The Wardman Wire

Hot Issue of the Week

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 [...]

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.

Was the breakdown that gave rise to the data loss at the systematic (i.e., something in the office), 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.

[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.