PJC Journal – Original

A delegation from
the Council of Europe is currently mulling whether to invoke international
monitoring of British elections.  

The council
normally monitors countries in the Balkans and the former USSR; the only western-European nation under
examination is Monaco.

The stench of
corruption and alleged vote rigging has finally reached the noses of those
bodies who monitor despot nations and third world countries. 

Ironically,
despite the fact that democracy is a relatively recent innovation for many nations, they may – in the council's view – already be better at
implementing it than the UK.
 

Britains move away from democracy towards a
totalitarian state is being watched carefully by organisation and countries
around the world.

The chairman of
the Committee on Standards in Public Life yesterday delivered
a stinging attack on attempts to modernise the British voting system. 

Speaking to the
annual seminar of the Association of Electoral Administrators in Brighton, Sir Alistair Graham suggested that
electoral fraud has increased sharply as a result of postal voting, and that
e-voting should be postponed or scrapped.

The number of
votes cast in local elections had apparently increased in some areas following
the introduction of postal balloting. He suggested that perhaps the extra votes
had been posted in job lots by corrupt party hacks, rather than by individual
stay-at-home citizens. 

Sir Alistair
suggested that plans to pilot telephone, text, and e-voting during the upcoming
May local elections should “be put on hold”.
 

This
writer believes that any government that has degraded our nation and our way of
life to the point where international bodies feel that we need to be supervised
is both politically and morally bankrupt.

BLAIR and BROWN – time to go,
while we still have enough left to recover.

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A delegation from
the Council of Europe is currently mulling whether to invoke international
monitoring of British elections.  

The council
normally monitors countries in the Balkans and the former USSR; the only western-European nation under
examination is Monaco.

The stench of
corruption and alleged vote rigging has finally reached the noses of those
bodies who monitor despot nations and third world countries. 

Ironically,
despite the fact that democracy is a relatively recent innovation for many nations, they may – in the council's view – already be better at
implementing it than the UK.
 

Britains move away from democracy towards a
totalitarian state is being watched carefully by organisation and countries
around the world.

The chairman of
the Committee on Standards in Public Life yesterday delivered
a stinging attack on attempts to modernise the British voting system. 

Speaking to the
annual seminar of the Association of Electoral Administrators in Brighton, Sir Alistair Graham suggested that
electoral fraud has increased sharply as a result of postal voting, and that
e-voting should be postponed or scrapped.

The number of
votes cast in local elections had apparently increased in some areas following
the introduction of postal balloting. He suggested that perhaps the extra votes
had been posted in job lots by corrupt party hacks, rather than by individual
stay-at-home citizens. 

Sir Alistair
suggested that plans to pilot telephone, text, and e-voting during the upcoming
May local elections should “be put on hold”.
 

This
writer believes that any government that has degraded our nation and our way of
life to the point where international bodies feel that we need to be supervised
is both politically and morally bankrupt.

BLAIR and BROWN – time to go,
while we still have enough left to recover.

Related Reading:

Driving Change: How the Best Companies are Preparing for the 21st Century

Un tour du monde des écoliers, à portée de main

Old Yishuv: Musta'Arabi Jews, Sephardi Jews, Four Holy Cities, Jerusalem, Main Page, Safed, Tiberias,Jaffa, Deluge Myth

Indian Literature: Sanskrit literature, Main Page, Mahabharata, Classical language, Sangam literature, P?li Canon, Vedas, Indian epic poetry, Assamese ... Bengali literature, Bhojpuri language

Structured Experience Kit-Main Pages

Connecting for
Health is planning to begin the implementation of the Care Record Service (CRS) in the next few weeks

A spokesperson for CfH, the agency in charge of England's NHS National
Programme for IT (NPfIT), told GC News that trusts acting as early
adopters are likely to begin using the CRS in the spring.

“There's a
process to go through in identifying early adopters,” the spokesperson
said. “There will probably be a number announced through the year. 

A guidance
document published in February 2007 says the early adopters are being
selected on the following criteria:

• a suitable community
  that has a critical mass of a single GP system supplier;
• a critical mass of
  practices meeting data quality standards and technology requirements;
• a suitable acute sector
  or unscheduled care provider that is willing to participate in the initial
  stages of the implementation.

NOW IS THE TIME TO OPT-OUT

Connecting for
Health is now advising that the Summary Record Advisory Group take the 93C3
code to mean that a patient has explicitly refused to have their records
uploaded to the Spine.

For those who have not already done so, (use the letter in the link), it is
vitally important that you write to your GP now.

What are the risks of not opting out. 

Your medical
confidentiality is at risk from this new database, as over a million NHS
employees and central government bureaucrats will have access to not only your
medical records but also your demographic details—name, address, NHS
Number, GP details, phone number (even if it’s ex-directory) and mobile number.

If you fail to
opt-out, you can only have them hidden in special circumstances if the police
or social services request it—if, for example, you are a celebrity or on a
witness protection scheme.

Many public and
private sector workers will otherwise have access to your address and phone
number, from social workers to pharmacists. 

You will
eventually be allowed to ‘lock down’ some of your medical details (though the
security mechanisms haven’t been built yet).

