good omens
More news from the Home Office for those wondering whether ID cards will ever see the light of day:
BBC: Home Office accounts under fire
The National Audit Office said it had not had the evidence to form an opinion on the accounts for 2004/5, and there were fundamental problems with them.
…
There were such “such fundamental problems” with the Home Office’s accounts that he had to issue a “disclaimer of opinion” because of the lack of audit evidence needed to assess whether they were truthful and fair.
Without dwelling on the penalties that would be meted out to an individual who submitted such accounts (ie, severe), this is good news. On this evidence you couldn’t trust a Home Office official to go to the shop to buy you a newspaper and expect him to come back with the right change. And the reason for the shonky accounts? Yep, another sub-GCSE standard computer system.
Watching these clowns try and run an ID card system costing (before the inevitable overruns, revision of estimates and all the other expected incompetence) half a billion pounds a year is going to be spectacular. Pull up a chair.
Posted on March 31st, 2006 at 11:40 am
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Filed under ...In a brewery, ID cards, New Labour, UK politics |
On this evidence you couldn’t trust a Home Office official to go to the shop to buy you a newspaper and expect him to come back with the right change.
Actually, they’d come back with an entire printing press which didn’t work, and would only print Page 3 of The Sun if it did. And then the offical would still charge you for the lot.
Surely they’d commission a review of newspaper procurement policy from someone like PwC, who’d recommend outsourcing the procurement of newspapers to, er, PwC (or possibly Capita). Three years later a deal would be signed to implement a new system to buy blank sheets of paper at 3 quid a page, and everyone would get knighthoods.
Sigh. Yes, yes, all very true. However, incompetence was the norm behind the Iron Curtain in the period 1950-89, and, ok, ID cards weren’t computerised. The government still managed to make everyone’s life miserable.
ID cards are almost a detail. This government doesn’t care if they work, in the same way that totalitarian governments didn’t [or don't] care if steel manufacturing went up, or whether they were simply spinning. What these bastards are aiming for is the right of the police to stop you and demand your papers. If ID cards get delivered with the same efficiency as the Scottish Parliament or Wembley, it won’t phase them. They want a principle established in law. Compromises be damned. I don’t care if ID cards can work or not. The idea behind them is outrageous.
Dave, do you think the Government look at it those abstract terms? Isn’t it more to do with an intellectual laziness that sees technocratic solutions for all societies ills?
The urge to control comes from a twisted paternalism, doesn’t it? As well as a malaise that tells them that governing should be simple, touch-of-a-button and once-size-fits-all not the hard slog of fulfilling a diverse spectrum of needs.
If the implementation of these ideas allows them to paint dissenters as troublemakers, weirdoes and outsiders then that’s a welcome side-effect as for someone as contemptuous of those that disagree as Clarke is.
Isn’t it more to do with an intellectual laziness that sees technocratic solutions for all societies ills?
The urge to control comes from a twisted paternalism, doesn’t it?
I think it is more to do with the Labour party leadership having long since run out of actual ideas, so now relying on McKinsey to run the country. The management consultants have taken over the asylum…