Government by Gmail catches up with UK minister... who is reappointed anyway The UK's Home Secretary – the minister in charge of policing and internal security – has been forced to apologize for breaching IT security protocols in government. Suella Braverman, who had already resigned for the breach, was reinstated in the UK's merry-go-round approach to government. She has written to the chair of …
In the scheme of "UK Gov Shitshows so far in 2022", this is a non-issue.
No. It is the tip of the iceberg. (Another lettuce to bring the government down!)
She admitted that she did it six times in the six weeks that she was Home Secretary for the first time. Presumably because she has been confronted with the logs showing these six events.
Follow-up questions which should be asked include:
- how many times did she do this during the 31 months that she was Attorney General? (for those overseas, that position is the most senior law officer in the government)
- how widespread is this practice throughout government?
Even with VPN, and all the other stuff, at the end of the day it could still go through a major state player, then all best are off!
It’s a pain but the rules are simple and VERY well explained to anyone handling these communications. In order to do what that have all done you need to respond to a question with a down right lie! Not a ministerial code break.
The Orange Man can't do email - just tweets - so he's safe, from this point of view. Having them printed from one account, then scanned, and sent through another account looks a lot of effort to me.... <G>
But what about the top secret documents he shouldn't keep in his private house, scattered around? Or those destroyed without following the rules?
Oh yeah, the supposed nuclear codes or some other such bunk. Gone all quiet in the media probably because it was false.
A bit like the Georgia Guidestones getting blown up or the Las Vegas shooter. Everything just goes quiet.
The difference being that Hillary, at least from what she said, operated her own servers with the full knowledge, and vetting, of the US Security agencies.
I have no idea if that is correct, but I have it on good authority that the email system in the US houses is so terrible that senators and congress people using their own email servers is tolerated, if not exactly liked.
If that is true, I think the real scandal isn't so much the fact that it is tolerated, but that no one has succeeded in getting the provided email system working reliably. The email system would have been installed in the 90s, so I blame all the US presidents from both parties for this. So. that would be Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
"I have no idea if that is correct, but I have it on good authority that the email system in the US houses is so terrible that senators and congress people using their own email servers is tolerated, if not exactly liked."
So they claim. It is actually just the typical behaviour of public servants seeking to evade monitoring requirements. It should be treated as a crime, just like any other cover-up is treated as the crime it could potentially cover.
It really is utterly unacceptable, although of course it is widespread.
> "She admitted that she did it six times in the six weeks"
She sent a document to her own gmail 6 times. She sent it from there to the wrong person once (that we know of)
But what kind of information governance allows sensitive material to be sent by email outside the organisation? That is the bigger question, not some numpty's misuse of it.
The subtlety here is that, as well as this, she sent information about policymaking, which was supposed to only be discussed by those involved, to a back-bencher who, as well as not being part of the government, and therefore not privy to such information, also has a political identity that is self-described as "anti-woke", which, in plain English, means "anti-decent-human-being". The same self-appointed moniker also applies to Braverman herself, which, to be honest, is the bigger problem with her.
as a former Security Minister, Hayes should have known to blow the whistle on Bravermans use of insecure private email.
That he, so far as we know, didn't suggests he was aware it wasn't on the level for her to do so.
Word is that he is effectively her handler on policy - possibly because she's not astute enough to write a coherent policy herself.
== has a political identity that is self-described as "anti-woke", which, in plain English, means "anti-decent-human-being" ==
I didn't see the sarcasm flag around that so I have to assume you meant it. Would you care to post your justification for your ability to define the meanings of the English language?
If we're into broad sweeping statement territory (El Reg comments after all...) then 'woke' is typically used by people who object to not being able to "call a spade a spade", or to go to Sun/Daily[Hate]Mail level - not be openly racist/sexist/homophobic.
Probably the same people supporting our esteemed [current?!] Home Secretary who is currently doing a plastic Enoch Powell impersonation, and is one speech away from 'rivers of blood' in rhetoric.
Or were we discussing the lack of basic competency amongst the current government?
Woke in the US is - if you arn't pro-gay, you are anti-gay. If you say something to someone and they don't like it - you are anti-woke. If you don't invite people to your party based on racial balance and not based on friendship - you are woke.
Frankly its just one more excuse to keep people divided and fighting against each other, so the big corrupt media can avoid being ridiculed.
