Hot Issue of the Week: Labour’s Donation Scandal

From the desk of thunderdragon ·November 30, 2007 at 8:37 pm · Filed under Columns, Hot Issue, News - Current Affairs, Politics

Money, Money, Money…

This week’s hot issue has been Labour’s problems with donations received through third parties, which has dominated the headlines quite substantially. The problem is that David Abrahams has donated more than £600,000 to the party under other people’s names. This is illegal, and Gordon Brown has acknowledged, and announced that the money will be returned. This has already cost Peter Watt, the Labour general secretary, his job, and may cost Jon Mendelsohn, Brown’s chief fundraiser and general election director, his job as well.

But the problems go deeper. Harriet Harman, the deputy leader, party chairman, and Leader of the House of Commons, accepted £5,000 from Abrahams through one of his third-party donors, although she claims that she and her campaign team “acted at all times within both the letter and the spirit of the law.”

What has now happened is that the Electoral Commission has called in the police. This is yet another scandal for Labour at the moment, allowed the “sleaze” tag to be attached to them, and for Brown’s leadership to be viciously attacked by David Cameron and compared to Mr Bean by Vince Cable at PMQs.

And it continues even this morning with Harriet Harman effectively telling Gordon Brown “if I’m going down, I’m taking you with me”. Since this story seems to be continuing apace, at this rate it may even be next weeks Hot Issue as well!

What’s been said?

There has been a hell of a lot of comment in the blogosphere on this topic over the last week. Unfortunately I haven’t had time to keep or create a list of these posts… So if you want to read them – and there are some great ones out there – I suggest you go searching! If you have written any good posts on the issue, feel free to mention them in the comments!

Analysis

This has been yet another bad week for Labour and Gordon Brown. This is yet another nail in the coffin of Gordon Brown’s leadership, and allows the difficult-to-shift labels of “sleaze” and “scandal” to be attached to the entire party. Especially following on so soon after cash-for-honours, it certainly doesn’t help the general view of political parties and donations to them.

In a way, you can’t help but feel sorry for Gordon Brown over this issue. After all, its certainly not all his fault, and since his leadership campaign turned down a donation from one of Abrahams intermediaries, he can’t be attacked for personally having taken crooked donations [unlike his deputy]. However as he is the leader, it is in the end his responsibility to deal with.

Since the police have been called in, it looks very bad for Labour. This, especially right on the heels of their other problems and that the polls are consistently really quite bad for them, really doesn’t make Brown’s Labour government look very good at all.

The ThunderDragon

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A week is a long time in the Inland Revenue … : Hot Issue of the Week

From the desk of admin ·November 23, 2007 at 11:24 am · Filed under Hot Issue, News - Current Affairs, Politics

This week’s hot issue has been on the first page for much of the week. It focuses on Alastair Darling and the loss of the the personal details of more than 25 million people through the downloading, writing to CD, and posting of this data. This is issue is large enough to even force the Prime Minister to apologise .

Said to be a mistake made by a junior civil servant, though apparently with the knowledge of his superiors, this has put the families whose details are on the two CDs in serious risk of being victims of fraud, if they fall into the hands of criminals - with the potential rewards for getting hold of the information in to the billions of pounds. This looks especially bad when the CDs were not encrypted, and protected only by a password - something which could easily have been done. But why so much data sent when the National Audit Office wanted only some of it and not the sensitive stuff? To save about £5,000.

Questions have also been raised about whether Alastair Darling can survive as Chancellor for much longer, considering the number of bungles and examples general incompetence occurring, or at least emerging, under his tenure.

This issue is a big issue for us all - what precautions are the government taking with the personal details it requires of us? And this is one question that many blogs have dealt with , including this one.

Events, dear boy…

Sometimes life’s a bitch to politicians. You just can’t help but feel sorry for poor badger-like Alistair Darling. He really is under severe pressure, and mostly down to issues that aren’t really under his control. There is little he could have done to prevent this issue arising, really, since no minister can be aware of everything that goes on in his department. But unfortunately for him life’s a bitch, and when civil servants make mistakes it’s the politicians who get the blame. No matter what the issue is. The people of Britain are beginning to want to see a head roll, and the Conservatives have caught the scent of blood, and are going in for the kill or to at least cause a bad wound. Can Darling survive? Most likely. But this will undermine confidence in the government, even though it isn’t directly their fault.

