Well it’s with much relief that I can report - as noted also by Andrew Skudder and John Hemming - that the Standards Board has decided that it’s ok to refer to the BNP as ‘Nazi’s’.

Well that’s very kind of the Standards Board - even if it has nothing whatsoever to do with them.

In case anyone’s wondering what this has to do with the Standards board anyway, cases such as this fall into the catch-all category ‘bringing the council into disrepute’ which, as with football, usually means that the councillor in question has - gasp - expressed an opinion which has pissed someone off.

While there are occasions when it may be right to consider the question of disrepute, when a councillor’s actions clearly reflect badly on his status as an elected representative - for example getting done for speeding while sitting on the committee which decides where to site GATSO’s - the question of whether a councillor has spoken out of turn is one best left first to internal party discipline (the Whip’s office) and ultimately to the electorate. Things a politician might say or put in print when acting politically - i.e. not under public duty as a councillor - should not be investigated by the Standards Committee at all as to do so is intoduce unacceptable restrictions on free political expression to the detriment of local democracy as a whole.

In the annals of official stupidity, a report is today’s Times that the Home Office has, over the last month, been deporting asylum seekers to Zimbabwe of all places, and is due to deport many more over the next few weeks, deserves a page all of its own.

Worse still is this particularly asimine example of offical doublethink from the Home Office which is reported as having said:

“Regular country assessments are carried out in order to ascertain the current country situation and ensure the safety of returning people to their country of origin who have no legal basis of stay in the United Kingdom.

“In light of this we would not remove anyone to a country where their lives would be in danger. We are returning people to Zimbabwe where it is found to be safe to do so.�

Safe to do so? For fuck’s sake… WAKE UP!

At least pay attention to the advice of your colleagues in the Foreign Office…

In recent weeks the authorities have embarked on a violent “clean up� campaign in urban areas. This has resulted in the destruction of the homes and small businesses of tens of thousands of people and some displacement to the rural areas. Urban areas are currently tense, and the situation could deteriorate quickly, without warning. Visitors should avoid going to “high density� (low-income) urban areas.

In the event of increased political tension, visitors and British nationals resident in Zimbabwe should keep a low profile, exercise caution, stay away from areas where demonstrations may be held, and avoid unnecessary travel in all urban areas. If a demonstration or disturbance is taking place, you should leave the area as quickly as possible. You should not stay to watch or attempt to photograph it, even from a distance, or use a mobile phone.

And that’s just the advice to British tourists.

Which bit of ‘not safe’ does the Home Office not get?

What does it take for them to accept that returning asylum seekers, any asylum seekers, to Zimbabwe may be just pushing the envelope a bit too far when it comes to their personal safety? A personally signed note from to each returnee from Robert Mugabe reminding them to be sure to pick up a body bag and shackles on their way through customs?

This is a no-brainer. No one goes back, not while Mugabe remains in power. It’s NOT safe.

Now how difficult was that?

My fellow blogger PoliticalHack has been following the unfolding saga of John Hemming’s personal indiscretions, noting the rather vomit inducing spin being put on the story by journalists at one local newspaper who are known to have prior associations with our local Libidinous Democrat - great headline from the Mirror, BTW.

Today’s nausiating commentary, BTW, comes courtesy of Paul Dale of the Birmingham Post.

Paul is also the journalist to whom JH disclosed information from a confidential cabinet report, in Nov 2003, regarding the relocation of the Royal College of Organists - no pun intended - to Birmingham, which resulted in him being investigated by the Standards Board, although he escaped any sanction after they accepted his assertion that the disclosure was in the public interest.

And, of equal interest, Paul is/was also JH’s chosen ‘auditor’ of his allowance as former Deputy Leader of Birmingham City Council which on taking office he magnanimously decided to donate partially to charity, allowing him to claim that he was doing the role ‘for free’ - the rest of the money went into local Lib Dem Party coffers to cover the costs - mainly - of it’s Coventry Road offices.