Well, very briefly, "woke," which isn't really a term anyone uses for themselves anyway, roughly means to be aware of social issues that may put other people at a disadvantage, and to be generally respectful and compassionate towards them, and just in general a decent human being. So, "anti-woke", very roughly, translates as "disrespectful and discompassionate." Or "not a decent human being". That's certainly not a label that I’d choose to apply to myself, but it seems to some, being what we'd more colloquially describe as "a cunt" is a badge of honour.
Is that clear? Good.
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Even if they have adequate controls in place, are they enforced equally?
Would an Administrative Assistant who did the same thing six times also be given a "second chance"? I'd argue they probably wouldn't.
However, that said, what happens depends on whether the messages, or data contained in them, was classified. if it was, she should be in prison now. I've got a cousin who used to deal with classified data as part of his job. He was an Administrator, but he had to hand in any electronic devices to the security desk when he started his shift, only getting them back when he finished. They also only had a couple of computers in the office that had internet access, with all the others being on an air gapped network. Any classified data was only allowed on the air gapped computers. He was repeatedly reminded he risked prison if he left the office with any classified data.
Note that there are different levels of information classification. This is described on the following gov.uk website (public info).
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-security-classifications
So I doubt that anyone would go to prison for mishandling documents/information marked as just Official.
In the scheme of "UK Gov Shitshows so far in 2022", this is a non-issue.
I'm pretty sick of this kind of attitude. "Everything else is so awful, this thing that's a bit shit doesn't matter". Of course it matters, if I'd done this with sensitive company documents I wouldn't be retrained, I'd be fired for gross misconduct. The fact it was done 6 times in such a brief tenure ask Home Sec means this is not a mistake, it is a habitual way of working for her, it's just this is the first time she's been caught it's been detected.
I'm beyond the point of accepting "I know our politicians are beyond useless, but we accept it because we tell ourselves the others are just as useless". Why do we think this is OK? Why as a population do we accept it? These people are meant to be the best of us, the wisest of us and yet I wouldn't leave them alone for 5 minutes unsupervised in a room with a pair of safety scissors. The excuse "We think others are as bad" is not a reason to accept it.
"I'm beyond the point of accepting "I know our politicians are beyond useless, but we accept it because we tell ourselves the others are just as useless". Why do we think this is OK? Why as a population do we accept it? These people are meant to be the best of us, the wisest of us and yet I wouldn't leave them alone for 5 minutes unsupervised in a room with a pair of safety scissors. The excuse "We think others are as bad" is not a reason to accept it."
Everybody is free to stand for election against 'these people' and everybody else is free to vote for them. So if we want a change, all we have to do is change our voting habits. Stop electing 'these people'. And stand for parliament against them. Simples! :)
So if we want a change, all we have to do is change our voting habits. Stop electing 'these people'.
Which is exactly my point, and yet people insist on voting for these imbeciles and putting them in power, despite all previous experience. If people still want conservatives in charge in spite of the last few years, no amount of "someone I never heard of" putting their name on the ballot is going to change masochistic tendencies.
That being said I would gladly stand against them, care to lend give me the £500 it costs to do so? Unfortunately I can't afford to throw that kind of money away.
Seriously - if you intend to stand against one of these eejits and you represent the "I know what a computer is and why it is important to be secure and not use personal email for government business" party, I will put up the whole of your deposit.
Just make sure the rest of your manifesto and policies ensure that Windows 11 is abolished and gigabit fibre will be a universal service and offered free.
The print media (and their websites <cough> Mailonline</cough>) are adept at conveying the image that however bad the conservatives are at the moment, the alternative will be - for unspoken reasons <cough>red scare</cough> - worse.
Once the public start saying to themselves "they're as bad as each other" (although objectively British politicians are not all as bad as each other), then it becomes the case that some just don't bother voting, leaving only the motivated that make the effort to vote. And if those are motivated by the aforementioned on-the-whole-right-of-centre-press then you get what we've had.
Yes, I do indeed remember the 1970s when inflation reached 35% under the Heath administration and also remember the 90s when mortgages shot up to 15% after the ERM fiasco and the subsequent property price crash with all the negative equity going on. That was under the Major administration. Labour were only in power in the 70s from 74 to 79 and only 3 years in the 90s (by which time the economy was doing rather well,)
The last 12 years also haven't been exactly financial nirvana and on November 17th its going to get a lot worse.
Knows that councils had to provide housing for people and we weren't turfing out thousands of young families onto the streets. That was the council housing all the selfish shits bought up in the 80s to fund Thatcher's economic boom.
You look at what Truss did and still believe that Labour will always be worse?
