Snoopers' Charter queen Theresa May returns to Home Office brief Theresa May has – despite her failure to ram through the Snoopers' Charter under the previous Tory-led Coalition government – once again, been handed the troublesome Home Office brief. Prime Minister David Cameron, whose Conservative Party secured a slim majority in the House of Commons on Friday, has been lightly reshuffling …
Putting Gove in charge of the Snoopers Charter gives me some hope. Hopefully he can fuck it up in the same manner he attempted to fuck up our education system when Education Secretary. Plus his reputation for butting heads with his colleagues will hopefully give Treasonous May a bit of a handful to deal with.
Best news I've heard since the Torys got a majority.
Upvote, because in his stint as education minister he DID manage to do significant damage to the the education system, the aftermath of which teachers are still dealing with and will have to for many years to come.
On second thoughts, that should be a downvote because although he will undoubtably fuck it up, he'll do so in manner which will affect us all beyond the tenure of this next government.
[ disclosure: my wife is a teacher, so I've unfortunately had to witness the crap they've been going through ]
His wife is "Sarah Vine", who is like Katie Hopkins but without the excuse of epilepsy.* I consider myself a moderate Conservative, and I simply cannot imagine voting for him. But at least we now haven't got Grayling in charge of the "Ignore all the experts in the legal system" department.
US IT companies and banks, however, will doubtless be telephoning KRM, Rothermere and the Barclay Brothers with their thanks. It's odd that the one Conservative I'm aware of who actually has degrees in comp sci and business - David Davis - doesn't seem to be allowed near the question of IT contracts.
*Please note this is not a dig at people with epilepsy. From what I understand, Hopkins has a potentially life threatening version and I can fully understand her milking her Miss Nasty personality for all the money she can get. But Vine has to need to.
...But at least we now haven't got Grayling in charge of the "Ignore all the experts in the legal system" department.
Didn't Gove adopt a similar attitude when at the Dept. for Education?
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/jul/27/gove-ignored-advice-on-list
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2642197/Gove-knew-Muslim-schools-plot-four-years-ago-Education-Secretary-accused-sitting-warnings-Islamists-trying-Birmingham-schools.html
http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2014/mar/11/gove-criticism-careers-advice-guidance-policy
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/michael-gove-urged-to-listen-to-advice-on-exams-8652999.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7932056/Leaked-advice-deals-Michael-Gove-new-blow-in-schools-row.html
"Didn't Gove adopt a similar attitude when at the Dept. for Education?"
Michael Gove is a journalist who has made arse-licking comments about Rupert "one of the most impressive and significant figures of the last 50 years" Murdoch. As such he could cow the teachers because they have a commitment to their pupils and don't want to put their futures at risk. But the legal profession and prison officers? These people have the ability to make real trouble. That's why I think he's safer where he is going to face some real opposition.
IDS is also back in the cabinet and he's been given an axe. So the nasty party is back doing what it really wanted to do the first time round and this time there's nothing to stop it, unless some backbench rebels have a crisis of conscience (in which case, why are they in the nasty party in the first place)?
What's David Davis up to by the way, have they buried him in a shallow grave yet?
@Vimes... hardly surprising when you consider whether they win or fail domestically (e.g Kinnock).. they need to make sure their EU retirement scam of gooning around Europe at the taxpayers expense is not going to be touched. Don't forget the nice fat salary, plush office and final salary pension. I would be sidetracked as well. EU is the retirement home of the political elite
IDS is also back in the cabinet and he's been given an axe. So the nasty party is back doing what it really wanted to do the first time round
Maybe the axe is for him to take out the back and do the decent thing? It takes some flair to run a public sector IT project that stands out from the others for it's failure. I was originally going to post that I wasn't surprised that he got his old job back because you would have to be mad to take over that unpolished turd from him but then I thought that that doesn't cut the field down that much.
Teflon Theresa in charge is like letting a paedophile protect a playground. She's so seriously done SFA for the UK in terms of protecting our borders I think with her at the reins we'll all be heading to Valhalla very shortly.
She's clueless and needs to go home to Maidenhead!
Funny you should mention jodhpurs - one of the first things they started talking about was making fox hunting legal again.
http://metro.co.uk/2015/05/09/the-tories-are-bringing-back-fox-hunting-because-of-course-they-are-5189187/
There's nothing like getting your priorities straight is there?
"TBH, the fate of foxes is the least of my worries for this country over the next five years."
Maybe so, but if your new boss said one of the first things they wanted to do was to let some of your office mates tear apart a living animal with dogs, it wouldn't be a good sign, would it?
One of my all time favourite arcade games.
They had it at the Students Union and once, for the fun of it, I completed it by doing *all* the possible routes and held all the high scores!
What has this to do with the article? Well, about as much as a picture of the arcade machine does with it...