Now this idea of ‘for free’ is rather interesting in the sense that;

1. It isn’t really ‘for free’ when you still claim the allowance. you might reasonably claim that you derive no personal benefit in such a situation but Council Tax payer’s money is still being paid out.

2. Isn’t the admission that part of the allowance is going into local Lib Dem party coffers equally an admission that Birmingham’s Council Tax payers have been, indirectly, funding a local political party, whether they support that party or not?

3. According to the Electoral Commissions register of political donations, JH’s registerable donations for 2004/5, the year in which he was the Council’s Deputy Leader total some £5,500 to the Lib Dem’s West Midlands office and a further £1,764 to the Birmingham Yardley & Hodge Hill accounting unit - £7,264 in total. The Deputy Leader’s allowance for last year was something of the order of £37,000, which leaves around £30,000 unaccounted for at this point in time.

Now, I think it fair comment to note here, without in anyway impugning John’s personal integrity, that £30,000 in donations to charities, if donated locally and in key areas, could hypothetically add up to a sizable amount of political patronage and influence over some community organisations and the community representatives and ‘leaders’ associated with them - and that as this money derives from council tax payers, it would seem to be a matter of public interest that the identity of any local groups in receipt of donations from these funds should be openly disclosed to local taxpayers.

In short there seems to be a moral obligation here to be a little more forthcoming in how this money has been used above and beyond the simple artifice of getting a sympathetic local journalist to look over the books.

Anyway, all this is by the by as like PoliticalHack I’m actually rather more interested in the question of why neither John, nor Bromsgrove MP Julie Kirkbride - as John himself suggested in the Sunday Mercury - thought it necessary to disclose before now that they’d been offered luxury cars by a Rover director in 2003 in return for not making quite so much fuss about corporate mismanagement within Rover? I should note in the interests of accuracy that these offers were declined by both parties.

And, even more to point, why this was disclosed first to the Sunday Mercury - other than for the obvious reason of keeping his personal life off the front page - when both had ample opportunity to raise this particular issue under protection of Parliamentary privilege in a debate which took place a mere three days earlier.

Oh, the other reason for posting was to note Pendennis’ far more realistic appraisal of John from the Guardian over the weekend, which reads:

“Poor John Hemming, the hitherto obscure rookie Liberal Democrat MP who has the weight of the world on his shoulders now it has been revealed his mistress is pregnant. The pressure was showing last week when Hemming attended a lunch where he consumed an impressive amount of wine. When asked why he was so thirsty, Hemming, married with children, explained his misfortune and his fears the press would soon find out. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen an MP set out so energetically to sabotage his political career in one fell swoop, and only a month after his arrival in Parliament,’ said one who attended the same lunch, hosted by that well-known guardian of secrets, Private Eye.”

From which one might observe John’s apparent political naivety in failing to realise that if one must keep secrets, the last thing you do is get pissed at a lunch laid on by Private Eye.

Still in deference to his liking for jazz one might offer John a few words from an old spiritual which has been recorded by, amongst others, both Satchmo and Magic Sam…

“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen
Nobody knows but Jesus
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen
Glory Hallelujah”

One of the more interesting and illuminating books I’ve read in a long time is Tim Slessor’s ‘Lying in State’ which through a range of examples, some familiar (Hutton, Belgrano, Gulf War Syndrome) and some maybe not so familiar (the Chagos Islanders, Chinook ZD576) explores the way in which Whitehall routinely lies, dissembles and obfuscates in order to limit our exposure to the truth of what our Government and the State get up to - supposedly in our name.

One of the more interesting tactics is common use is, interestingly enough, actually to tell the truth - but in such a way that even the truth fails to tell the full story and becomes, instead, misleading as in this example from Home Office Minister, Tony McNulty in written answer to Sadiq Khan MP (Tooting, Lab) -

“Since the publication of the Identity Cards Bill on 25 May 2005, 21 representations have been received from members of the public. No representations have been received from any organisations or official bodies. The representations took the form of both letters and e-mails, and they expressed concern that the Identity Card Scheme would infringe civil liberties.