How? How will paying a tiny bit of attention to the millions of desperate low paid workers make things worse?
Truss wasn't wrong in principle, just totally stupid and inept in implementation.
The best way to fix the situation for the lowest paid is to get the country growing, so overall tax income increases. Strangling investment by increasing taxes on the very people who create that growth never works. You can't tax your way to growth, something Labour have never understood.
ahh the old laffer curve bollocks.
your out of date, thats been proven bollocks same as trickle down.
history shows that everytime conservatives get in power they fill their pockets and their mates pockets and leave the country fucked.
Only fuckwits believe otherwise, same as brexshitters thinking CONselfservatives were doing it for anything but the racist vote of brexshitters
The best way to fix the situation for the lowest paid is to get the country growing, so overall tax income increases. Strangling investment by increasing taxes on the very people who create that growth never works. You can't tax your way to growth, something Labour have never understood ...... Anonymous Coward
Whenever you can’t tax your way to growth, and it be growth which the current Conservative Party led government admits is absent and vitally needed nowadays for the future, why is there so much present day chatter about across the board taxation rises in the fast approaching November budget statement/yet another markets testing mini budget???
Does anyone at all directly involved in such matters actually know what needs to be and how to do it and who is to do it and with what?
All available evidence, backed up by more than a decade of mounting failures, increasing debt and rising deficits would more than just suggest there is no one in their ranks even remotely able and capable of commanding and controlling such as may help.
J’accuse.
the council housing all the selfish shits bought up in the 80s
There might have been a few "selfish shits" as you put it, but a lot more were ordinary working-class people of modest means who bought into the home-owning hype. As is often the case, some "early adopters" won, but after a while people realised that their houses in the middle of council "sink" estates weren't really worth anything like the money they had been led to believe and in many cases found it difficult to sell at anything like the value needed in order to move up the housing ladder.
But the two biggest problems created by Thatcher's right-to-buy was not that existing council houses were taken out of the stock available, but a: that the sale price was not sufficient for councils to be able to replace that housing and b: that they were actually prohibited from doing so, meaning that (housing associations aside, and they were only just beginning in the 1980s) the amount of affordable-rent housing in all parts of the country declined and declined.
It was another of Thatcher's ideologies which had some merit but was extremely badly and insensitively implemented.
M.
Anyone who lived through the 1970s and 1990s knows from personal experience how economically catastrophic a Labour government will always be.
Well, they certainly know how much blame Labour got for Tory policies that caused the economy to suffer. When Labour got back in, at the end of the '90s, the economy picked back up after 18 years of Tory mismanagement. Remind me again, whose watch was "Black Monday" on?
Now, of course, I'm not going to claim that Labour's economic policies have always been right (Gordon Brown selling off the gold reserves when the price of gold was low springs to mind), but it is pure bullshit to try to play the "Tories are good with the economy" card. You only have to look up any graph of GDP vs national debt to see that debt goes up during Tory administrations, and, on the whole, the only sustained periods of debt reduction in our lifetimes have been under Labour. Thatcher managed to get an economic bounce by "selling off the family silver," and getting big returns from privatising everything she could (plus a handy windfall from North Sea oil and gas revenues). The problem is that now, we don't have those things to privatise any more, and in many cases, we are stuck paying more for them, because, as private entities, they cost the same to produce, but profit is extracted. Mortgaging your children's futures isn't exactly economically competent, or forward thinking
the £500 it costs to do so? Unfortunately I can't afford to throw that kind of money away.
Don't forget you will also need ten people from the constituency to nominate you, and you'll need an election "agent" who could be yourself. You absolutely do not need to be backed by a political party and you get one free mailing and certain other help (something to do with hire of rooms for public events).
However, if you choose your constituency carefully and campaign well, you stand a good chance of getting your deposit back - I think the requirements are only that you get 5% of the votes cast, which isn't necessarily a huge hurdle.
As I've opined here previously, if some of the rules used in the developed world were applied to elections in the US of A, things over there might be a bit less frenetic. I mean, over $6bn spent on political advertising seemingly mostly consisting of gun-wielding Biden-deniers* on the far right, and single-issue "pro choice" campaigners on the centre-right can't be a good use of money. Put an election spending rule in place (which would also help candidates of more modest means to participate) and (crucially in my opinion) put a time limit on campaigning.
But as others have pointed out - internal government documents sent to a personal Gmail account? What on earth? Well, at least it allows Google to index government policy a bit more quickly (not keeping up with things, I guess Google still parses every email sent through Gmail?)
M.
