Oily Wildcat Blunkett Database Bollocks

The foreign workers dispute rolls on and wildcat strikes continue. There's no point bringing in ACAS - this is not an arbitration dispute. The government's hands are tied because the rules are made in Brussels.

John Redwood makes the point:

For years the UK government has told us that it influences EU legislation, and had got on well with our partners. The truth has usually been very different. The UK government has found out what the EU plans to do next, and then has told us it finds that acceptable or a good idea. Where it realises that an EU measure is going to be unpopular it either plays it down, or tells us it is going to press for changes. If it manages a minor change it then heralds this as a success and gives in on the bigger principles at stake. As a result of its retreats we have lost a big chunk of our financial rebate successfully negotiated by Margaret Thatcher, we have imported huge quantities of regulation whilst the government has told us it is deregulatory in spirit, and we have adopted the canons of EU labour and migration law.

The EU has been continuously sold to the British electorate as nothing more than a free trade area. It's not: it's a political union, a superstate in which nation states and their governments are merely regional assemblies implementing regulations from Brussels. Once the Lisobon Treaty comes into force all national sovereignty will be effectively abolished.

Here's a turn up for the books:

DAVID BLUNKETT, the former home secretary, has criticised government plans to record every telephone call, email and internet session on a database, saying it could endanger civil liberties.

The Home Office is proposing to install “black boxes” in telephone exchanges to copy phone and web data passing through them and to store it on a central database.

But Mr Blunkett said the multi-billion pound Intercept Modernisation Programme (IMP) may not achieve its aim of defeating terrorism.

“We have got to be very cautious,” he said. “I fear there is no point in having sophisticated data retention if it’s not usable, refinable and therefore applicable in tackling potential terrorism attacks.

“I have strongly advised that the Government should not try to set up a centralised system that it operates itself, because that could lead to difficulties as well as concerns about civil liberties and data exchange,” he added.

“I hope they will be able to attain an alternative way of achieving the same goals.”

Currently, the police and security services draw on records from telephone companies and internet service providers, frequently using the material in prosecutions.

But with changing technology and the demise of itemised phone bills, the Home Office said there was a need for the Government to create its own centralised database.

Special briefings led by Lord West, the security minister, this week will attempt to allay fears over the intercept programme. A consultation paper setting out initial ideas on how the IMP would work is due within weeks. (Sunday Telegraph)

That's a perpelexing thing to read when you remember that Blunkett was not only the early champion of ID cards (or 'entitlement' cards, as he liked to call them) but at one stage was himself proposing that all our phone calls should be logged.

Could it be that he's only against the government having the database, rather than the job being farmed out to private business? Blunkett has at various times had interests in a DNA firm and Entrust, a US company specialising in providing - you guessed it - ID cards. Forgive me suspecting there's more to this than meets the eye.

Mandelson plans a "people's bank" via the Post Office. In other words re-establish the National Girobank, a successful bank that vanished in privatisation under the Tories. A (rare) good idea from New Labour. But will it actually happen?