The Government believe that the Identity Cards Scheme will support civil liberties and human rights. The scheme will be bound by legislation such as the Data Protection Act, Human Rights Act and the Disability Discrimination Act. The Identity Cards Bill also contains a number of important safeguards such as setting limitations on the information that may be held by the scheme and its use. Only Parliament would be able to change the statutory purposes of the Register or the type of information which could be held and only via primary legislation.”

To understand what’s happening here let’s look at two specific point where the literal truth of the Minister’s answer fails to encompass the full reality of the ID cards debate.

First we have:

“21 representations have been received from members of the public. No representations have been received from any organisations or official bodies.”

That may indeed be true but, as should be obvious, it fails entirely to reflect the widespread and detailed debate that is actually taking place on the subject of ID cards and the National Identity Register. If fails to acknowledge the existence of the NO2ID campaign, the LSE’s analysis of ID cards which was widely reported in the media and their subsequent work on developing an alternative system which would be both substantially cheaper and far less intrusive.

To the Home Office, in responding via a Minister to a Member of Parliament, none of this exists as it has not been reported directly to them even though this entire debate is being conducted openly and in full sight of the public in the media and on the Internet.

This, as Slessor notes on several occasions is classic Whitehall, where civil servants will decide what information is, and more often than not, isn’t relevant to the question being answered and draft a response accordingly. Indeed a key element of the credo of the Government is that in response to Parliamentary questions it should provide the minimum information necessary to answer a particular question and nothing more, as giving additional detailed information invariably spawns further, usually unwelcome, questions - thus we get comments like this one;

“It was apparent to me that if we were to moved down the route of following the detailed analysis which was being requested, we would end up with yet more requests for yet more information”

That comment was made to a Parliamentary Select Committee by the then Defence Minister, Michael Heseltine, in relation to a detailed analysis of the circumstances of the sinking of the Argentine warship Belgrano prepared by Clive Ponting. Ponting, as you may recall, was subsequently arrested, prosecuted and finally acquitted of braking the Official Secrets Act after leaking elements of his report, which he was asked to compile by the Foreign Office, to a Member of Parliament, Tam Dalyell.

Knowing, then, that the provision of answers which are factually correct but incomplete is very much a standard tactic in Whitehall when Ministers and their civil service advisers are seeking to obscure the truth, what of Tony McNulty’s other key statement?

“Only Parliament would be able to change the statutory purposes of the Register or the type of information which could be held and only via primary legislation.”

This is, again, a factually true but extremely limited statement which does not encompass the full extent to which data may be added to the National Identity Register or how that data may potentially be used.

First of all it needs to be understood that while this apparent stricture, requiring primary legislation, i.e. a full Act of Parliament, to extend the Register applies only in circumstances where Government is seeking to extend its purpose or the type of information it holds might reasonably lead one to believe that an Act of Parliament would be required to add any additional information to the Register, over and above what is already specified, this is in fact not the case.

The Act defines two clear statutory purposes for which the Register may be used;

(i)Provision of a convenient method for individuals to prove their identity; and

(ii)Provision of a secure means of identifying individuals where that is in the public interest.

And goes on to define the public interest as encompassing;

- National security;
- Prevention and detection of crime;
- Enforcement of immigration controls;
- Enforcements on prohibitions on unauthorised working or employment; and
- Efficient and effective provision of public services.

As you can see this is already a pretty broad definition to begin with, particularly if one considers the full scope of information that might be conceivably be incorporated into the Register just on the basis of these definitions alone.

The full list of information which will be included, right from the outset, is not in the Bill itself but in Schedule 1 of the Bill - for those unfamiliar with legal terminology, think of a schedule as being like an appendix - about which the Government’s own explanatory notes have this to say;

“Schedule 1 may be amended by secondary legislation following a resolution in both Houses of Parliament to add to the list of information that may be recorded on the Register. However, any additional information must be consistent with the statutory purposes of the Register. So, for example, this power to amend Schedule 1 could not be used to include criminal records in that Schedule without further primary legislation as recording previous criminal convictions is not covered by the definition of registrable facts and so is not consistent with the statutory purposes of the Register in clause 1″

Ah, so in actual fact, an Act of Parliament would be required only if the Government wished to do something completely different with the Register from what’s already been specified - if all it wishes to do is extend the range of information in the Register within its existing purposes then only secondary legislation, a statutory instrument, needs to be passed.