*Yup, that's correct, though the numbers seem to be in dispute. The Washington Post puts it at 291 out of 561 - over half - while other sources put it higher or lower. I think I heard someone on the BBC yesterday say it was over 400, though this might have included those standing for some of the other elections on the ballot.
"That being said I would gladly stand against them, care to lend give me the £500 it costs to do so? Unfortunately I can't afford to throw that kind of money away."
That is getting to be more of the problem. It's not just the filing fee, but the cost to run any sort of campaign. If you win, it's committing a chunk of your life (and sanity) to public service where every decision you make and have made will be subject to intense public scrutiny often out of context. You might also wind up the target of a few nut jobs that just want the notoriety of attacking a public figure rather than out of any philosophical disagreement.
>Everybody is free to stand for election against 'these people' and everybody else is free to vote for them. So if we want a change, all we have to do is change our voting habits. Stop electing 'these people'. And stand for parliament against them. Simples! :)
I know the replies will say "that's because you vote for the party and not the people", but I'll point out that only Conservative members votes for Truss, no-one voted for Sunak, and absolutely no-one voted for Braverman to be appointed, be forced to resign and then be re-appointed as Home Secretary.
> "that's because you vote for the party and not the people"
Actually you vote for someone to represent your constituency, so literally "the people". Not the party to which they belong, and certainly not for the leader of that party.
How you arrive at your choice is entirely up to you. My parents tell me that there was a time when party affiliation wasn't even mentioned on the ballot paper.
-A.
Spot on. In which case, if I chose to stand for election, in my constituency, I would be standing against a very good Labour MP who has an unassailable absolute majority amongst all registered voters, not just those who voted. Why the fuck would I do that? And if I chose to stand as a candidate in Braverman's constituency of (checks notes) Fareham in East Hampshire, I'd at the very least have to uproot my job and family to move to the area and live there for several years to stand a decent chance of representing the locality.
And in any case, she's predicted to lose her seat if an election was called today anyway.
Yeah, right on, sabroni.
Nothing good ever came from knowing what happened in living memory!
Ignore the past!
Who cares what has been changed! Things have always been like this!
/s - in case you'd not realised
Stop electing 'these people'. And stand for parliament against them. Simples! :)
Well, that's deeply disingenuous of you, because the first step towards seeing such people voted out of office is to call them out on what they are doing, rather than loudly proclaiming "so what" like you have done.
Also, you know, we need to have an election to get rid. Current polling shows that, if we held one tomorrow, her party would win 450 fewer seats than the opposition.
Also, you know, we need to have an election to get rid. Current polling shows that, if we held one tomorrow, her party would win 450 fewer seats than the opposition. .... Loyal Commenter
Which is why elections when they are needed are not called for especially by all those who would be risking their future public employment with benefits/generous salary with additional public funded perks/expenses.
And one has to ask why, whenever Mr Heaton-Harris has acknowledged on numerous occasions he has a legal duty to call an election now in Northern Ireland, he has avoided doing so? Is that wilful abdication of legal duty, unlawful and criminal, and thus tantamount to Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris self-disqualifying himself as a fit and proper person for Parliament and ministerial office ...... and the fact that Parliamentarians themselves are so apparently accepting of the blatant abdication, does also have one raising questions as to their suitability for anything which requires effective public lead.
Revolutions and civil unrest and Troubles have been born and triggered by less.
The "troubling" word there (pun very much intended), is "Troubles". A hell of a lot of hard work, from a lot of people, including hard compromises, went into making the Good Friday Agreement, and the mad brexiters literally don't give a shit about it. They don't care if the killings start again in Northern Ireland (and the Republic), because they don't live there, they don;t give a shit about Irish history, and probably know very little about it, and what they do know is probably very, very one-sided. They probably all think the Black-and-Tans were great blokes because their idol Churchill was responsible for them.
I have never voted for any member of the current UK government.
In fact I've never voted for any member of any UK government in the 30+ years I've been voting because the UK government is always decided by the voters in another country. If you don't live in England (or vote for the same party as the majority of English voters) you don't have a say.
I believe the 1997 Labour Government (ie Blair 1) is the only one which would have taken power without Scottish MPs. In other words, just as every Conservative government at Westminster has been elected by the English, almost every Labour one has been elected by the Scots.
>Stop electing 'these people'
Nice soundbite...
Can you point to anything in Sualle's past which should have been visible to the average voter and specifically residents of Fareham - other than they stood as a Conservative candidate, that would have indicated they weren't suitable material for a Cabinet position...
