Gov.UK taskforce publishes post-Brexit wish-list: 'TIGRR' pounces on GDPR, metric measures A UK government taskforce chaired by the architect of the disastrous £700m "one dole-to-rule-them-all" Universal Credit IT project, Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP, has published a wish list of regulatory proposals it wants to see adopted by a post-Brexit administration. Included are wholesale reforms of data laws, the development of …
that sometimes you manage to forget just what an absolute weapon Ian Duncan Smith is. Leaving him in charge of opening a tin of tuna is presumably likely to result in disaster.
There're politician that go the other way too - David Davis being a particular one. He repeatedly made himself look a complete tool with various things Brexity, but in before-Brexit-was-a-thing times (and to some extent since) he does actually talk some sense on topics like Government accountability.
> Create the ‘smart’ energy grid of the future
I'm actually sort of OK with that, so long as the requirement for UK smart-meters to contain a contactor is removed. Other countries cope without the ability to remote disconnect, and UK suppliers aren't currently using it (and claim they won't) - so why not remove it from the spec sheet so that supplier screw ups can't cut peoples power off.
> Amend the Weights and Measures Act 1985 to allow traders to use imperial measurements without the equivalent metric measurement.
Curious to hear what, exactly, they think we gain from this. Either we're already using the imperial measurements (pint please mate) or there are a couple of generations in the world who have never used those imperial measurements. Seems like having to print both is a reasonable compromise.
>Curious to hear what, exactly, they think we gain from this.
A couple of days of positive press in the Mail and Express. No business in their right mind wants to trade in imperial measurements. Nobody under the age of 35 even knows what an ounce is.
Unless it's an ounce of plant matter, then we can spot it from fourty yards, natch.
> Unless it's an ounce of plant matter, then we can spot it from fourty yards, natch.
I'm told that sales of that's moved to more commonly using grams now too. Someone mentioned getting 7 grams a while back (a quarter to you and I)
Post Brexit "Security" concerns overriding personal privacy. GDPR does a bloody good job keeping social media and corporations in check.
Now that the EU is out of the picture, let's rewrite the rules to screw over whatever remnants of privacy rights you have. We the UK government want to know everything about you, but want to keep everything we do secret until 75 years after they die.
In the US it is. In the UK it is at times, though it's not legal to trade real estate in anything other than metric in the UK.
A couple of years ago questions were asked in Parliament about why estate agents are getting away with advertising space in square feet when building regulation, building design, building construction and building fitting out are all in metric. They probably stick to it because it's a bigger number.
The minister responded by saying they'll write to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors to enforce the use of metric units. A (deliberately of accidentally) pointless thing to do as surveyors already work in metric. It's the estate agent spivs that need to be pursued by Trading Standards.
Alas, in our Brave New Brexit World I don't see that have any legs. Raise this point now and a minister will enforce all buildings to be advertised in square rod but not change any of the other regulations. Just to create the maximum amount of inconvenience to the greatest amount of people.
I don't really understand why people downvote verifiable facts.
Typical website selling/renting warehouses, etc.
https://www.cbre.co.uk/research-and-reports/about-real-estate/blogs/xxl-warehouses-in-the-uk
Presumably because the first reference to size in your "evidence" says
> with its 21 metre high eaves and 574,258 sq ft (53,350 sq m) of floorspace,
Note that that the height is in metric, and although a square footage is given, the measurement is also given in metric.
If we pop over to right move to look for offices to rent, you'll also find that both are given.
Yes I see I could have picked a better link! I was looking at the graphs and the "informal" references to square footage. You mention RightMove, but it depends. RightMove commercial give all summary sizes in sq ft. It's only when details are delved into that metric equivalents are quoted.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/commercial-property-to-let/London/warehouses.html
*Nobody under the age of 35 even knows what an ounce is."
I'm in my late 40s.
I have no idea how many ounces in a pound, pounds in a stone and stones in a errr, no idea.
No idea how many pints in a gallon. Is it fluid oz in a pint?
I know how many inches are in a foot, is it 3 feet in a yard? No idea how many yards in mile.
A rule of thumb is that a Floz of pure water is an ounce by weight (almost, but close enough) in the way that a litre of water is 1Kg. Once you start switching out the fluid for anything other than pure water, then the relationship goes away by varying amounts depending on the density of the fluid.
"I'm in my late 40s."
Late 50's here. I can answer all the questions you posed in terms of the numbers, but have no idea how to estimate measurements in imperial these days. We learned both systems in infant school, used primarily metric in junior school and only metric in secondary school and O/A level exams. The more esoteric imperial measures like rod, chains, furlongs and fathoms (6'??) I've heard of but long forgotten what they are.
Having said that, I'm comfortable with miles and MPH and have the car trip computer set to work in imperial so I get MPG so I have a consistent comparison that lets me know if I'm driving less efficiently or if there might by something wrong with the car. Guestimating a distance in Km or a speed in KPH isn't something I can do easily. Likewise, fuel consumption in litres per 100km feels wrong.