But although you
can keep some of your medical details confidential from some of the doctors
involved in your care, they can override this if they think it’s necessary, and
there is no way for you to keep your information confidential from civil
servants.

You will no
longer be able to attend any Sexual Health or GUM (Genito-Urinary Medicine)
Clinic anonymously as all these details will also be held on this national
database, alongside your medical records.  

For the first
time everyone’s most up-to-date and confidential details are to be held on one
massive database.

Patient Doctor confidentiality gone forever.

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Soviet Main Street

The first of the
Big Brother card and database schemes (of which there are many) has finally
been scrapped. 

Always punted as
the poor entrant to the NIR the youth opportunity card will not now see the
light of day.

It appears that
an early assessment of progress has caused the DfES to scrap the scheme before
it even got off the ground. 

The statement obtained by PSF, which the DfES said was public
anyway, said the project had been scrapped after an assessment of its costs,
benefits and risks, although searching the DfES website finds no record of any
press release.

Known as the
youth opportunity card, it was introduced as one of a raft of
measures designed to help wayward kids back on the straight and narrow, as part
of the government's Respect Action Plan and Every Child Matters programmes. 

Public Sector
Forums (PSF) said it learned of the scheme's demise from a memo leaked from the
Department for Education and Skills (DfES), which was supposed to pilot the
system with 10 local authorities over two years from autumn 2006.

However, the DfES
said in a statement that it realised last summer it might have trouble seeing
its plans through because there was no off-the-shelf technology it could use to
run the youth card. 

“It is clear
that the costs for the delivery infrastructure would far outweigh the money
that would end up in the hands of the young people whom we are trying to
help”.

Source

This
is probably the most sensible thing that I have heard come out of the DfES in
many years.

Hopefully
now this government will realise that the way to deal with our youth is to talk
to them, and more importantly deal with the social and economic issues that
bedevil many areas of Britain, not just stick them on
another database.

Perhaps we should also be asking for our money back from Accenture, the Consultancy group that proposed the idea in the first place, before spending millions of our money on them only to find out that there was not the technology to support it.

The first of the card and database schemes to be scrapped, this is a small move in the right direction, but the bigger, more expensive schemes such as the National Identity Register, the NHS Care Records System, e-bookings and the overall NHS NPfIT programme are the ones that really need the scrutiny and eventual closure of the projects.

Related Reading:

Driving Change: How the Best Companies are Preparing for the 21st Century

Driving Change: How the Best Companies are Preparing for the 21st Century

Front Page (Sterling Main Street)

Stop the War Coalition: Main Page, Osama Bin Laden, John Rees, Communist Party of Britain, Communist Party of Great Britain Provisional Centre, Committee

Un tour du monde des écoliers, à portée de main

The first of the
Big Brother card and database schemes (of which there are many) has finally
been scrapped. 

Always punted as
the poor entrant to the NIR the youth opportunity card will not now see the
light of day.

It appears that
an early assessment of progress has caused the DfES to scrap the scheme before
it even got off the ground. 

The statement obtained by PSF, which the DfES said was public
anyway, said the project had been scrapped after an assessment of its costs,
benefits and risks, although searching the DfES website finds no record of any
press release.

Known as the
youth opportunity card, it was introduced as one of a raft of
measures designed to help wayward kids back on the straight and narrow, as part
of the government's Respect Action Plan and Every Child Matters programmes. 

Public Sector
Forums (PSF) said it learned of the scheme's demise from a memo leaked from the
Department for Education and Skills (DfES), which was supposed to pilot the
system with 10 local authorities over two years from autumn 2006.

However, the DfES
said in a statement that it realised last summer it might have trouble seeing
its plans through because there was no off-the-shelf technology it could use to
run the youth card. 

“It is clear
that the costs for the delivery infrastructure would far outweigh the money
that would end up in the hands of the young people whom we are trying to
help”.

Source

This
is probably the most sensible thing that I have heard come out of the DfES in
many years.

Hopefully
now this government will realise that the way to deal with our youth is to talk
to them, and more importantly deal with the social and economic issues that
bedevil many areas of Britain, not just stick them on
another database.

Perhaps we should also be asking for our money back from Accenture, the Consultancy group that proposed the idea in the first place, before spending millions of our money on them only to find out that there was not the technology to support it.

The first of the card and database schemes to be scrapped, this is a small move in the right direction, but the bigger, more expensive schemes such as the National Identity Register, the NHS Care Records System, e-bookings and the overall NHS NPfIT programme are the ones that really need the scrutiny and eventual closure of the projects.

Related Reading:

Indian Literature: Sanskrit literature, Main Page, Mahabharata, Classical language, Sangam literature, P?li Canon, Vedas, Indian epic poetry, Assamese ... Bengali literature, Bhojpuri language

Front Page (Sterling Main Street)

Un tour du monde des écoliers, à portée de main

Structured Experience Kit-Main Pages

Old Yishuv: Musta'Arabi Jews, Sephardi Jews, Four Holy Cities, Jerusalem, Main Page, Safed, Tiberias,Jaffa, Deluge Myth