“Web 2.0, or just Stasi?”

The title is quoted from the Register, in a post entitled “UK ID card service mounts birth, marriage, death landgrab” (The clue is in the title. )

The UK Identity & Passport Service (IPS) has staged an identity landgrab on birth, marriage and death records. From April 2008 the General Register Office, which is responsible for recording these matters and is currently a directorate of the Office of National Statistics, is to become part of IPS, meaning that IPS will be logging you from the moment you’re born until the moment you die.

Not only is the previously respected General Register office about to disappear into the gaping maw of the Orwellian Identity ministry, but its data will now feed

into the somewhat more chilling notion of of a continually updated life record. So was that Web 2.0, or just Stasi?
Considering the new owners, it’s now pretty clear which it is. (The Register, 11th October 2007)

Today, the Treasury announced its plan for cutting out all “avoidable contact” between the public and government services. Partly this consists of shutting down government websites and merging their information into one uber-website for citizens and one for businesses. It also involves minimising the chances that you might get to speak to a human being in the dole office or tax office. It’s supposed to be based on “customer journey mapping” which is supposed to be so successful in the private sector.

I assume that the government ministers and senior civil servants have other people to do their shopping for them. Otherwise they might know what a “customer journey” is like in the real world. There are few activities more infuriating than trying to get an answer to a nonstandard question from a phone-line that tells you how important your call is. Unless you count a call-centre operator with a preset script and limited understanding of any regional accent. Or a website that throws away all the details you have laboriously typed in after hours of searching through pages that were delivered over the Internet at a speed that would embarrass a partly squashed slug.

What does this whole new world of applying customer service principles mean for the UK citizen then? Well basically, yes, you’ve guessed it, extending their data sharing between departments. More ID.

Making better use of the customer information the public sector already holds. The types of transformation covered by this Agreement will simply not be possible unless the public sector can establish the identity of the customer it is dealing with simply and with certainty, and be able to pass relevant information between different parts of government. (The Treasury paper, 11th October 2007)

Bull.

Page 19 of the Treasury document says

MAKING BETTER USE OF THE CUSTOMER INFORMATION THE PUBLIC SECTOR ALREADY HOLDS
3.34 This is a highly complex challenge which will not be entirely solved within the CSR07 period. The public sector can, however, make progress:
• at a strategic level; with the work being lead by the Home Office (on identity management) and by the Ministry of Justice (on information sharing). …
• at a tactical level by tackling these issues within the context of specific projects, most importantly “Tell Us Once”. ….. In addition to “Tell Us Once” the Government will also sponsor and facilitate other specific projects including the Free School Meals pilot which is already
underway …………

This is all boring stuff. The social consequences of applying mad business models to delivering public services makes your eyes start to droop. I know. I feel just the same.

The writers know that peppering documents with enough empty phrases like “the context of specific projects” and “strategic” and “tactical” and “facilitate pilots” will switch us off. This stops us seeing the content.

The No2ID campaign makes the same point as the Register, mentioning “Stasi files. ”

In your face, bungling amateurs in the Stasi. The UK government can teach you a thing or two.

Justice or Revenge

Is there a difference between “Justice” and “Revenge?” How should a criminal justice system behave when it comes to punishing offenders? Difficult questions to really answer, but they are ones which need to be addressed.

This thought process has been sparked off by a post on the OUStudent blog about a news item on the BBC today. Titled “Criminal Justice in the News” and it does hit a few issues that I like to get on my high horse over

In the BBC news today there is an article titled “Death driver sentence ‘too short’” which begins with:

A widow is calling for a tougher jail term for the lorry driver who was responsible for her husband’s death.

Grandfather Peter Ellison, 62, of Carlton Husthwaite, near Thirsk, was killed when a lorry ploughed into his tractor on the A168 last September.

David Jackson, 56, of Kirkbymoorside, was jailed for nine months at Teesside Crown Court on 22 June after admitting causing death by dangerous driving.

Mr Ellison’s widow, Dorothy, wants the Attorney General to review the case.

It goes on to confirm that the Unduly Lenient Sentence team is considering referring this case to the appeals court and outlines the basic details of the case. While this is indeed a tragic incident, and you cant help but to feel sorry for the widow left behind, it raises the issue of “Justice” or “Revenge.” This is something, which to me, constantly hovers over pretty much every court case – rarely do victims think “justice has been done” unless the offender gets disproportionately punished – and its after effects are often the basis for all manner of political grandstanding (I wont start on how bad the Church can grandstand – that is a rant for another day).

The BBC article finishes with some telling remarks:

Mrs Ellison, who would have celebrated her 34th wedding anniversary last weekend, said: “It just seems like we are the victims really because he gets nine months and comes out and gets on with his life.

“We have lost somebody special and nine months just doesn’t seem fair.

“I know he didn’t do it deliberately, but to kill somebody and just get nine months, it’s an insult really.”

To me, this is a call for revenge rather than justice. Mrs Ellison is the victim, in that it was her husband who died (Murder is an odd situation in that the victims tend to be dead… 🙂 ), so all I can assume the first comment above means is she wants some one else to suffer more than she has. That is not justice.

Her second comment above is a sign of the hurt she is feeling, but the BBC (and radio news today) have spun it into something else. It is not fair that her husband died in the accident, but no amount of punishment of the driver will change the state of affairs. Her husband will remain dead. Nine months in Jail (away from his own family) and a criminal record is not a “light punishment” – this is a myth often pushed about by the Righteous Right-wing media, mostly people who have no concept of the effects of even relatively short periods of detention.

Crucially, it raises the question of how long would Mrs Ellison consider fair? Ten months? Nine Years? 99  Years?