The interesting thing is that EU law currently has some derogations regarding the use of Imperial for certain fluids because one of its member states (despite formally introducing Metric in late 19th century and formally switching to Metric in 1965) still had some in use for beer and milk.
Now the UK is no longer a member I wonder if those rules will be streamlined at the next opportunity and not allow the UK exporting products in anything but Metric to its biggest trading partner.
You missed one..
>The paper talked about stripping out "unnecessary red tape", introducing rules that are less "onerous" for people and organisations,<
For that, read 'Avoiding oversight and public tendering for contracts.' Which, I am led to believe , is what the current Govt. 'special measures' are all about..
I am 52 and went to school in the UK. I was taught (and can mostly only think) in metric measurements. I can just about get away with feet and inches, but that is only because I know an inch is roughly 2.5cm and 1 foot is the same as a 30cm ruler.
Pounds and ounces? NFI.
My dad can use both systems, but prefers metric.
Why on earth would anyone want to go back to something that is alien to most of the population?
"Why on earth would anyone want to [use] something that is alien to most of the population?"
That was a commonly stated opinion when metric measurements were really introduced in the UK. I was taught in both Imperial and metric at school in the late 60s through the 70s, at least in part because some of teachers did not want to teach metric. I still know e.g. the speed of light in both miles per second and metres per second, because my physics classes taught both.
As mentioned previously, we have a hybrid system in the UK anyway - pints and miles are still the measurements used every day.
"That was a commonly stated opinion when metric measurements were really introduced in the UK"
Maybe, but there was some benefit to moving to metric since that was what (almost) the rest of the world was using. The units make more sense to me as well since they all have the same base 10.
I can't see any benefit in moving back to a system of measurements almost nobody born since man first landed on the moon has used.
As for miles, just get on with it and convert to km. Pints you can just use the metric equivalent like they do here in most of Oz. Ask for a pint and get a 570ml glass (apart from South Australia where a "pint" is about 2 thirds of a real pint for inexplicable reasons).
Why on earth would anyone want to go back
Because if we go back to the mid 1950s - just after "we" won the war and while we still could just about claim to have a bit of empire left - we can be great again.
I'm surprised they didn't suggest bringing back food rationing. People would be queuing up to queue up.
@David Hicklin "Hey leave us boomers out of it - we are thoroughly metric."
Speak for yourself. ;)
To be honest I can use both but I tend to think imperial even though metric is simpler. Probably because up until the last 2 or 3 years of school maths and sciences were imperial. Subjects like TD, metalwork and woodwork were still mainly imperial. But I suppose it not cheap to replace imperial tools like a metalworking lathe.
The background to this report, and the core reason why it's nothing but a scattershot, stream of conservative-wet-dream consciousness is that TIGRR spent weeks on end doing the rounds with all the major business consortia; your CBIs and your IODs and your FSBs and whatnot, canvassing them for their shopping list of things they'd love now we're free from the yoke of EU oppression.
Their response? Don't ask us, guv, we didn't back brexit.
GDPR put the fear of god into all the global multinationals. 'Mandatory' training was imposed to make sure employees knew what was about. 4% fines on global revenue made them stand up and take notice. The EU matters and is a global force in the world.
Yes cookie banners are a bit annoying, but GDPR is much more than this. It's about a legal backstop if you fuck up with people's data. And IDS is just an ignorant pillock. Why make people use only imperial? It's nearly dead, as are most of its proponents. It's just childish Brexit posturing to say look what we can do now.
It's just for fucking headlines. Brexit is only headlines -- there is no substance. Other than svrnty. :-(
6 oz of ham. Who the fuck under 45 understands that now? Oz, is that part of the wonderful Australian deal we have apparently agreed? And if you go to a market stall (the presumed target of this change) that only offers things in imperial and ask for 200g of ham, what then? Are they going to refuse to serve you? That'll be a smart business.
The sooner this brexit bullshit blows through, the better. The current 'do not agree to anything with the EU' -- a la the Northern Ireland Protocol for example, where the unthinking standard response of (unelected) Lord Frost is the EU need to compromise, when we have gone through that, got to a deal, and now WE (the UK, NOT the EU) needs to step up to the commitments it agreed to when the blond twat signed the deal -- is childish, but chimes strongly with the brexiters.
Still, the morons think it's going swimmingly, because lots of old, white racists keep voting for them, despite the fact that the other side of the coin, everyone OUTSIDE the UK think they are a bunch of cunts. It looks like Coyote is still defying gravity after running off the end of the cliff. But nothing lasts forever -- and these scum are slowly dying off. Coyote cannot remain in thin air for ever.
Like I say, it's all bollocks.
> part of the wonderful Australian deal
I wouldn't think so - Oz and NZ have been metric for some while now,
even km and kph for motorists, which never got done here, largely because
of the Old Fart Tendency. I think the difference is that our antipodean
commonwealthers (despite our impression they are behind the times) are
more interested in the future than the past, unlike our Lords and masters.
Well said sir!