This fundamentally is the problem, anyone can stand to be an MP and whilst the major parties have selection processes, given the number of sheep that keep getting selected and elected, it is clear they aren't picking up the unsuitables...
Can you point to anything in Sualle's past which should have been visible to the average voter and specifically residents of Fareham - other than they stood as a Conservative candidate, that would have indicated they weren't suitable material for a Cabinet position...
That she was such a crap lawyer that she never made QC? Even if that didn't deter the voters it should certainly have ruled her out as Attorney General ... but she was the only Tory lawyer in Westminster who would tell Boris that his schemes were legal. Probably because she doesn't understand the law very well, hence not a Q(K)C.
"Everybody is free to stand for election against 'these people' and everybody else is free to vote for them. So if we want a change, all we have to do is change our voting habits. Stop electing 'these people'. And stand for parliament against them. Simples! :)"
As long as:
I agree with you. It seems that the BBC and The Guardian, plus much of the country want to bring down the government one cake or GMail at a time, if that's what it takes. We'll end up with a Labour government, so be careful what you wish for.
But it seems that Braverman actually wants to do something about the migrant crisis, and we can't possibly have that, can we?
Quite apart from the fact that there is no such crisis, this rather overstates her attachment to principle rather than, say, pandering to the mouth-frothing crazies who might one day elect her leader of the party.
-A.
The only "crisis" is the one that refugees, amongst them women and young children, are being forced to sleep on the ground, in marquees, in November, because of a government which chooses to pursue the rhetoric that anyone crossing the channel in a small boat is a criminal, rather than doing the two things that would help the situation; providing "official" routes for refugees, and going after the actual criminals, by cooperating with trans-European efforts to stamp out people smuggling (and by association, the modern slavery and other criminal activity that goes with it).
That doesn't suit those who engage in dog-whistle politics, though.
edit - oh, and number three, employing enough case-workers to process the asylum cases, rather than "having to" put people up in hotels at great expense, wholly in order to drum up more anti-immigrant rhetoric.
I agree with the need to deal with the criminals who facilitate this people trading, but those who arrive illegally are rarely refugees. By the UN's own definition a refugee is someone fleeing persecution. For the most part these people have left safe countries such as France or Albania where they are not being persecuted, because they think Britain will be a soft touch for illegal employment.
Your support for them is shocking. Give some thought instead to the British citizens who are struggling to pay their own bills, and let the government help them instead of having to waste money processing illegal migrants. Charity begins at home.
After the tories fucked the economy only they can fix it?
It's not migrants that are raking in massive profits while families are losing their homes.
It's the RICH that are the problem, not the poor people displaced as a result of our countries arms deals with their oppressive governments.
This is the 2020s, not the 1820s. The days when people were either the rich minority or the poverty-stricken majority are long gone. Most people in the UK are ordinary middle class people who work hard to earn a reasonable living, and are entitled to keep what they earn.
As for oppressive governments, France is a respected European state, and Albania (current source of the biggest group of migrants) is in the queue for EU membership. Neither is oppressive or persecutory.
all the middle class people who are now having to use fucking food banks due to fucked up CONselfservative policy bunging billions into their mates pockets then writing it off.
The CON really fucking helped them!!! fuckwit.
Oh silly me, I didn't realise that our country was being run into the ground by refugees. There was me thinking we'd had a Tory government for the last twelve years.
Gather round, folks and take a look, see! Our very own captive sucker! See how they've swallowed the "divide and conquer" rhetoric hook line, and sinker!
I wonder that if "official" routes for refugees were set up how many would qualify for refugee status and how many would have to go back to the current unofficial routes?
You're dead right though - there's no crisis its only costing c£4b (I think that was the figure I saw quoted on the beeb) a year plus the costs of patrolling and rescuing these non-refugees.
Those costs are largely there because there are no legal routes, and policing the "illegal" ones* that spring up is reactive and expensive.
If legal and accessible routes for asylum claimants were provided, how many genuine refugees would choose to stow away in lorries, or cross the channel in dinghies? Here's a clue: it would be a round number.
In a swoop, this would remove the entire refugee market from the people-smuggling gangs. They would be left with those people who, for some reason, are so desperate to reach the UK, they'll accept a high risk of death to do so, The odds are that those people are not going to be doing so willingly (would you?), and these are vulnerable people being exploited by criminals (modern slavery). The criminals here are very clearly the "people smugglers", not their victims.