Is this, as has been touted, New Labour’s Winter of DISContent [sorry for the pun]? Not yet - but like the infamous Macmillan quote: “Events, dear boy, events”, suggests there is just no way of knowing what might happen next.

Tags: child benefit data loss, data protection, data security, hmrc, inland revenue, alistair darling, gordon brown

[tags]child benefit data loss, data protection, data security, hmrc, inland revenue, alistair darling, gordon brown[/tags]

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Systematic or Incidental Failure?: Hot Issue of the Day: Child Benefit Data Loss

From the desk of admin ·November 23, 2007 at 10:08 am · Filed under Business - Management, Columns, Hot Issue, News - Current Affairs, Politics

Was the breakdown that gave rise to the data loss at the systematic (i.e., something in the organisation), or incidental (i.e., something in the “Junior Functionary” concerned).

The former has dire consequences for the people who created the organisation, up to and including Gordon Brown who made the decision to merge the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise.

The latter has dire consequences for the “Junior Civil Servant”.

From the BBC

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologised for the data loss but said it was down to officials not following the rules rather than “systemic” failures at HMRC caused by budget cuts.

Any systems auditor or designer (or programme manager worth his wages) will tell you that “officials not following the rules” is precisely a symptom of systemic failures. Relying on “x didn’t follow procedure” is an indication that something in the environment is not right. And when it has happened multiple times with “fixes” applied each time, and assurances that it is “sorted out”, that should raise warning signals and give very grave cause for concern.

Failure in Which System?

The question is whether it is a failure in:

• The policy and political systems which should keep political initiatives in tune with what is practical.
• The value system that underlies the business (e.g., how important is data security).
• The cultural system that sets the overall approach in accordance with those values.
• The business system that implements the approach and defines how the organisation operates.
• The IT Systems that manifest the business system in IT terms.
• The security system, that should have been incorporated into all the above.
• The training system that inculcates all this into the employees.
• The communication system that makes sure that all of these are kept in the organisation’s attention.
• The auditing system, that should make sure that all the above remain in place.

All of these need to be functional, and there exist national and international standards for most of those.

Even if those standards are implemented (and it’s all about using standard methods as a way of reducing risk), it is all still dependent on the integrity and value system of every individual in the organisation (e.g., “I believe that selling confidential data is wrong”) - and that is crucially dependent on each individual believing that their contribution is valued.

The key question, then:

Where was the cause of the breakdown, and what caused that to arise?

That question needs to be followed back - like St Thomas Aquinas looking for God - to the First Cause.

Will an enquiry or three do that?

Read the rest of this entry »

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Hot Issue of the Week: Was Enoch Right? by the Thunderdragon

From the desk of admin ·November 9, 2007 at 11:31 am · Filed under Columns, Hot Issue, News - Current Affairs, Politics

[Editors note: I’ve reformatted the column due to a glitch in Wordpress. Any problems are down to me not the Dragon].

Issue of the Week: Was Enoch Right?

A week is a long time in politics.

This is a new section on the Wardman Wire. Each week, hopefully to be usually posted on every Friday morning, there will be a post on the biggest political issue of the past week. We hope to provide a background summary of the issue, links to opinion both from the media and blogs, and some measure of examination on what effect this has had on the wider political situation.

Background

This issue began with Nigel Hastilow writing a column in the Wolverhampton Express and Star in which he said:

When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most people say immigration. Many insist: “Enoch Powell was right”. Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 “rivers of blood” speech warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably. He was right. It has changed dramatically.

He was swiftly rebuked by his party, and attacked by Peter Hain as “expos[ing] the racist underbelly of the Tory party”, and illustrating that “in the undergrowth of the Tory Party…there are all these backwards reactionary sentiments”.

Then, after a discussion with party chairman Caroline Spelman, Hastilow resigned, having refused to apologise for saying that Powell was “right”, followed by criticisms from Hazel Blears for Cameron having “dithered” for 24 hours, and not having condemned Hastilow’s words.

This has also been followed by a defection offer to Hastilow from UKIP.

What’s been said?

This issue has certainly been big all over the media this week, and has gained plenty of commentary in both newspapers and on blogs. Comments tend to fit into one of the following categories. Either they seem to agree entirely with Hastilow’s statements, or they think he was mistaken to invoke Powell’s words but generally right, and those who consider it either racist or just wrong to talk about the subject – especially if you invoke Enoch Powell at all.

Read the rest of this entry »

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