This is just the usual bunch of overly opinionated ideologically inflexible fuckwits on a charge to see what else they can fuck up whilst the consequences from Brexit still play out like a slow motion car crash.
What galls me is these wankers always refuse to take responsibility for their actions and refuse to act consistently in their actions, then act fake surprised when the world calls them on it. The current sausage war being a prime example of them being hoist on their own petard. See also the DUP.
No surprise when they are led by the adulterer in chief and one of the biggest liars ever to hold office.
Davis may be a brexit supporting prick but at least on data he had some sane opinions.
"What galls me is these wankers always refuse to take responsibility for their actions and refuse to act consistently in their actions, .... No surprise when they are led by the adulterer in chief and one of the biggest liars ever to hold office."
As a conservative (but definitely not Conservative) I would like to give you a thousand upvotes for that.
And one or two of these -->
Being picky, but why concentrate on cookie consent with regard to any discussion on GDPR?
The GDPR does not mandate much about cookies. They are covered by the ePrivacy Directive (EPD) which pre-dates GDPR by 9 years.
GDPR does include one short paragraph which clarifies that where cookies contain data that can identify an individual, this is personal data. So GDPR gave some teeth to the EPD.
A was in need for new carpets around the time they changed from feet to meters. First, the carpet shop had gone metric. Their prices where not pound per square yard, but pound per 0.8631 square meters. Seriously.
Next, I needed a carpet, 13 foot 11 inch long. The pimply youth at the shop pulled out his calculator and typed 13.11 * 0.3048 = 3.9959 meters. Lucky enough I know that 13 foot 11 inch is just a little bit less than 14 foot which is more than 4.2 meters. Now I'm older and nastier than back then, I would him take his calculation, and write down "customer ordered 13 foot 11 inch" on the order paper. And wait for the carpet fitter to arrive with a carpet that is 20cm too short for the 13 foot 11 inch room. With proof that I ordered a carpet that fits.
I assume this refers to carbon (and hopefully other greenhouse gas) emissions. Is 'net zero' good enough, though? As some greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years*, we need to be thinking about carbon capture - such as preserving peat bogs which absorb CO2, instead of drying them out and burning them (which liberates CO2).
And no, I didn't get "transformational new technologies on a scale not seen since the creation of the internal combustion engine", I just remember that the internal combustion engine was invented, and is a major cause of pollution (CO2, various oxides of nitrogen, and metal particulates ). Iain Duncan Smith may believe that these revolutionary** inventions just turn up, but they really don't, they have to be invented, analysed, refined etc.
I recently sold my car for scrap (129,000 miles, 22 years old), the man who collected it reckoned that new petrol cars today have engines that last about 60,000 miles as the requirements for efficiency mean the metal is thinner. He also reckoned that the manufacture and scrapping of batteries for electric cars is hugely damaging to the environment. Hopefully batteries will improve, be more powerful and lighter, and less damaging to make and recycle soon. Time will tell.
*https://blogs.edf.org/climate411/2008/02/26/ghg_lifetimes/
**Sorry, no pun intended.
Not really a one size fits all answer, as their have been some really cheap motors in cars over that last 10 years that were basically defective(looking at you Hyundai/Kia), which make the overall statistics hard to read.
This isn't really a new issue, an US 80s Fiat spyder wasn't a paragon of reliability, and aluminum blocks can last a long time if their designed well, like to old Toyotas, and and some of the new ones as well.
Any Subaru block should go hundreds of thousands of miles with basic service unless you forget to put oil in it. And to be fair the new 1.6ish block in the new Kia's looks to be excellent. Yeah, their lighter, thinner and use lighter weight oil, but if that means you can only bore it out 2-3 times it's really not an problem. That only happens when you do a full engine rebuild. That would be an issue at 600,000 miles, not 60,000.
Yeah some of the old cast iron blocks were tough as hell and could be rebuilt dozens of times or bored out for performance gains. Only racing teams and people doing restomods on former beaters are going to "wear out" a block doing rebuilds. Instead they get broken, either by pushing performance mods too hard, by lack of maintenance, or bad design.
A bigger headache is all the soy based plastics in the engine bay. Stuff in the wiring harness starts breaking instead of disconnecting. That will be an issue for electrics as much as gas(though less oil and fumes in the engine bay will probably buy a few years).
The battery pack problems are mostly a paper tiger in the real world so far. I remember people freaking out about how replacing a Prius battery pack was going to be 7800$, by the time people were actually replacing them the price was less than 1300$ Now it's as low as 900$
Same thing will happen for the full EVs. The prices will crash once there is actual volume in demand for the spares. At least for vehicles that are fairly common, or that use common cells in their battery packs.
> Any Subaru block should go hundreds of thousands of miles with basic service unless you forget to put oil in it
Well no. In my limited experience of the last 20 years
1.2 Justy - Engine bearing failure. Sold for parts.
2.2 Legacy - Headgasket failure. Repaired. Failed again. Replacement Engine. Failed again. Scrapped.
2.5 Legacy - Bottom end failure. Fully rebuilt engine at massive cost. Failed again. Sold as seen.
3.0 Outback - Bottom end failure. Replacement engine at massive cost. Still going.
I thankfully avoiding buying the dreadful boxer diesel engine of which almost every example ever built has failed.