Her last sentence shows she understands the reality of the situation, but is still hurting. Mr Jackson did not set out to kill (mens rea remember) and it is accepted by the court his actions were not deliberately reckless. This leaves a big question mark over what Mrs Ellison is asking for here.

Every day people drive dangerously and recklessly. Some of these people have accidents which destroy property, some have accidents which injure people and some have accidents which kill. Should the punishment be based on the (almost random) consequences of the act, or the nature of the act itself?

Equally (if not more) importantly, is the “punishment” of criminals there to make them suffer or rehabilitate them and deter others? Are people deterred from having accidents by punishing those who have very serious accidents? I doubt it.

What would sentencing Mr Jackson to a longer prison sentence achieve?

[tags]Society, Culture, Law, Rights, Murder, Crime, Punishment, Social Rights, Social Values, BBC, News, Dangerous Driving[/tags]

More about bodyweight

From BBC Breakfast Time to the BBC website, child obesity is yet again a BBC theme of the day. The topic is whether child obesity is a form of neglect.

Related articles are one about Kacey’s weight went off the scale and Infants being treated for obesity.

Rather disappointingly, from a freak show point of view, four-year-old Kacey didn’t break the 20 stone barrier, or whatever the top mark on a set of bathroom scales is. She was only “off the scale” in terms of the percentile charts used to measure infants. (Just in case there aren’t enough normality hoops for parents and children to jump through, when they get to school….)

It turns out that the supposedly monstrously obese two-year-old Kacey is no longer obese but is in fact just tall now.

As a result of becoming obese when she was still a baby, Kacey has had a premature growth spurt and is now the height of an average 10-year-old and still weighs five stone (31.7kg).

So, was this even “obesity”? Don’t children put on weight before they grow tall. And if they are going to be very tall, they need something to grow new body from.

This got me wondering, is tallness a potential problem? Are people to have their children taken off them by social services for growing too tall at the wrong age?

Because that seems to be one implication of this compulsory normality madnes sthat is getting beamed at children and parents.

Her mum hopes that will continue and by the time Kacey is reaching her teenage years her height and weight will be much closer to the average child. By taking control of Kacey’s food her parents have transformed their daughter’s future.

Sentence One: WHY? Thor forbid that anyone should be on the outside edges of the human bell-shaped curve any more. Average is GOOD. Standard is GOOD. Diversity is BAD.

Sentence Two: Well, no, actually, it seems to me they have more likely set up a future teenage battle-ground that will end up with her becoming anorexic, bulimic or a compulsive eater. Food & control all tangled together, with subliminal Stepford-Wines style messages about how important it is to be like everybody else. Important enough to embarrass the future fiurteen-year-old Kacey (is that even a name or a set of initials?) with the existence of discussion and pictures of her as fat two year-old “problem child” in the national press. I can’t predict a good outcome.

I don’t blame this family for apparently turning a child’s weight into the centre of their lives. What else can they do? Thye have to show a willingness to change it. The other articles discuss the BBC’s apparently successful drive (no surprise there, resources flow to those who take the fashionable line) to find paediatricians who will agree that families with overfed children should be scrutinised by social services.

Now Social Services departments are well known for always improving the lives of kids who fall under their tender attentions …….
And there blatantly aren’t any enough children who are beaten or homeless or abused who could really do with some of this attention……

Doctors say they are now seeing children as young as six months old in their obesity clinics.

Come on. How on earth can a child under 6 months become “obese”? Small babies can’t even eat food. Even bottlefed babies are hard pushed to take in more than they can handle. Babies just stop feeding when they are full. And as soon as they start moving round, even chubby babies tend to burn up their stored energy.

Parents are allegedly to blame for feeding McDonald’s diets to their babies. Nonsense again, if we are talking about the poor* – because there is always an unspoken assumption in this that the poor are too stupid to feed their kids nutritious food – they can hardly afford to give babies a diet of BigMacs and Super-thick milkshakes, no matter how stupid they may be.

* At the children’s centre in the deprived Meadows area of Nottingham parents are offered support to improve their children’s diet.

Here is the one mysterious fact about the epidemic of obesity (and, yes, I do know that you can’t talk about an epidemic of something that isn’t a transferable disease, I was being ironic, ok?) As you can read in an old post here Everything about diets seems to be bull people actually eat LESS now than they did 15 years ago, according to the UK Office of National Statistics. I can’t repeat this too often. Even the BBC did in their quiz. It undercuts almost all of the food nonsense we get stuffed down our craws:

Men eat 6% fewer and women 3% fewer calories and both men and women eat less fat than they did in 1986.

Hmm, calories and fat. Aren’t we getting constantly told that it’s calories and fat that make us fat? This is obviously not completely untrue – there must be a relationship between how much we consume and how much bodyfat we store – but it can’t be wholly true either.

I can come up with a million crackpot theories involving additives and people not walking anywhere and residual estrogens in the water and so on. These remain personal opinion based on minimal or no evidence, so I’ll spare you them. Until we actually understand any of this, it is stretching credulity to assume that every chubby child is getting stuffed with KFCs and crisps and Big Macs and is doomed to a lifetime of Jerry-Springer-style immobility.

The one crackpot theory that I won’t spare you is the idea that the social meanings that we attach to food are demented.

We are so alienated from what we eat that we barely know it comes from farms (a/c to a spurious report on the BBC yesterday). We are obsessed with the weight of celebrities. Half the population is in a constant state of self-loathing beacuse they cant lose weight, but still despises other people for their fatness. And just in case adolescents aren’t disturbed enough about their bodyweight, we are now stretching the boundaries of concern down to babies.