Nobody is going to claim that this sort of organised crime isn't a huge problem, but the current government's approach to tackling it actually exacerbates the problem, because by preventing refugees from having a legal route to get here, we are directly feeding their "business model".
*It's not illegal to cross the channel in a small boat, by the way, in case you were wondering. It's the entering the country without going through border control bit that is questionable.
"it seems that Braverman actually wants to do something about the migrant crisis, and we can't possibly have that, can we?"
There is no migrant crisis. The UK has the lowest number of migrants arriving by unofficial channels of the Western European nations, and even those that are arriving are doing so in far smaller numbers than in the first decade of this century. Stop reading the Daily Mail you twat.
But it seems that Braverman actually wants to do something about the migrant crisis, and we can't possibly have that, can we?
Does she want to cut down the number of genuine refugees seeking to escape repression, torture and worse, or she just out to stop economic migrants like her parents?
Her parents came as legal hard-working immigrants
Yes, they came here to find work, legally under the rules at the time, and fair play to them, did well out of it. That's pretty much the definition of an economic migrant. We had "legal" routes for it to happen back then, and the right-wing (the likes of Enoch Powell) really didn't like it at all.
These days, people of Indian heritage living in Kenya (Which IIRC is her lineage) would not get to come to the UK and become British citizens. If they wanted to do so, they'd have to risk their lives in a small boat, or hidden in the back of a lorry.
We've always been a nation of immigrants, right back to Roman times and beyond. The main difference these days is that in the modern world, people can travel further, and some people don't like it that some of them don't have white skin.
So we have gone from Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" to the daughter of the people he was probably talking about ranting about an "invasion" apparently with no sense of irony whatsoever. A reminder, if one were needed, that nasty hate speech can come from anyone's mouth.
All religion/creed/colour is used as tribal dividers, I was shocked when young to find a freind of colour who complained about racism was perfectly happy to use racial slurs about pakistan and indian people, and seem oblivious to the hypocrisy.
You have to remember most cultures have biases against sub groups even in their own peoples (see indian caste system for prime example, or english/irish/scottish/welsh abuse).
So not really surprised.
Down vote all you want, that won't change the facts!.
Indeed. I saw a talking head on a programme on the TV last night (can't remember whom or what programme I'm afraid, so this is anecdotal), who made the pertinent point that the UK is actually one of the least racist countries in the world. This doesn't mean there's no racism here, far from it, but he highlighted the fact that a lot of European countries have a far worse problem with it.
This apples across the world. My wife experienced racism as a white woman working in Japan, which is every bit as pernicious as anti-black racism from white people, or anti-Asian racism from black people, or any "anti-X from Y" you can think of.
Sadly, tribal racism is baked into our evolutionary past, and this probably stems from the fact that when we were pre-human apes, we lived in small tribal units of a few hundred, and tribalism was a survival trait. "Protect the tribe from outsiders". Clearly, in today's world, we don't live in tribes, and we're not under constant threat from other groups trying to kill us, and steal our food and females. Evolution takes a long time to change though, especially when what was a survival trait goes to being simply a trait that confers no advantage. In today's world, it's arguable that it conveys mild disadvantage to be racist, but as I said, evolution works slowly...
What we can do, as thinking beings, is recognise that the tools evolution has given us aren't all ones we need to use. We (well most people) don't go around raping and murdering because we have the occasional impulse to do so, for example. I put racism, and other forms of xenophobia in the same category. Others may choose to embrace them, but I think maybe that's not for the best...
These days, people of Indian heritage living in Kenya (Which IIRC is her lineage) would not get to come to the UK and become British citizens.
What makes you think that?
Certainly they don't have an automatic entry route to UK citizenship since Kenya and Mauritius (Braverman's parental background) declared independence in the 60s, that's hardly a surprise. There's still no reason that someone in their position couldn't apply legally for work, get a visa, and over time apply for citizenship. Just arriving, illegally, and expecting to be given support and a job is not a realistic approach, of course.
is that in the modern world, people can travel further, and some people don't like it that some of them don't have white skin.
Ah, another racist who thinks that skin colour is all that matters. There are many reasons to encourage immigration, mostly around the skills that people can bring to the country, but it seems that some people still only see colour. Sad.
That is rather the point of critical journalism: point out the problems in Government; *whatever* and *whoever* the Government is it shouldn't be hiding anything.
No matter who is in power at the moment, there is - and should be - someone pointing out the flaws.
I work in retail and even we have rules about using personal email accounts for work purposes. There are consequences and penalties where I work for doing so. These include gross misconduct which will unsurprisingly result in you losing your job. For the Home Secretary to breach the rules where she works is utterly unacceptable.