Subaru has a reputation for reliability from the 1980's but they haven't actually built a reliable engine in a long time. Great cars to drive, very few minor faults, but catastrophic engine failures are pretty much guaranteed.
The real reason I had to scrap my car was that the seals around the doors and boot lid decayed and water would get in when it rained, causing the seats and steering wheel to go mouldy. (Yuk.)
The car scrap dealer was, I assume, speaking from experience of the mileages of cars he had bought for scrap recently, rather than ones which had been really looked after, plus, of course, it was only his opinion (and he'd just given me £100 cash for nearly a tonne of scrap metal, plastic and rubber). In his line of work a running 22 year old car with a current MoT is somewhat of a rarity. Still I take your point, my car had always been serviced every year and I had never thrashed it, and if you look after mechanical things, they can last quite well these days.
"transformational new technologies on a scale not seen since the creation of the internal combustion engine" is a reference to the Great British Blockchain.
This will be bigger and better than European blockchains because it will be built using Imperial Bits, which are 1.38794 metric bits.
This post has been deleted by its author
"reckoned that new petrol cars today have engines that last about 60,000"
Phew! Luckily my ICE car is a diesel, not petrol, It's 5 years old and got almost 200K on it. I'm glad I didn't get a petrol car, it'd have died before the warranty ran out if your contact was correct.
yeah, way to go! But why 'partial', I thought we're now FULLY independent of that... metric... SHITE?! Also, a totally independent and separate equivalent of internet would be handy! Call it bru-net, or something. And don't forget to change the DNS to OBS!
Presumably all the scientists and engineers in the age group this bit of pathetic populist posturing is meant to appeal to will be happy to come out of retirement and fulfil the wishes of the government to lead the world in innovation, as they'll be the only ones who are at all used to using these measures.
Honestly, this is pathetic. You may as well ban the use of these new-fangled computers as well, because it's just not like the good old days when we had to use slide rules and knew how to do long division.
The laughable thing is that Imperial measures are actually metric.
The yard is precisely 0.9144 meters and the pound is 0.45359237 kg - by definition! This was all sorted out by international treaties in the 1960s, before we joined the EU, so coupling it to Brexit is just the sort of Daily Mail reader pandering that you would expect from IDS and his crackpot cronies. I would assume the rest of the report is the same sort of vested interest chummocracy rah-rah.
So, are you also buying your groceries in 453gm quantities?
For some activities, I used metric, for others, I was buying groceries in Lbs, ounces, pints and so on.
I understood metric was originally based on the wrong measurement from Paris to the North Pole. It was then subdivided to make it more user-friendly, a gift from some Napoleon or another.
Perhaps I had a skills training from an earlier age. As a five-year-old, I bought groceries using shillings, pence half pence and farthings and had no problem with imperial measures. The ration coupons were a small extra challenge, but hay-ho challenges are to be accepted, not dodged.
This post has been deleted by its author
Absolutely - in spite of what some seem to believe, the UK never really went metric. To a great extent (in grocery products in particular) all that happened was the old imperial sizing on the label was converted to metric, with no alteration to the size of the container being needed.
Similarly in engineering many of the old AF nut and bolt head sizes were simply replaced by their nearest approximate metric equivalent (eg. 11/16" became 17mm; 3/4" became 19mm; 1" became 24mm), all sizes that were not commonly used in metricated countries, rather than switch to using the more logical metric spanner sizes that they already used elsewhere in Europe (14mm; 16mm; 18mm, 20mm, 25mm).
Of course, the sizing of wheel rims has never been fully metricated anywhere in the world (mainly due to US domination) and wheel rims and tyres are still sized in inches, whilst section width and width across the bead is now mostly quoted in mm.
10,000 km is the distance from the equator to the North Pole, as measured back in the day. Measurements today are a bit more precise, so just as a day isn't 86,400 seconds, the distance from equator to North Pole is a bit over 10,000 km.
The distance is also 90 degrees times 60 minutes = 5,400 minutes, so the nautical mile is about 10,000 km divided by 5,400 = about 1,852 meters.
The worrying thing is not so much the semi-literate nutjobs that sit in Government who wouldn't be there if they knew what they were doing.
The real worrying thing is the people around them who are not morons and who whisper their wish list into the ear of cabinet ministers in return for a plum post-politics job and a donation to the Conservative Party.
In the words of David Cameron, "A fantastically corrupt country".
Well, we had the idiocy when the millennium dome was closed on the last day of the old millennium (31st of December 2000). I had wanted to visit it in the new millennium back then and couldn't. Plus one truly idiotic politician claiming it was Jesus' 2000th birthday. Which would have been on Dec. 25th 2001 If we had got his birthdate right, which we haven't.
