Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

The staffing levels of post offices often seems to be very much politically led and rather than being subject to whatever local demands would dictate seems merely to reflect that it’s considered as effectively a job creation scheme.

Thus, although the nearest post office to us is on a main road and in quite a large village, it has the same number of staff as the post office in the small very quiet village where our son goes to school. The net effect of us is that what should be a fairly well staffed post office is almost always virtually unuseable. Not only are the queues frequently out the door but they close quite often to catch up with the backlog of work that this generates.

By contrast, the post office in the little village rarely has queues and always leaves us with a good impression. However, a large part of that good impression is no doubt due to that office being effectively well overstaffed for the level of business which it receives.

Whilst I wouldn’t want to deny the small quiet village its own post office, that service should really be part-time with the staff working the rest of the time in the larger one thus improving the service standards considerably for a large number of people.

I see that the Information Commissioner would like breaches of the magnitude seen this week made a criminal offense.

But if it were so right now, who would be the person being arrested by the police? Would it be the “junior official” who appears to have made an error in using a courier firm rather than the Royal Mail. Yet, at the time he would have been told NOT to use the Royal Mail as they were planning to go on strike that week.

In such instances, the instructions are to use courier services instead and that’s just what he did.

Many people have said that such a junior official should never have been responsible for so many records yet that’s the reality of day to day operations in large government departments. Quite junior people need to be able to work with all the records in that way. Surely no-one is expecting the head of HMRC to run the programs that process the various benefits himself?

Short of getting in the car and driving down to London with the CDs, just how could he have gotten the information to London? Yes, there is encrypted e-mail between government departments but it’s just not up to e-mailing two CDs full of information. After all, normal e-mail systems usually can’t even e-mail a single digital photograph these days.

It looks like the UK government is shaping up to provide yet another unconditional guarantee with an open-ended cost for the taxpayers.

Last time it was Northern Rock for which they have kindly guaranteed that everyone in the UK will pay £1300 to support a bank that should simply have been allowed to fail. This time, it’s potentially even more than that as they appear to be about to guarantee that they will cover any losses incurred by any of the 25 million people who are not potentially at risk to identity fraud thanks to action by the government.

Still, at least they are directly responsible for that this time around.

Every time that the issue of ID cards comes up in the UK, there are questions asked about how securely the information collected will be held and every time the government says “trust us”.

Well, today we’ve seen just how much we could trust the government with our information. Not that far at all as it happens as they’ve just managed to lose the complete ID records of just about everyone in the UK. Had it been anyone other than the government that had lost it, those places providing ID theft solutions would be advising everyone to change their bank accounts. When you’re talking millions of people, that’s not really a runner of course.

Still, there are encouraging signs in this fiasco. For one thing, it’s a great example to refer the government to when they say that the ID card information will be perfectly safe. And, of course, it’ll be a brilliant excuse to use when your bank claims that you’ve overspent on your credit card as you’ll be able to say that your identity was stolen.

Perhaps TNT aren’t the best company to use if you’re sending really valuable items in the post!

The whole idea behind the common market, or European Union as we call it these days, was that borders between the countries participating would gradually cease to exist and, for the most part, that has been gradually happening over the last 20 or 30 years. How come then there’s almost always a queue at the border crossing between Spain and France then?

I used to think that it was just a case of “jobs for the boys” until I saw a number of cars and caravans being pretty much taken apart by the customs guys. Presumably they’re enforcing some import control then? Perhaps, but then anything that you can legally buy in Spain can be legally taken to France.

Whatever they’re doing it certainly causes major problems in the Summer when the queues of cars can reach right back to the toll booth (abour 6 kilometres!) and the hill leading up to the customs post is littered with cars that have overheated and had to pull in off the road.