No sorry you are wrong.
Mishandling of sensitive information is a serious offense and anyone, anywhere else, would potentially be looking at jail.
They certainly wouldn't have their job back after 6 days.
How can anyone in that position ever be trusted again? Once may be a mistake. Six times is on purpose.
To say she needed to see it during a teams call just shows the lack of care.
Some of us have worked in environments requiring DV and STRAP levels of clearance. Most of all of these kinds of places also have to have some kind of disclaimer manually added to the first line of the email along the lines of "I confirm that this email contains no restricted information. dd/mm/yyyy"
Any part of that missing and the email won't send.
The very fact you have to add it manually should be enough to make you stop and critically examine whether or not you are about to breach security.
Anyone can make a mistake. Once. THAT possibly requires retraining and moving on (possibly with some closer monitoring). More than that? Just nope.
Or even better, imagine if the government could have been able to afford to buy her two phones. Or if they could afford a new toner cartridge and print out government documents for her, which could have been secured in some kind of box.
We might have been one spyware loaded "sink the migrants" game in the app store away from our entire national security being blown wide open.
Given the type of idiocy she has so clearly been guilty of we know with utter certainty that she would cheerfully have conducted confidential government business on her private phone (and probably did) without a care in the world. She is a major league dishonest plank. Choice of icon? With her woeful ignorance of all matters of IT-security what else?
I'm sure they can. They may have even tried.
I'm also absolutely certain that any attempts at such policy enforcement over the last decade would have immediately resulted in Ministers screaming that they can't do their jobs if they have to follow the law and the ministerial code, and said civil servant is going to get fired if they don't let them email anything they want to anyone right this second.
That kind of IT policy only survives if the boss really wants it to. Johnson has repeatedly proven his opinion of how important the law and ministerial code is.
Pretty sure if I sent a document marked "confidential" to my home gmail account from work it would count as misconduct with an attendant likelihood of being sacked. 6 times? I'd definitely be out with a black mark on my name for a job. Why is this deemed tolerable for someone who is allegedly in charge of national security and policing? To wave it away with "I've had IT training so everything is fine" is crap, this should be basic confidentiality training for any incoming politician so I'd be surprised if she hadn't had the exact same training at various points in the past, she just chose to ignore it. If there isn't training given to politicians on IT security and document handling, someone needs a massive boot up the arse to get it sorted.
So we threw out Boris and his gang for holding parties because they were above their own law, not to mention being a menacing bunch of loose cannon.
Then we threw out I've-forgotten-her-name-already for being above the natural laws of the financial markets, not to mention being a fracking menace.
Now we have a Home Secretary who is breaking cybersecurity law because she is above the laws she is responsible for. I mean, what kind of excuse is it that she forwarded Govt stuff from Gmail because it was the only phone she had - it shouldn't have been in her Gmail box in the first place! Not to mention being a menace to all "invading" desperate foreigners. Then there was the story about her which appeared here about a week ago and shortly afterwards mysteriously disappeared.
So that's all right, then.
Hearts v. Hibs? If you're after the constitutional question over whether Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland MPs should be allowed to vote on England-only matters, then that would be the West Lothian question. It was named after Tam Dalyell, who was the MP for West Lothian when he repeatedly raised the question during devolution debates.
And it has a very simple answer
No, it doesn't.
It has a very complex answer because of a compromise "until we find something better" (20+ years and counting) funding arrangement known as the Barnet formula.
Money from central funds to the devolved parliaments is given as a 'block grant' which means that they can divvy it up however they like. So if Scotland wants to spend 2% of the grant on public transport and Wales wants to to spend 3% (totally made-up figures) that's absolutely fine.
However, the cash size of the block grant is calculated purely on the basis of what Westminster spends in England, thus if for some reason they decide one year (or even part-way through a year - watch out for the Autumn Statement incoming) to reduce the amount they spend on public transport, the Barnet formula ensures that the block grants are reduced by proportionate amounts.
The effect of this is that if the devolved administrations wish to maintain cash spending in (for example) public transport - perhaps they have just committed to buy a fleet of new trains based on the size of the grant at the time - they will have to reduce spending in other areas (alternatively they now have the option of minor variations in income tax).
The same applies to other 'devolved' reaponsibilities; health, education, housing, etc. etc. In other words while they might be 'politically' devolved, they are not (really) 'financially' devolved and there is therefore a really strong argument that Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs should be able to vote on those areas in Westminster.
