David Boyle's Blog, page 105

The tyranny of data protection

Am I the only one to be constantly asked by corporate call centres to prove who I am?

It would be quite understandable, of course, if I had called them – but they are calling me. I got the third of these calls in the last few weeks last night, and it was from British Gas. But I am not, however many times they bleat 'data protection' at me, going to tell them my date of birth or any other personal details over the phone. They will be a good deal more certain about who I am than I can be about w...

The strange case of the postman who did not ring

There was a small click by the front door this morning while I was having breakfast and there was a note from the postman. It explained (as these things tend to) that he had tried to deliver a parcel but I was out.

Odd really. I wasn't out. Why not just ring the doorbell?

The answer is that this is a small symptom of the damage done by Blairite targets (which he declared himself still in favour of last week). The parcel vans are driven, not by the desire to serve customers, but to deliver more ...

Why did Blair achieve so little?

I happened to hear Anthony Seldon (Blair's biographer) talking about that biography on the BBC this morning, and - apart from saying you learned nothing new from it - he listed three things in particular which the book should have shed some light on, but didn't.

1.  Why did Blair join the Labour Party?  Worth wondering that one.  Was it really from conviction - if so, what was he convinced about?

2.  Why did his decade in power achieve so little?  OK, peace in Northern Ireland and devolution to...

Oddities from Blair

I was fascinated by the Tony Blair interview on Wednesday, and almost everything that could be said about it seems to me to have been said since. But two things struck me that have stuck with me for 24 hours, and seems to me to be worth saying here.

One was his bizarre account of the Iraq escapade. He claimed that the problem which caused all the trouble was that 'outsiders' fed the conflict and disorder after the invasion, as if somehow that had been wholly unpredictable.

This is a strange. O...

Where are all the children?

It occurred to me today, as I pressed through the crowds at Clapham Junction and London Bridge (it is amazing how crowded London is in the summer), that I was feeling a little like that scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in Vulgaria, when Dick van Dyke realises there are no children.

Where are they all?  In the suburbs?  In the countryside?  Locked into airless, artificially lighted New Labour-style nurseries, enjoying their interactive education smart screens?  I don't know.

There are one or two...

Why Stephen Williams is wrong

Stephen Williams is the Lib Dem vice-chair of the Treasury select committee, and he has just weighed into the argument about RBS profits and the shortage of lending to small business.  "There is no excuse for RBS not to loan to good British companies that are struggling to get credit," he said. "We cannot simply allow banks to go back to business as usual while viable British firms are suffering."

He might be right in this second sentence, but he is wrong in the first.  In fact, the party is h...

Why do we subsidise this waste of talent?

HSBC chief executive Mike Geoghegan has made raised the predictable complaint about Vince Cable that his call for 'restraint' – rather mild when there are over a thousand City bankers earning more than £1m a year – might drive bankers abroad.

"We pay for talent and we have to pay the market rates," he said.

But what is talent here? This is the question the political world needs to ask. Is this a good use of talent, to set it loose in the corrosive, speculative world, and deprive the real world ...

Taking part in a BBC McDebate

I was on the new BBC Sunday Live programme this morning, talking – if you can call it that – about Tony Hayward's £1m pay-off. I had forgotten just how frustrating those kind of programmes are.

It is a fantasy, of the BBC and others, that getting lots of people to phone in with comments and having a studio panel with others, who are not particularly well-informed, is somehow a contribution to democracy.

In practice, the technology barely worked. The phone-in consisted of one Scottish lady say...

A bad day with Eurostar

I had a nightmare journey back from Paris with the family on the Eurostar yesterday. Actually, to be precise, the journey was fine, it was the bizarrely disorganised queuing system – overwhelmed check-ins and long queues snaking around the station's mezzanine at the Gare du Nord.

Our train was delayed for 20 minutes while they desperately tried to get their booked passengers on board. The Eurostar staff blamed the UK immigration desks for the chaos, and I'm sure they were at least partly rig...

Why we need a Big Society guarantee

The problem is very simple and rather stark. The kind of public spending cuts coming down the line are unprecedented, with many government departments reducing their spending by a quarter. Many of the services that we have come to assume are necessary to civilised life will disappear.

The rhetoric of the Big Society assumes, correctly in many ways, that there may be other, community-driven alternatives. But we also know that, in many of the places that need it most, these will probably not ...