Major wasn't elected between 1990 and 1992. Although I expect the folks shouting about GB not being elected will say "ah, but we knew he would be later so it was ok"
Keys to Downing Street?
I thought 10 Downing Street could only be opened from the inside.
Hot Swap is appropriate
As you usually hot swap a drive when it FAILS.
Farewell Gordon. No longer willI have to watch that 'thing you do' with your mouth when you pause talking.
Hmmmm….!!
This is going to get interesting…start laying bets – who will blink first – Cameron or Clegg, and what tricks will the Labour party be playing in the background? Election about October I think!
As for IT within the public sector, Short term contracts only. However, there should be a quite a few new ones becoming available as the old Labour quangos and interests are shut down in favour of new ones relating to both Conservative AND Lib Dem wants.
Labour
"and what tricks will the Labour party be playing in the background?"
They won't be, they are about to rip themselves apart again.
Labour were offered the chance to try and salvage a coalition by Gordon Brown and Sith Lord Mandy, but the rest of the party didn't have the stomach to fight for it.
Before the negotiators had even met, half the back bench had come out saying they should just retire into opposition, and the negotiators knew they had nothing to offer as their party wouldn't accept it.
All the Labour MPs and supporters who were saying they were looking at what was good for the country are talking shite. They didn't have the balls to do what would have been really good for the country and decided to look after themselves and put the party first.
The party will fragment again and it will take a few years to pull itself back together.
I just hope the coalition lasts until the Labour party sorts itself out otherwise we will have a Tory majority government before long.
But will it be real change or more of the same old same-old?
So, Cameron and Clegg have done a deal, now the question is will we get the reforms (not just voting, but political behaviour and on civil liberties to name a couple) that we actually need...?
Contactpoint isn't DNA
Contactpoint isn't anything to do with DNA: it's a national register of children so that social services can be co-ordinated. It's a hideous mess, and a dangerous accumulation of power, but it isn't a DNA register.
Sir
Hip hip hoo-fucking-ray!
I am mostly underwhelmed, but at least Mandelson is out of power again (for a little while).
I wish that it were
but the man is a (sith?) lord, so will never be out of 'power' as it were.
Although
It has been entertaining to watch him, and Campbell spinning like dervishes over the last couple of days...
Floreat Etona
That's that then. We're all completely buggered.
I'll get me coat. Not much point staying in this country any more.
See ya then!
QUOTE:
Floreat Etona → #
That's that then. We're all completely buggered.
I'll get me coat. Not much point staying in this country any more.
UNQUOTE.
Or at least we would be completely buggered and totally fubar'd with another five years of Gordon Brown and Lord Slimeball at the helm.
As for what posh bloke Dave and his new but (not so posh) LibDem chums ultimately plan to go about doing what needs to be done ... remains to be seem. Fun times lie ahead I'm sure!
Some kudos though to Gordon Brown, for stepping down as the not democratically elected (now ex) PM with some level of dignity, not dragged out of No.10 kicking and screaming as some newspapers would've you believe might happen, and probably wanted to see.
Britain = sum of parts
"this is the first time in British politics since the Second World War when British political parties have divvied up the Cabinet seats"
Well, technically the first Scottish cabinet did that in 1997, and was part of Britain last time I checked...
Sum of parts
Our correspondent was talking about the real cabinet, no-one cares about Scotland's toy one.
If ...
... the French invade when Cameron is on paternity leave, does Clegg get to push the button?
We need to be told. I'm not convinced the LibDems are cut out for thermonuclear warfare.
"That meant for a period, the UK had no elected leader."
Yeah, the entire time Gordie (good riddance ****wad!) was in office.
Re: "That meant for a period, the UK had no elected leader."
If I hear this one more time I'm finally going to snap. When's the last time we elected a leader? That's not how it works, divots.
I preferred it when we were in limbo, frankly.
Sir
"That's not how it works, divots."
Class :) I bet that's not what you really wanted to call them though.
Yes we do
We had a bunch of entirely anonymous candidates in our constituency. I am vaguely aware of what the outgoing Labour MP looks like (because she once opened something or other at my kids' school). But in order to have found out what she or the other candidates actually stood for I would have had to go out of my way (and it probably wouldn't have been worth it). Most of them didn't even respond to a set of straightforward questions the local paper sent out to all candidates. Unless you have a famously good or bad candidate most people aren't really voting for their local candidate.
People are influenced to some extent by the leader of the party at the time of the election, and that does give them more legitimacy than Brown, who wasn't even contested when he stood for PM.
@Sarah Bee
Shame the site doesn't have sound as you would hear me clapping
Have to make do with the thumbs up icon instead.
While you are technically correct...
...if we vote for our local politicians and the points are added up to make seats and those seats make the ruling party, who elects their leader... what is the point of all this annoying question-and-answer face-off programming and party political dozefests if we aren't supposed to believe we have a say in who *runs* the country?
What would happen, just as an aside, if the party put Cameron as their leader and we voted because we felt the Tories had the answers, or whatever, and then Cameron lost his local constituency at the vote. Can he carry on without, or would he have to step down meaning due to the actions of a fairly small group of people, the party would no longer have the leader that it was selling itself with.