M.
"Handsomely," in this case, translates roughly to making promises he had no intention of keeping, and otherwise being pretty dishonest, which most people who voted for him seem to have cottoned on to, as his approval rating over time shows, from being largely positive, to very negative at the point he was forced to resign over an accumulation of various scandals and dodgy dealings.
All this shows, is that if you promise people lots of good things, they'll vote for you, whether or not you have any intention of delivering them. This just demonstrates that a lot of people are terrible at spotting an obvious charlatan.
As it happens, in my constituency, the incumbent Labour MP (Thangam Debbonaire) increased her already considerable majority, so that wasn't so "handsome" for the Tories, was it? Incidentally, she's also of Indian descent, but far from the "pull-the-ladder-up" attitude of the home secretary (and her predecessor under Johnson), she is very strong on refugee rights, amongst other things. It just goes to show you should judge someone on their merits, rather than their skin colour, or geographical origin. It may be confirmation bias, but I'd tip her as a future leader of the Labour party. She's a very good speaker, and handles the media rounds very well, and it's about time (and to it's shame that it hasn't yet happened) that Labour had a woman leader.
Of Sunak's 31-member Cabinet, 16 were Cabinet ministers under Johnson: Sunak, Raab, Braverman, Wallace, Zahawi, Dowden, Coffey, Shapps, Barclay, Gove, Heaton-Harris, Jack, Hart, Mercer, Williamson and Jenrick. Most of the rest were junior ministers or held other posts (e.g. Mark Harper was Chair of the COVID recovery group). I think it's just Hunt, Mordaunt and Mitchell who were back-benchers. Hunt and Mordaunt were Cabinet ministers under May.
(All information off Wikipedia. List of Cabinet members from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63376560)
Another clueless dipshit idiot in charge of the country. As if hashtags Rudd was not bad enough. What was she thinking? All that training, signing the OSA (I presume she must have done that to become home secretary), constant briefings on cyber terrorism, knowledge of auditing and traceability, and she still does something like this 6 times? And on a gmail account of all things. Now big brother google knows more about our government policies than the government.
Surely when you become a senior government minster, someone from somewhere tells you to close all your personal "publicly hosted" free email accounts, and only use a personal email account that is hosted in a suitably secure environment.? Aside from anything else, the ability to get malware through a public account like that is just not worth any risk. No doubt Liz trusses hacked phone suffered similar.
In any commercial organisation distributing internal classified information would be a sackable offence. It needs to be in this case too. And properly sacked. Not just removed from the cabinet, but sacked as an MP for misconduct in public office and a by-election called. Then people (and her cronies) would actually start to question and understand what she has done.
Official govt phones & email accounts subject to monitoring, audit, FOI data requests etc.
Use your own phone and who knows what dubious apps & storage (Gmail, FFS, everyone knows that's not the place for confidential data - you have a Gmail account for random irrelevant dross, not for anything vital ) and you can leak information to whoever you wish, set up all sorts of unofficial & unmonitored communications back channels with who knows what individuals & organisations.
I'm sure there's a massive culture amongst many MPs of "off the books" communications - cannot let data security measures get in the way of activities that may be extremely corrupt*
* As a charitable sort, I am not implying Sue Ellen is corrupt: Same as if I see a bloke walking down the road at night with a chunky flathead screwdriver - I don't automatically assume he is going to try and jemmy his way into a car, as there's plenty of legit reasons for him to have that tool, but if local plod saw him they may well be having a chat on the grounds of "reasonable suspicion"
There's a £50Billion hole in the government finances........................................
That means almost £1000 LESS FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO SPEND to support every man, woman and child in the UK!!!
Think....Universal Credit.....think....NHS.........
.....and this article in El Reg is about Cruella's phone????
.....please.......get a grip!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
...needless to say, asylum claimants don't get NHS treatment, free housing, Universal credit et al. They essentially get imprisoned (at great expense), and then, if the current lot have anything to say about it, deported to Rwanda.
Successful asylum seekers become citizens, and, all metric indicate, end up contributing more in taxes to the exchequer than the average natively-born Brit.
Try explaining that to your average thick-as-pigshit Daily Heil or Ex-cess reader though, and you'll wear out their poor little brain-cell.
Earlier today, someone tried telling me that an asylum seekling migrant only becomes a net benefit to the UK once they earn over £45,000 (I presume they meant per annum).
Which seems a bit off given the median household disposable (ie after income tax etc) income in UK is around £31,000
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