We’ve been here before with Capita and Group 4 and all the others…

• Nov 2007: 25m people’s child benefit details, held on two discs
• Dec 2007: 7,685 Northern Ireland drivers’ details
• Jan 2008: 600,000 people’s details lost on Navy officer’s stolen laptop
• June 2008: Six laptops holding 20,000 patients’ details stolen from hospital
• July 2008: MoD reveals 658 laptops stolen in four years

And now yet more data has been lost - unencrypted - on a memory stick!

The memory stick contained un-encrypted details about 10,000 prolific offenders as well as names, dates of births and some release date of all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales - and 33,000 records from the police national computer.

Just stop outsourcing to crap, usually foreign companies! I mean - who doesn’t encrypt everything they put on a memory stick? Most sticks these days come with automatic encryption and decryption anyway.

The government has buggered up our childrens’ education, lost millions on an abandoned Ancestry project and now lost data - who had been sacked? Anyone? Take some responsibility, you shameless fools.

Oh, and interesting that PA Consulting don’t seem to have got round to mentioning any of this in their PA In the news website…

Tags: labour,outsourcing,stupidity
Categories: Politics
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BBC NEWS | Politics | Labour will win election - Brown

Gordon Brown has left London for the Olympics declaring Labour will “go on and win” the next general election.

It comes as an Ipsos/Mori opinion poll gave the Tories a record 24-point lead over Labour, with 48% of those polled saying they would vote Conservative.

The 24% poll gap between Labour and the Conservatives is believed to be the biggest gap recorded since Ipsos/Mori’s records began in 1977.

The poll also found that more than three quarters - 76% - of those surveyed are unhappy with the way the government is running the country and 58% now believe Mr Cameron’s party is ready for office.

When asked about Labour’s election prospects, he said: “We are going to go on and win.”

They really have no clue do they? They say they are listening, but we are shouting REALLY loudly, and they’re just not hearing the message. Go, and go now before you do any more damage, you bumbling incompetent twat. Call an election and put the country out of its misery.

Tags: labour,Politics
Categories: Politics
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Admittedly, they are straight from the department of the bleedin’ obvious, but in the same week that Gordon Brown pointed out that…

…each household could save £420 a year by not throwing away edible food. Approximately 4.1 million tonnes of food which could be eaten are disposed of each year, the government estimates.

David Cameron said:

…that some people who are poor, fat or addicted to alcohol or drugs have only themselves to blame.

He said that society had been too sensitive in failing to judge the behaviour of others as good or bad, right or wrong, and that it was time for him to speak out against “moral neutrality”.

“We talk about people being ‘at risk of obesity’ instead of talking about people who eat too much and take too little exercise,” he said. “We talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion: it’s as if these things — obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction — are purely external events like a plague or bad weather.

“Of course, circumstances — where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school and the choices your parents make — have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequence of the choices people make.”

Blimey. Personal responsibility? Whatever next?! Not sure a country infantalised by ZaNu Labour is ready for this kind of thing….

Tags: brown,cameron,food,green,labour,Politics,waste
Categories: Politics
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In the last few days…

From The Times (added 30th June 2008)

Pupils are being rewarded for writing obscenities in their GCSE English examinations even when it has nothing to do with the question.

Write ‘fuck off’ on a GCSE paper and you’ll get 7.5%. Add an exclamation mark and it’ll go up to 11%
One pupil who wrote “f*** off” was given marks for accurate spelling and conveying a meaning successfully.

His paper was marked by Peter Buckroyd, a chief examiner who has instructed fellow examiners to mark in the same way. He told trainee examiners recently to adhere strictly to the mark scheme, to the extent that pupils who wrote only expletives on their papers should be awarded points.

From BBC News

A report this week by think-tank Reform laments the drop in numbers of people taking maths A-level, at an estimated cost to the economy of £9bn.
“The UK remains one of the few advanced nations where it is socially acceptable, fashionable even, to profess an inability to cope with maths,” it says, despite a maths A-level putting on average an extra £10,000 a year on a salary

Also University cheats ‘not expelled’

University students who are caught submitting plagiarised work are very rarely expelled, shows a survey.
A study found only 143 students caught cheating were expelled out of 9,200 cases - despite almost all universities threatening expulsion as a sanction.

Exam papers had answers on back

Thousands of teenagers are facing uncertainty over their exams after a GCSE music paper was found to have some of the answers on the back.

Students ‘had hints’ before exam

An exam board is investigating suggestions that some teachers gave students hints about what questions would be in an A-level biology exam.

I know this myself - I went to Reading College 11 years ago, and it was tough graft.
I went back 2 years ago, and it was a joke - they virtually stood there and read the answers out as the exam was happening! I blogged about it.

All this came to mind when I heard Harriet Harmon whiffling on about how educational standards are far higher than they were 10 years ago.

Does ANYONE believe that?!

Tags: education,labour,Politics
Categories: education
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In one week - part one:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/27/cc_charge_tsunami/

A Kent tradesman who ill-advisedly decided to pay the London congestion charge online was buried by a 3,000-receipt tsunami for his trouble, the BBC reports.

TfL explaimed in a statement: “This is clearly an unacceptable error. Our service provider, Capita, have identified the fault and put in additional controls to ensure it does not happen in future.”

Part two:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7319293.stm

Documents containing payroll information relating to 182 NHS staff members have been have been found dumped in a street.

They contained information, including addresses, bank account and National Insurance details, from five trusts in Leicestershire and Northamptonshire.

Police were informed and collected the documents after they had been found in a street in Stevenage, Hertfordshire.

The documents had been in the care of company Capita when they were lost.

Capita handles many major contracts for local government and public bodies. Does that make you feel all warm and fuzzy?!

Tags: labour,outsourcing,stupidity
Categories: Politics
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