An Act of Parliament would not, therefore, be needed to add a DNA profile to personal data held about individuals within the Register as, obviously, recording such information would be entirely consistent with its use in the detection of crime. What wouldn’t the Police and its forensic scientists give for access to a national DNA register?

The same argument could also be made in relation to recording information about an individual’s bank accounts and other financial records as a aide to the detection of ‘white collar’ crime, fraud and money laundering and, therefore, this too would be entirely permissible without a full Act of Parliament just on the existing definition of the Register’s purpose.

This, then, is the first - of three - ways in which the Minister’s statement, which factually correct, succeeds in providing a misleading and incomplete picture of the full extent to which the Register may impact on our daily lives.

The second misleading absence of information is closely related to the first and exemplified by the statement, in the Government’s explanatory notes to the Bill, that;

“for example, this power to amend Schedule 1 could not be used to include criminal records in that Schedule without further primary legislation”

In simple terms, what the Government is saying is that it would require an Act of Parliament to include details of an individual’s criminal record on the Register - and, of course, by implication, one can extend that same stricture to other records, medical records, tax records, welfare benefit records, etc.

Now, as anyone who understands how databases work will tell you, the first and most obvious thing about this statement is that mere idea of compiling things like criminal records into the Resister is, for simple and practical reasons, a total nonsense - for no other reason than that the sheer amount of data that would have to be stored in a single system in order to do this would make the Register so unwieldy as to be almost useless. It would simply collapse under the sheer weight of information it was being asked to hold.

The Government can, therefore, quite happily make this idea subject to the requirement that full Act of Parliament should be passed to make it possible simply because it no intention of ever doing it anyway.

The second thing to note - and the basis of my original article ‘Unlocking the Register’ - is that in order to use the National Identity Register to access things like medical records - the Government is currently spending around £6 billion on computerising record keeping in the NHS - tax records and criminal records, which are or will be held on different databases you do not need to store those records in the Register itself. All you need to store in the Register is the information needed to locate this information in the database in which it is already stores.

To use the example of your tax records. In the tax system each individual is identified uniquely via their National Insurance Number - if you have someone’s NI Number you can search the tax system for their individual records and locate them very easily. So as long as you record someone’s NI number in the Register - which the Register will as this is already included in Schedule 1 - then the information the Register provides will, in turn, provide you with the information you need to locate and examine an individual’s tax records provided that you have the authority to do so.

However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that the Identity Cards Bill will go so far as to identify who might use the contents of the Register to access your data or in what circumstances they may be able to carry out such an examination. Such powers, some of which already exist, are, or will be, defined in a range of different primary and secondary legislation, making it nigh on impossible to identify who might have access to what without a detailed and time consuming trawl of the statute books.

This, then, is the unstated purpose of the National Identity Register, it acts as an index, and as ’skeleton key’, to locate and unlock a vast range of information about individuals which is held across government and in a wide range of other databases and, indeed, will include from the outset a number of index references - what in database terms are called ‘keys’ - to other systems including your passport and driving licence numbers as your National Insurance Number.

In order, therefore, to link your medical records, or even your criminal record, to the Register its not necessary to store that information in the Register itself, only its location - another database - and the unique identifier - the key - required to identify and isolate your individual records from everyone else’s. And this information can be added to the Register at any time not by Act of Parliament but by secondary legislation, by a statutory instrument which is not, generally, subject to anything like the same degree of scrutiny or debate as a full Act.