> Regulators should introduce ‘scaleboxes’ to provide agile regulatory support to high growth innovative scale-up companies.
That's a bit bothersome. How are they going to differentiate classic pump and dump schemes from a legitimate company that is doing well? And if a company is genuinely doing well, what are the chances they are going to mess it up with an intervention?
Why not support all companies?
High-growth company usually means funded by rich investors - why they should have even bigger advantage over a small privately funded company?
I can't help but think that many of these are actually written to help rich get richer.
Nothing in that report about self-employment and small business. I guess entrepreneurship will be only for rich kids.
You can't even start a company these days and use your skills to fund your own start up, because you'll be classed as deemed employee and be taxed rates meant for rich (who they never pay) and killing your chances.
"How are they going to differentiate classic pump and dump schemes from a legitimate company that is doing well?"
Its part of the design that they are not. Their cronies will pump and leave innocent investors with the dump. Just another way of politicians shitting over their electorate.
It's all about targets and numbers these days.
If Gov puts £x million into supporting high-growth companies it can report that it helped to generate £y million, but if it put £x million into "all companies" it might only be able to report gains of £y/10 million.
Which gives the best headlines and appears to best justify their activities (if you don't look too deeply)??
The trio argued the GDPR regs “overwhelm people with consent requests and complexity they cannot understand, while unnecessarily restricting the use of data for worthwhile purposes.”
What purposes exactly? nothing in GDPR stops reasonable use but it takes a dim view of companies taking ownership of my data to sell onto to the eternally bewildered marketing people and keeping it forever.
Companies should just be upfront with costs to consumers rather than trying to sell data via back channels, unfortunately the majority of the VC universe is obsessed with customer growth benchmarked against the data vampires of Google and Facebook which requires 'free' everything.
Have this lot not learnt anything from 'Smart'Meters, a complete disaster by any measure which we are all paying for via the bills.
GDPR is written by those of the land line generation and at times makes most sense if you view it as if it is the 1980’s. The idea is sound but it is quite strange in places.
The main crux of it is that an organisation got created that pretty much every business must throw money into; so, when a prosecution fails, the vast cost of the lawyer army that was required to take on a Facebook or similar is not a political issue. There is a handy information commissioner to throw under a bus. It’s all a bit like Railtrack #2, a nice dodge that delivers most benefit to politicians.
Most complaints against the big tech companies tend to match the form ‘I thought I was entitled to something for nothing and discovered this was not the case’ or some similar expectation that commercial companies are benevolent by nature. The solution to that issue is not GDPR and I agree that there should be two options when you go to Google, pay or offer something of equivalent value.
In general the best approach would be to put up a sign on every street corner reminding the entitled dip sticks of this world that actually you cannot have something for nothing; little updates about the place reminding how our civilisation is based entirely around the exchange of one thing for another.
The public currently need the BBC to point out to it things that should be blatantly obvious to anyone, that getting a delivery company to deliver costs money https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57497997 or that a small shop will need to charge more https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-46193653 - we need a less dumb society.
Treating the symptoms of the low level dumb that has become accepted by society with laws such as GDPR should not be championed as a great achievement.
Clearly we need to ban those new-fangled so-called standardised metric shipping containers too. There's nothing wrong with using variable sized bags/pallets/nets full of goods just dumped into the holds of ships that can be craned out at each end, creating lots of highly paid, highly skilled unionised jobs.
Imperial measures
I cant wait... when us engineers can say "just needs couple of thou" instead of "move it 51.8 microns"
Back to the great days of yore when the drawings arrived in metric, got converted to imperial, converted it back to metric because the machines and measuring gear were all in metric too....
Actually its more about making sure the 'hancock is a cock" headlines stay out of the daily w(m)ail and daily excess while winding up the guardian to cover said story (also keeping the "hancock is a cock" story out of there too)
Here's my offering for creepiest paragraph in the document:
227. It is particularly important that changes are made to permit automated decision-making for machine learning and to remove the human review of algorithmic decisions required by GDPR
That's just stage 3 of the standard process used by politicians to sell a crock of sh*t. The stages are:
1. It's the best thing since sliced bread.
2. It's just temporary teething problems.
3. It's not my fault, my idea was wonderful but someone else screwed up implementing it. Blame <insert name here>.
We are also at stage 3 with the Brexit Northern Ireland Protocol, stage 2 with Brexit generally etc. etc.
Ahahaha. Sad, pathetic, backwards-looking Boomer pandering. It is the story of Brexit distilled to its essence. The scorn of the upcoming generation is well deserved. Stew in it, you pitiful Flag Shaggers. And how long will we all have to suffer from that debilitating illness, IDS.
I am surprised that the list did not mention motherhood and apple pie - or perhaps these are too American.
In my 40 years in IT, I found the people who made big projects work, started with small projects that worked and moved up. The worst people were the ones "with vision". Once they had set a direction (head for them there hills) they were often moved on to other projects, and practical people took over to set achievable goals and plot the path to get there. The very worst stayed with the project and changed their vision once we were going down the path, resulting in lots of work thrown away, and heading in a different direction.