To understand why the party leader is important, look at Thatcher. She was leading the country, taking on the Argies and the Unions, and either dealing with the f*ckups of a past Labour misadministration or creating her own f*ckups (depending on your leaning), and yet nobody actually voted for her to be leading the country? We just voted for a Conservative government and they put her forward as the candidate? What if you liked the Conservatives (generally) but didn't like her (specifically)?
The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.
Seconded...
Promises
Lets hope that they scrap ID cards and sort out the DNA database as promised, then hopefully once Labour have had a break they might come to their senses and become the party they should be rather than the dictatorship that doesn't listen to anyone they are at the moment.
But....
I think you'll find Labour have *never* listened to anyone, that's the whole point of being a Marxist/Trotskyist/Stalinist dictatorship - the ruling elite know best, and the proles? Well, they can all just FOAD. Gordie & co were hoping for some kind of 'national emergency' whereby they could just do away with general elections and stay in power forever.
Gordon
I wish Cameron well in his new task.
BTW I can't wait to see the sequel of his last movie!
Gordon.
Ps: Mine's the one with ID cards in the pockets.
"That meant for a period, the UK had no elected leader."
We've had no elected leader for a lot longer than an hour and 5 minutes. More like since, ooh... June 2007?
Actually it's far longer than that
try 1951, if you count coalition governements or 1931 if you only want a single party.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_1951
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_1931
Or if you have any clue about about parlimentary democracies, you'll realise we've never had an elected leader.
Semantics
There is the way it works theoretically and the way it works in reality. A bit like whether we do or don't have a constitution, or whether for most of the 21st C.so far we actually were any sort of democracy.
News just in.....
The details Con\Lib deal were actually agreed at 8 am the day after the election. The formal accouncement of the deal was put on hold as the stone mason was having 'time issues' putting Tory promises into a format the statisfied Nick Clegg and the rest of the Lib Dems.
Compromise already seems to be happening.
Clegg scraps the mansion tax, Cameron scraps the tax break for millionaires, *both* raise the threshold on *paying* tax, leaving more money in the hands of UK tax payers.
This is starting to look like an *actual* coalition.
Darling reckoned it would cost £40m to cancel the ID cards project. A bargain versus the £10.4Bn estimated over the 10 years (does anybody think that number would go *anywhere* but up?)
Honoring the ECHR ruling on DNA should lower admin costs.
Reviewing *all* big spending projects (and when a traffic light review says "Red" it *means* no moving forward until the issues are resolved) for value for money would seem a good idea. The NHS IT project is an obvious one.
The problem is the Gordon saddled UK PLC with c£110Bn of additional debt. You need to make *big* savings and scrapping a Trident replacement would lop roughly 20% off the top in 1 go. IMHO the terms payed to operators on *all* PFI rojects are remarkably generous (Banks seems quite happy to hand them the cash for the buildings *once* they saw the repayment terms). I think re-negotiating them would save money on the kind of scale needed.
Some solid work should be possible on the Foreign and Defense departments. WTF is the MoD head count as big as the British Army?
Thumbs up for the start of (possibly) something big.
Why is it that no one ever mentions the bankers
when talking about the national debt. Its always someone else, never the greedy bankers?
Mention the Bankers?
Maybe the reason there is that it isn't _technically_ their fault.
The banking system was bailed out because of a number of dodgy practices. However, the bankers working within that system were doing their jobs, within the rules. If they hadn't been following the rules and making money for the banks that employed them, then they would hav been out of jobs.
The issue is, that the rules themselves (contributed to in part by Gordo) were at fault. Compare and contrast what happened with banks in the UK, and banks in Spain, where rules on lending practices are much stricter. For example, how is Banco Santander doing, compared with Northern Rock?
The people you can probably blame are those at the high level, who put political pressure on our leaders to not legislate against dodgy lending practices for the sake of rapid, profitable, unsustainable growth in the earlier part of this decade. Good luck getting any money out of them.
Defend the Ministry of Defence
"Some solid work should be possible on the Foreign and Defense departments. WTF is the MoD head count as big as the British Army?"
Well several reasons:
1 - because it covers more than just the Army.
2 - because people have to make sure soldiers get paid (amongst other things)
3 - because MOD Civil Servant includes people who deploy to operational theatres
4 - because Options forChange and Frontline First scrapped the support services to the military (cooks and bottlewashers etc) meaning that MOD Civil Servants had to take up the roles. (I might be wrong, but werent they brought in by a Tory government?)
Yes there is fat in the system with the MOD, but its like any other organisation (public or private sector I must add) in that regard.
More importantly do you think the cutbacks will get rid of pointless ex-Staff Officers who earn a tidy sum on top of their pensions to do paperwork or the cooks and cleaners who support the military? (Dont forget to add in that all the senior MOD oxygen thieves are strong supporters of the Tories.....)
One way to make the Armed Forces less costly and reduce Government administrative burden would be to privatise it in the way the Railways were. Do we think thats a good idea?
Attacking your defence ...
1. The MoD still has more employees than the Army, Navy and Air Force combined ...
2. A lot of the admin work getting people paid in the Army is done by uniformed soldiers in the AGC, or by the actual payee through JPA Self-Service.
3. But not that many
4. Cooks (chefs, actually) are still uniformed soldiers, and washing - well, that's what privates are for, innit?
I take your point, but I think there's a great deal of fat that can be trimmed from the MoD and devoted to actual D.
(I'm in the Army, btw)
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