In fact, if you look at when and how many statutory instruments are debated and passed, especially one’s which may be somewhat contentious as those extending the Register could be, you’ll find that a little Parliamentary ‘trick’ usually comes into play in which debates on statutory instruments are scheduled to take place on a Friday afternoon, at a time when the majority of MP’s have already left for their constituencies and are, therefore, not present for the debate. It’s fairly easy, therefore, for secondary legislation to slip in under the radar with the minimum of debate and without the public, for the most part, even realising its happened.

The third and final deceit regarding the National Identity Register is rather less obvious than the other two yet, in many ways, potentially the intrusive and the most damaging to civil liberties inasmuch as it enables personal information and data to be linked to the Register without anyone even realising it.

In order to locate a specific piece of information in a database you need a ‘unique identifier’, a piece of information held in the database which is unique to that information - and when it comes to identifying information which relates to a specific individual, the Register provides just such a unique identifier, your National Identity Registration Number.

Now, if and/or when ID cards are introduced, one of the pieces of information which will be disclosed to anyone making a request to verify your identity will be your National Identity Registration Number, the number which uniquely identifies you - and once that information has been disclosed there is nothing in the Bill to say how it may then be recorded or used. The only protection, in law, you will have will be via the Data Protection Act which, when it comes to issues of privacy, is far from watertight.

In fact, its highly likely that a wide range of third parties will make use of and record your National Identity Registration Number as a matter of routine - one can envisage from the outset that the financial services industry will be amongst the earliest adopters and that before very long, banks, building societies, credit reference agencies, insurance and pension companies and others will all be tagging every single piece of information they hold with your Registration Number and using that number to exchange information about you an your finances. Once your National Identity Registration Number gets out ‘into the wild’ it can be used for a wide range of purposes outside of those specified in the Bill and with few controls on its use. More often than not, you may not even realise that its being used.

Moreover, because the Register incorporates an ‘audit trail’ which records each an every time a third party accesses the Register in order to verify your identity, when this happened and, most importantly of all, who was doing the asking, the Government then has a complete record of everyone who is using he Register and your National Identity Registration Number - so if the Government did, for any reason, want to know what you’ve been doing - or even where you were at a particular time - the audit trail will tell it exactly where to look…

… and it already knows what to look for - any information to which your National Identity Registration Number has been attached.

—

It should be noted that, on its own, the National Identity Register does not create a ’surveillance state’. It does however put in the place the means the create such a state by providing a mechanism which enables a wide range of personal information held in a variety of locations, not all of them in government by any means, to be connected together to form a comprehensive ‘picture’ of who you are, where you are and, more importantly, what you’ve been doing.

I’ve now written maybe three or four full articles on the subject of ID cards and more specifically on the National Identity Register and the ‘deeper truth’ of these proposals, which go far beyond anything that the Government or the State will openly discuss or admit to.

Much of what I’ve had to say in those earlier articles - which are all categorised under ‘Civil Liberties’ if you wish to review them - tended to be quite technical in tone, a fact noted obliquely by Vicki Woods, writing in yesterday’s Telegraph, in pointing out that she didn’t quite understand the concept of ‘foreign keys’ from ‘Unlocking the Register’. In fact she can be entirely forgiven for having difficulty with that concept, it is difficult unless one possesses a solid technical understanding of databases and database design, and its recognition of that that I sat down to write this piece in the hope that I could provide a less technical explanation of the extent to which the National Identity Register may quietly infiltrate every aspect of our daily lives.

I, therefore, owe Vicki a debt of gratitude for showing me, perhaps without realising it herself, the need for a less technical examination of the Register and a debt of thanks for recognising, in the mainstream press, not only my own work but the work of other bloggers on this issue. It’s good to see the mainstream press starting to pick up on what’s going on out here in the blogosphere and, in particular, recognising that increasingly much of detailed work of unpicking government policy and identifying what Whitehall is really up to is going on out here on the Internet. Good for us, certainly, but also, I believe, good for democracy as out here on the electronic frontier is where you’ll find many of the debates which government would rather we didn’t have and which they clearly would like to ignore; not just about ID cards and the National Identity Register but on electoral reform and PR, and also on Europe, which above all others has been the debate which dare not speak its name in either of the two main political parties for the last few years.