I like the Unix approach - do one thing and do it well. We should have enough components that it should "simply" be a matter of plugging them together, and upgrading them transparently as required. The problems of setting up database for 100 million people were solved decades ago.
Red-tape has many purposes, one of which is to make things safe for us. Remove regulations and house builders will rejoice as they can cut corners. The fact that we will have houses more likely: to go up in flames, fall down and flood will be none of their concern and we will be left to pick up the bill - assuming that we did not die in the fire.
Deregulation of banks was a large part of the 2008 crash, the lessons of the 1929 Wall St Crash having been forgotten.
Similar concerns on all other areas where red-tape is cut.
They only work for a very small part of business. My work involves speaking with a lot of different companies and sectors and I have yet to meet the first one that thinks Brexit is going to help them.
Individual Brexit voters, sure, I’ve met and know a few. But business leaders, sector bodies? Not one so far.
The closest is probably the Federation of Small Business (FSB). I met Mike Cherry, their chair, last year and their main challenge when it comes to Brexit is that their membership was precisely split down the middle on Brexit and still is. That makes life difficult for such a body and is why they don’t come out against Brexit. You won’t hear Mike say a good or bad thing about Brexit. His membership won’t allow him.
Their cousins for big business over at the CBI and Chambers of Commerce have been very critical of the Brexit folly. As is the National Farmers Union, the Road Haulage Association, the Food and Drink Federation, the British Retail Consortium and I could go on and on. I can see the fishing industry turn too.
Just today the meat industry came out fighting warning about the decimation of the UK’s domestic meat industry.
It seems to be mainly very wealthy individual business owners (Dyson, Bamford, Ratcliffe, Odey) with connections that are catered to. Not the average business.
"when it comes to Brexit is that their membership was precisely split down the middle on Brexit"
As the vote demonstrated, that pretty much applies the whole of the population, but those voting for Brexit had their own ideas of what they were voting for. eg, before Brexit, most farmers seemed to be in favour. Now that it's happened, the same farmers are complaining about the problems of exporting to the EU. That seems to be echoed across much of the pro-Brexit industry. They didn't get what they were expecting.
I'm sure some sort of balance will come about eventually, but it was always going to be a complicated and painful process to leave the EU and all the intertwined regulations and pan-EU bodies. Which way that balance is skewed, I'll leave up to the reader.
"Red-tape has many purposes, one of which is to make things safe for us. Remove regulations and house builders will rejoice as they can cut corners."
Yup, friend of mine had a SO who was a small developer. Apparently he was looking forward to Brexit eliminating a lot of health and safety stuff. However, most health and safety at work procedures are covered by national legislation - UK legislation being stricter than that in other countries. (EU safety regs mostly apply to products, not procedures.) And aspects of English building regs are stricter than, say in NL (e.g. fire compartmentation, height of front door thresholds, etc. - I've had to read them for work). Of course, Brexit has reduced the number of workers available to build his houses - it'll be interesting to see how he deals with that.
“Our” Imperial measurements? We stuck with William III’s bushel, Anne’s wine gallon, and their multiples and subdivisions, with the system locally referred to as “US customary units”, even after the units’ redefinitions in terms of SI units. Your newfangled George IV-era Imperial bushel, gallon, et al. had no purchase here.
That actually made me think. Peculiarly the UK still advertises car efficiency in Miles per Gallon even though petrol has only been sold in litres for god knows how long.
But, is American MPG different from British MPG because an US Gallon is 3.785411784 litres and a UK Gallon is 4.54609 litres?
Umm... this is a user interface issue. Could be solved by changing "reject all" to "reject all and never ask me again because I won't change my mind", or defining a universal cookie that means "I reject all, forever". Sites seem to keeping asking in the hope I'll give them the "right" answer.
Or, could just ban the unsolicited collection of data? That's a simple change to the regulation.
And this ladies and gents is why we don't have a snowball's chance of getting a long term Data Protection Adequacy decision.
Even if we get one when the 'transition' period expires at the end of this month the minute there are any changes like those suggested that decision will be withdrawn and then the extra work data controllers have to do to use EU citizen data or data sent to EU subsidiaries will far outweigh the benefits of lighter touch DP rules in the UK
I'm just assuming that they forgot the reason they kept the GDPR, incorporated into the DPA, was so that information exchange could still take place UK-EU, and back.
Or maybe they're just looking to bork, totally, the financial/insurance system?
Letting IDS have any part, in any-thing, is a recipe for shit-soufflé.
"Or maybe they're just looking to bork, totally, the financial/insurance system?'
That's already started. I used to have my Professional Indemnity insurance through MFL, a broker in Manchester. Due to the loss of passporting they can no longer help me so I'm now sending a couple of hundred euros every year to a broker here in the Netherlands. Such a great way to support British businesses :(
For some strange reason I seem to see a few comments crying about removing a rule telling us what units of measurement we should be using. This is in a country which uses a mix of imperial and metric and people dont fall over having a brain aneurysm for doing so. Its almost sounding like a fear of thinking for yourself or the ghastly effort to go look something up (or just ask) if you dont know the answer.