I once had a Summer job as a dogsbody at a sports centre. The town was a few miles away and I couldn't be bothered to walk, so apart from living off snacks from the vending machine I also spent every lunchtime for 2 months playing Outrun. I once completed 14 straight runs through it without fail. Meanwhile everyone else would be outside at lunchtimes enjoying the sunshine or taking advantage to use the sports equipment for free. Fairly obvious I was heading for a career in IT, that is stuck indoors in front of a screen, and kept away from direct sunlight!
The Education establishment, having heard rumours that Gove was coming back to Education, are extremely relieved! It looks like fears of having to teach Latin in primary schools were, in fact, unfounded.
However Gove as Justice Secretary is still very worrying. Will be see a return of the cane as school punishment, and workhouses for the poor?
I'm holding out hope that the Tory majority is small enough that back benchers feel safe in making a noise. Otherwise we'll end up with the Snooper's Charter and a need to start using VPN connections to foreign servers for some things.
"Okay - that made more sense in my head."
No, it makes very good sense. I think most people would agree with the basic tenet of one nation conservatism - perhaps a bit paternalistic, but no change just for the sake of it, an aversion to ideology of any kind, and a touch of noblesse oblige
But instead we get far right radicals with obsessive ideologies that they pursue in the face of all evidence that they don't work, trying to argue that the poor are poor because they are lazy layabouts and the rich owe nothing to anybody.
To be honest I would have liked to have seen the coalition continue, with the LibDems tempering the worst excesses of the right-wing.
Yes. My first thought, on learning the result on Friday morning, was "WTF? I understand the disappointment with the LibDems but didn't people realise that they were the only thing keeping the Tories reined-in? What have you done!".
Of course, no one realised that one in eight people voting UKIP would result in only one seat, but they were only ever useful for a protest vote -- they were never going to rein-in the Tories -- just push them further Right.
I'm going to have to increase my contributions to ORG, No2ID, BBW, etc quite a lot.
The Lib-Dems were mugs. We all know that now; we suspected it then. In the wilderness for so long, they could promise the Earth knowing full well they wouldn't need to deliver. The Tories knew this and being slimier and more skilled at manipulation dangled power at them like candy to a toddler. 5 years of impressive incompetence, and Tories get a majority and Lib-Dems get canned.
Politicians venality and frankly inherent incompetence at "real world stuff" makes them an easy target. and it can only get worse with the current system.
"It was never about good and evil, it's about Power". (J.Whedon)
Politics needs to be completely dismantled and rebuilt around professional competence. Manifesto's should be contracts not promises.
And perhaps brain-scans like Z.Beeblebrox had for all ministers?
P.
It's great to see so many commentaries living under the misapprehension that
Ministers actually make decisions or deliver anything.
Have you never watched "Yes, Minister"? It's as true today as it was 30 years ago, it's not the ministers who make these decisions, it's their advisors and the Civil Service.
Too true. I suspect, especially in the case of the snoopers charter, the ministers are at the whims of the civil servants rather than the other way round. People forget the previous labour government and their, almost identical, attempts to do something similar (IMP anyone?)
Two parties, traditionally opposed ideologically, wanting to bring in the similar draconian laws? Personally, I feel voting in/out Labour or Conservative will matter little until the civil service is given a huge clearout.
The civil service are surely part of the problem, but I think it is ministers who have chosen to let the securocrats out of their bag and give them so much power and influence over the Home and Foreign offices to wipe out any objections from any more public-spirited civil servants.
Unfortunately Authoritarian/Liberal is an orthogonal political dimension to Left/Right (not that the Labour party can be called left wing any more anyway). I see many "central planning" and "state control" socialists as just as authoritarian as "hanging and flogging" conservatives. The snoopers charter was always going to be a problem after this election unless either the Greens or the LibDems held some influence.
...now they've been elected, some bereft of technical knowledge is going to have to explain how the Tories are going to mandate encryption with a backdoor *that can only be used by the 'good' guys*.
That + snoopers charter + 'making Britain the best place to do business online'.
It's been a while, but I think we might be about to experience a tech cock-up that makes Blunkettcards look well thought through.
Not sure we can expect much good of John Whittingdale:
"A Conservative MP has been told his own 12-year-old daughter has broken a social networking site's rules, during an inquiry into internet safety.
It dawned on John Whittingdale that there might be a problem when Bebo safety chief Rachel O'Connell told him the site operated an "over 13s" policy. "
(BBC news 29 April 2008)
That's fairly shaky grounds for denigration.
I mean maybe she was an early summer birth. I was. If you are born after some arbitrary date in June, you end up being almost a year younger than your classmates. That often makes life difficult enough.
So would you support her 'social isolation' from her classmates, merely for the letter of the law?
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