Attention to detail
Tim Ireland’s unearths New Labour’s:
Fast forward 5 years, to the run up to the 2005 General Election, and things weren’t looking quite so rosy. More than £30 million had been siphoned out of the company by the Phoenix Four in a situation that the Financial Times described as “capitalism at its ugliest… a spineless government taken for a ride by entrepreneurs who succeeded only in enriching themselves.”
Meanwhile New Labour, in panic and desperation made public pronouncements of support for the MG Rover employees, going so far as to slip the company a £6.5m pre-election bung.
However, it seems that their concern for the thousands of soon-to-be-jobless MG Rover workers was less than superficial.
The following would appear to suggest that New Labour paid Experian Intact to cleanse election canvassing data of any MG Rover employees.
You have to admire the dark misanthropy behind it. That the idea even occured to some New Labour myrmidon, that the idea was approved and then acted on. That New Labour didn’t want to hear about the hardship of the MG Rover employees to the point it was worth spending money making them disappear. Why aren’t these people ruling the world?
Update: Of course, as had been pointed out, this might just mean that New Labour were trying to ensure all the details were correct. Now it comes to it, I do seem to remember a spate of stories about puppies and champagne being delivered to MG Rover employees from New Labour head office.
Posted on May 26th, 2006 at 7:11 pm
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Filed under 2005 General Election, New Labour, UK politics |
Tim is doing great work in his analysis of the shit pile that TB has dumped upon us.
But New Labour paid Experian Intact to cleanse election canvassing data of any MG Rover employees would not make headlines on any paper size.
My alternative: Blair Fucked Rover
Database cleansing is a technical term for tidying up the data. It doesn’t suggest that any ex Rover employees were deleted from the master database.
You could be right, Dick. New Labour just might apportion the cleaning of its database according to where the people on it work. No doubt Tim will turn up other receipts for the cleaning the data of employees of ICI, Boots, Ann Summers…
Justin,
I am not suggesting that they are not using the roster of employees for nefarious purposes, merely that the ‘database cleaning’ does not in itself imply that they are cleaning their canvassing database or whatever of Rover employees. Database cleaning is exactly that - ensuring records and fields are correctly populated and formatted.
…as I commented on the BackingBlair entry, this is for teleappending - adding phone numbers to the master database for selected records. Presumably so Bliar could phone each and every ex employee at home to apologise…
THe question still remains, however, as mentioned on Backing Blair: Where did New Labour get the information from in the first place and why.