It reminds me of the kid who returned my car from its MOT and when I handed him cash he struggled at the simple task of counting notes because everyone just pays by card. I am not knocking the kid, he took his time with the unfamiliar task and achieved it which seems almost scary to some people today (the effort not the problem).
As for GDPR, I notice one or two comments about it reigning in the big tech companies. Dont forget that one of the great laments of the EU is that for some unknown reason beyond their comprehension, all these big tech companies come from outside of the EU and the EU was considering trying to make one themselves. Although I expect it would be closer to the Chinese idea of a platform.
> This is in a country which uses a mix of imperial and metric and people dont fall over having a brain aneurysm for doing so. Its almost sounding like a fear of thinking for yourself or the ghastly effort to go look something up (or just ask) if you dont know the answer.
Because *no-one* would complain if we changed all the road signs to use KM instead of Miles? Or switched to them needing to ask for 568ml rather than a pint?
The rule you're talking about, btw, doesn't prevent imperial being used - it simply states that metric should be present too. So what the suggestion to remove that rule is saying, is that we should make it needlessly harder.
@Ben Tasker
"Because *no-one* would complain if we changed all the road signs to use KM instead of Miles? Or switched to them needing to ask for 568ml rather than a pint?"
Not sure what you are getting at here. Sounds like you are saying people use a system that works and we are happy with and wouldnt appreciate some clipboard idiot changing things for their own self pleasure.
"The rule you're talking about, btw, doesn't prevent imperial being used"
Exactly. And without the rule it wouldnt ban metric either. Some commenters seem to think everything would suddenly change to imperial for some reason.
"it simply states that metric should be present too"
And that is necessary because? It aint. Not at all. Its just another bureaucratic paper pusher with nothing better to do telling everyone else to add more work. And why does this matter? Go ask the French village of fishermen who refuse to use this rule and even had a visit from the president telling them to ignore the EU law.
"So what the suggestion to remove that rule is saying, is that we should make it needlessly harder."
On who? How is it not simple to let people get on with their lives without telling them every minutia of how to interact with other people? The world spins without these stupid rules. People achieve this without stupid rules. So why must we have another stupid rule adding to the many to drown out the few we should actually care about?
@codejunky
You seem to think that this suggested change in rules would result in no (meaningful) change in behaviour.
Assuming for a minute that you're right, my question would be - why waste taxpayers money drafting and enacting a bill to implement it then? If nothing changes, what exactly is the point?
FWIW, I disagree that nothing would change - it seems fairly evident that a certain category of seller would drop metric, leaving at least 2 generations of people looking at their pricing and not knowing how much they're going to end up paying.
> On who? How is it not simple to let people get on with their lives without telling them every minutia of how to interact with other people?
Entered into a computer, built on standards, submitted to a website via HTTP (also a standard) over TCP (also a standard) presumably using ethernet (wait... also a standard).
The world is built and operates on standards. When we had it, the empire enforced standards on the countries we'd stuck a flag in. Society generally works by following an agreed standard (even down to, when the light is red, don't drive your car past it).
What you actually mean, is you don't like *this rule* because you associate it with the EU, so lets get rid of it and fuck anyone that didn't grow up with pounds and ounces.
@Ben Tasker
"You seem to think that this suggested change in rules would result in no (meaningful) change in behaviour."
Removing government interference into something that really isnt theirs to interfere with is meaningful. Government should be doing the few things we really need them for. And amusingly as I said the French president seems to agree with me.
"FWIW, I disagree that nothing would change"
Since you have a different interpretation of my comment than I intended we actually both agree there would be change. Instead of having some anal retentive using the weight of government to force sellers how to market their product it would be up to people to market their product as is useful in the market. Something that moves too quick for government (or anyone) to effectively control.
"it seems fairly evident that a certain category of seller would drop metric"
So what? If people dont trust/understand what they are buying they wont buy and the seller changes their ways (or loses out to others). So who cares?
"leaving at least 2 generations of people looking at their pricing and not knowing how much they're going to end up paying."
So you are claiming that 2 generations are too stupid to function in this world and should be wiped out by natural selection? So thick are these people that walking and breathing at the same time may cause injury or death? Amazingly there has been this glorious development called the internet where you can look stuff up, and a lot of people use it on their pocket sized phones!!!! Or shop somewhere you understand the measurement.
It is very insulting to claim people to be so incapable of functioning in this world. We cant bubble wrap people, they will suffocate in there.
"Entered into a computer, built on standards"
Yeah I see why you have a problem. The egg came before the chicken. And falls into a further problem, there can be standards without government weight to dictate them!
"The world is built and operates on standards"
And yet we are discussing some power freak dictating multiple standards must be displayed for their own self pleasure. An interference from government on the little day to day transaction over something that doesnt concern them.