I also owe a similar debt of thanks to a number of fellow bloggers including Tim Worstall, Robin Grant and all at perfect.co.uk, the Honourable Fiend, Tim Hicks, Monjo and others who’ve been kind enough to refer to, and link to my work - which also reminds me of the desperate need I have to update my blogroll as its now fallen hopeless behind the number of RSS feeds I have syndicated through Firefox.

Oh, and lets not forget NO2ID in all this, for leading the campaign against ID cards and tacking so many more issues that I’ve personally had time to deal with.

What I also hope I’ve demonstrated here is how, in the hands of a politician or civil servant, even the truth can be misleading, incomplete and downright disingenuous, although I should note my belief, in this case, that it’s doubtful that the Minister in question, Tony McNulty, is even aware of just how far from the full truth his statement, quoted in the article, is. The ID Cards Bill is a highly technical bill which creates a highly technical system of interlocking databases and records the full extent of which is most probably understood only by those within the Civil Service charged with the development of this system. In short I doubt even those politicians most closely involved in bring forward these proposals, first David Blunkett and, more recently, Charles Clarke, understand anything more than what they are told by their Civil Service advisers.

As Slessor’s book - which I heartily recommend to anyone interested in understanding how Whitehall operates - demonstrates on several occasions, what even the Minister knows may quite easily be some considerable way short of the full truth, even though it is the Minister who ‘carries the can’ should it be discovered that they have misled Parliament, even having been misled themselves by Whitehall. And even were I, as a member of the Labour Party, inclined to trust my fellow party members in Government, that trust does not extend to the legions of unelected and unaccountable minions of the State, the civil servants who are busily constructing this reprehensible system and who, should it come into being, will be the ones to administer and make use of it and its almost unrestrained ability to intrude into our personal lives.

And its for this last reason that I believe that we should, indeed we must, resist the introduction of ID cards or, if we are to have them, to have them in a form which does not, in turn, require anything near such an extensive and centralised identity register - such a system is not only possible but eminently workable and far cheaper to install and administer that the monstrosity being proposed by this current government, yet the government seem unwilling to even admit to such a possibility, let alone debates its merits openly and in public.

Government’s, ultimately, may be held to account. We have the ballot box as our ultimate weapon, our means of exacting a little payback on a ruling party who we see to be acting against our interests as citizens.

But when it comes to the State, to the people who build, administer and ultimately make use of such systems, the people who could most directly intrude on our personal lives through use of the Register, then we have no such weapon and no means of holding them directly to account - and its that about which we should be most nervous and most watchful because when we ask Juvenal’s question, “Quis Custodiet Ipso Custodes” - ‘Who will guard the guardians’ - the answer is no one but themselves.

Hey, I said there was more to come on the subject of SCVO – that’s Sandwell Council of Voluntary Organisations and not the Scottish Council of like acronym, BTW - and I’m always as good as my word.

Now if you’ve read the last article – and if you haven’t, you’ll need to read it anyway as some of what follows won’t make a whole lot of sense if you don’t – then you’ll have noted that at one point in proceedings the organisation ended up bringing in a firm of solicitors to help out with the odd employment issue or two… or four… or five… hell I can’t remember the exact number but it was a lot…

… more than you might reasonably expect in an organisation with less than 30 employees.

And since then, they’ve taken it all a step further and signed up with a specialist personal and employment law consultancy, just to make certain they have everything covered.

Which on the whole is a pretty smart move on the organisation’s part…

… especially if, as I do, you know the kind of situations some of its managers were capable of getting into is left to deal with employment issues without the benefit of a solicitors in tow to keep an eye on them.

To understand exactly how, and why, I can say that we need to look at three examples of what can only be described as ’screw-ups’ when it came to dealing internally with employment issues.

Why?

Because this is an organisation whose role, in the local Voluntary Sector includes, amongst other things, capacity building other organisations, promoting good practice and generally supporting other organisations to be, and become, good employers. Whether that same organisation can claim to practice what it preaches is, therefore, a matter of public interest given that it receives public money to enable it to fulfil that role.