"What you actually mean, is you don't like *this rule* because you associate it with the EU, so lets get rid of it and fuck anyone that didn't grow up with pounds and ounces."
No but it is funny to watch the toys leave the pram. I dont like the rule because its another stupid rule over something the gov shouldnt be enforcing. Yes the EU has form for doing so and also why we have such a dumb rule but the gov can make its own dumb rules too.
The amusement is watching people crying that they or others are too thick to function in this world without nanny government wiping their arses. That suddenly nobody will understand anything because big cuddly government isnt making the bad man convert something for them. Even as we already have a mixed system of imperial and metric which is foreign to those in a completely metric country.
As the rest of the world uses metric and the UK would have to use metric to trade with it (yes, even the US when it comes to engineering), we would literally be painting pounds and ounces on top of everything sold in the UK just to keep the post-war generation happy in their reality distortion field. Nobody under 45 understands this nonsense anyway.
Meanwhile those who are too far gone can giggle about toys and nanny states and the EU all that, when metric is used literally everywhere in the world apart from the US, Mayanmar, and Libya. And UK imperial units don't even match US imperial units.
If you really were a codejunky you'd understand the value of having standards.
@AC
"As the rest of the world uses metric and the UK would have to use metric to trade with it (yes, even the US when it comes to engineering)"
You may want to tell the US unless all they export is engineering works. Amazingly domestic and foreign trade often have different standards anyway.
"we would literally be painting pounds and ounces on top of everything sold in the UK just to keep the post-war generation happy in their reality distortion field."
Would we? I wouldnt. Would you? Or is this some hysteria to keep you excited for a while?
"Nobody under 45 understands this nonsense anyway."
Fantastic, so you have nothing to worry about as people will use what people know.
"when metric is used literally everywhere in the world apart from the US, Mayanmar, and Libya. And UK imperial units don't even match US imperial units."
Thank you for firing great big cannon balls through your own argument. Saves me doing it.
"If you really were a codejunky you'd understand the value of having standards."
Are we talking about removing standards? Nope. Hence the amusement of people getting their panties in a knot.
What the literal F is this BS?
Even if you did roll back GPDR, if you want to do any kind of business with the EU (and you will want to do any kind of business with the EU) you will still have to follow it anyway. The "literal checkbox exercise" is not the fault of GDPR in itself, it's an exercise in malicious compliance by people who decided to deliberately make opting out as hard as humanly possible whilst still complying with the rules as written. The real solution here is to re-phrase the existing legislation to punish such dark-pattern BS, but do you really expect that the party who thinks we want our medical records harvested for profit to do that?
And seriously, the imperial system? It's dead. And good riddance to it. It was shite and now it's obsolete shite. Who was their consultant on this idiocy, Abe Simpson? My car gets 40 rams to the hog's head and that's the way I like it!
You don't march towards a brave new future by living in the past, you bunch of fossils.
The legislative environment, and the issues around data adequacy are not really as the article makes out.
GDPR became law in the UK as a Regulation of the EU. DPA 2018 did not implement it or give it effect as there was no option but for it to become law. That would only have been required for a Directive of the EU. Different process.
DPA2018 made some elections allowed under GDPR, funded the ICO, and created criminal offences for breaches of GDPR, but it is mostly concerned with implementing data privacy regimes for areas outside EU competency -- national security and policing. (This is why a data subject access request sent to MI6 may not do what you want -- it's not a GDPR request.)
On leaving the EU, the "Exiting the EU Act" took effect, adopting all EU Regulations, including GDPR, into UK law. To remedy the impossibility of operating a Regulation designed for the Union in a single country, the GDPR as "retained EU" law in the UK, was amended by regulations issued by the Minister using the so-called "Henry VIII powers" in the Exiting the EU Act, to (e.g.) hand the task of the EC Data Protection Board to the ICO. So now there us a UK GDPR, structurally very similar but not at all the same. And it still has the DPA2018 unchanged.
That has little to do with data adequacy. It's a leg up, but when considering an adequacy decision, the Commission can consider data protection in all respects in the foreign country, not merely the areas where the EU has competence at home. So GDPR is the data protection regime in the UK for commercial services and a lot of government, and is presumably OK. But the regime for security services, police etc, is that of DPA 2018 and might be regarded as inadequate, and in fact would be regarded as inadequate if the Commission was more than a bunch of bureaucratic seatwarmers. Equally, adequacy has been granted to territories with data protection law quite unlike GDPR. Data adequacy is a political choice (and we saw with Schrems & Shrems II that the Court can undo it.)
Fortunately adequacy is not and has never been the only route to share data across borders. Trusting adequacy -- which can be lost -- verges on irresponsibility. The route to follow is contractual protection with provisions protecting the rights of data subjects. This obviously cannot protect data exportees from foreign security services, but the Court has always been 100% OK with that, and the Commission has recently updated the standard texts to use, making the whole thing easy.
That's pretty straighforward as these things go. And less alarming than the article made out. The UK could protect data adequately, would not need an adequacy decision any more than the US does, and the law should probably change.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