I might also point out, before anyone starts worrying unduly, that none of the managers who feature in these examples are actually involved in providing advice directly to local organisations. That responsibility falls to a small number of specialist officers, of which I used to be one, who actually know what they’re doing so if you’re thinking of contacting them for a bit of help, go right ahead – you’re actually in pretty safe hands as long you don’t go asking certain managers for help – you’ll get to know which ones if you read on.

… Meanwhile over at the other local paper, known colloquially in these parts as the ‘Express & Swastika‘ we find the Editor fair frothing at the mouth over the decision of Tory/Lib Dem led Dudley Council to cut rental funding from uniformed groups such as the Scouts, Guide and Boys Brigade.

Now aside from noting my usual unease at the idea of giving public funding to what were originally set up as youth paramilitary groups - but that’s another story - there are a few factual problems with Dudley MBC’s attempts to shift the blame for this one on to the Government - not least this press release from the Government News Network which shows that Dudley MBC should be receiving an extra £17.5 million in Government grant for this year (2005/6) over and above what it recieved the previous year (2004/5), an increase of 7.3% which is higher than any other local council.

Now on top of that we also have Dudley’s own budget which shows that although the Government factored in a 4.2% increase in council tax into its calculations - which presumably is the level at which it would apply a cap to Dudley MBC’s spending - in actual fact the Council expected to increase Council Tax by less than 3% - at least according to its own press release from December 2004.

So, logically, if the Council now finds itself short of cash then it has no one but itself to blame for setting a council tax rate below that which the Government would have permitted and it is, rather cheeky to say the least, for it to try to shift the blame to Government for a decision which was entirely its own.

In actual fact, what has happened here should be pretty obvious. The Tory-led council has taken the opportunity afforded by its increased grant to set as low a council tax rate as it thought it could get away with, knowing that a general election was due the following May. Its a simple matter of electioneering in the hope that by keeping Council Tax increases down it might improve its local candidates electoral fortunes.

Now, however, it finds itself coming up short - which usually means that somewhere in the council there’s department that’s been overspending and it now has the task of finding cuts elsewhere in order balance the books - and preferably the kind of cut which are least politically damaging, which invariably means that non-essential services and expenditure, such as money for voluntary groups, is often amongst the first areas to feel the pinch.

It’s also worth noting the apparent credulity of the Express & Star, which doesn’t appear to have done its homework properly before spouting forth on the presumed evils of central government as if it had, it wouldn’t now be in rather embarrassing position of having run off at the editorial ‘mouth’ only to find that the facts don’t back up either its or Dudley MBC’s effort to paint the Government as the villain of the piece - facts I might point out which took around 5 minutes at most to locate on the internet.

The Express & Star would like us to think that:

“Today in the Black Country we see how once-proud local democracy has become no more than a branch office of Downing Street.”

Unfortunately, today what we actually see is how the once-proud local press has become nothing more than an overly credulous and supine mouthpiece for a craven council which is unwilling to take responsiblity for its own embarrassing short-sightedness.

Now print that on your letters page!

… when I’d be able to describe John Hemming as a ‘master of understatement’ but when he describes his wife as being ‘not best pleased’ by this particular bit of news, then I think he more than deserves the epithet.

Hat tip: Bob Piper

Now you’ll have to excuse me while I clean the coffee off my keyboard before it stains…

What is it with politicians and having wars?

Not real wars with guns and bombs and people winding up dead or with unexplained mystery illnesses which don’t really exist - at least not in the minds of politicians - but all these fake wars on things which can’t actually fight back.

It seems any time a problem comes up there’s always some dumbass politician who wants to have fucking war on it.

Remember the ‘war on drugs’? What the fuck was that all about? A war on drugs - what did I miss something? Did America get invaded by a couple of spliffs and a crack pipe?

It just doesn’t make sense. A war on drug dealers or drug importers - now that makes sense. Those bastards at least have guns and shit to fight back with but not a fucking war on drugs?

- Hey Sarge. I think the Captain’s losing it - says the politicos are saying we’re gonna have a war on drugs…

… Sarge. How are we gonna fight a bunch of inanimate objects? -

These days we’ve got the ‘war on terror’ - on terror for fucks sake. Not terrorists but terror itself. Is it any wonder that Bin Laden got away when troops are told that the enemy is terror?

- No, Sarge. Didn’t find any terror in that cave you sent us to check out. Just a few guys with guns and an old kidney machine. Nothing scary about that at all… -

A war on terror? What ALL terror?

I mean what are they saying here? That one minute I’m watching a late night movie on TV and the next I’m surround by the SAS all shooting the crap out of my living room?

- Not to worry, Sir, We are in a war on terror and that film was pretty terrifying, wasn’t it? It’s all for your own safety, sir… -

Why so aggressive all the time? Can’t anyone figure out that if we didn’t go round pissing people off so much by having all these wars then maybe… just maybe… we wouldn’t need to keep having all these dumb wars anyway.

I mean there’s even a fucking charity called ‘War on Want’ - War on Want? What the fuck’s that all about?

We’re having a war on poverty and its all being paid for by a fucking charity? Has anyone even told the poor people this?

- Look, its alright. We’re here to help and we’re having a war on poverty -

- Look, fuck your war. Just give me a glass of clean water and a meal you bastard! -

None of this makes sense and these assholes don’t even see it? Why? Because they’re all too busy having a fucking war on the English language, that’s why.

Learn to express yourself clearly, for fuck’s sake, and the world might just start making a bit more fucking sense…

… you see, what we really need is a war on idiots who talk about nothing else but having wars on things!

of a modern Labour Minister.

Just sheer, unadulterated genius - click the link, sit back and enjoy the experience.

The story seems, at first glance, a straightforward matter of benefit fraud:

A MOTHER-OF-THREE continued to claim Income Support despite having scooped £100,000 on a National Lottery scratchcard, a court has heard

However, in the course of this story being reported we find this particular line in the Burton Mail’s coverage…

Disney was rumbled after routine checks by DWP bosses revealed she had £100,000 stashed away in her account.

Which then become even more intriguing as during the course of this story being reported on by BBC Midlands Today the reporter stated that the fraud had been uncovered by the DWP’s ‘new supercomputer’ - this report was not put online, sorry.

One of big and largely unanswered “what if’s” of the ID cards debate is the question of ‘what if the government could access to your bank account?’ - which forgets entirely that for anyone already receiving welfare benefits by direct payment, the government already has the full details of their bank account anyway.

However, if the BBC’s local news report is correct - and not a bit of “let’s try and scare the fraudster’s” type propaganda from the DWP - then it appears that the DWP is in a position to do far more than just pay money into your account. At the very least, this report suggests that this ‘new supercomputer’ can also check your balance as well, just in case you haven’t declared any savings.

Which is odd, as I seem to have missed the bit where the DWP were given the legal authority to make such checks without, seemingly, the account holder’s consent - unless there’s some sort of consent clause tucked away in the small print on benefit claim forms these days.

Moreover, the Burton Mail article refers to this having been uncovered as part of ‘routine checks’ - which taken together with the BBC’s report seems to clearly suggest that the DWP is using some sort of new computer system to routinely monitor the bank/building society accounts of benefit claimants - a fact which, as this case demonstrates, claimants appear to be entirely unaware of.

And, one might reasonably conjecture, if the DWP indeed has this ability then it probably won’t be too long before these same capabilities find their way into the ‘armoury’ of the Inland Revenue via its role in administering and distributing tax credits. In fact, for all we know for sure, it may already have this capability or least be able to access it via the DWP as I can recall there were some regulatory changes made a few years back to allow greater sharing of information between the Inland Revenue at what was then the Department of Social Security.

So what, exactly, is going on here? Does the DWP have, as seems to be suggested, a new financial surveillance system and, if so, why has this not been disclosed to the public given that, if this is true, it has profound civil liberities implications which clearly have been neither raised nor addressed openly.