Jacqui Boots, Destroyer Of DNA

Police to destroy DNA profiles of innocent people: the government has been compelled by a judgment by the Court of Human Rights to destroy the 800,000 DNA samples of innocent people. It's not until the sixth paragraph that the Guardian gets to mention this fact.

Jacqui Smith maintains the decision was somehow a purely internal one:

"there has to be a balance between the need to protect the public and respecting their rights. Based on risks versus benefits, our view is that we can now destroy all samples."

Very kind of you, you lying, incompetent bitch. Oh, but what's this?

"the Home Office insists that in deciding to destroy all samples on the database it has gone much further than it was compelled to by the court's ruling."

I think that qualifies as a lie, doesn't it? If it's illegal to hold DNA samples of innocent people then you should get rid of any such samples pronto. Otherwise you're breaking the law. Or is that too simple?

Crap IT contracts with the NHS: the government is notoriously inept when it comes to IT and making deals with business (and just about everything else). This ineptitude is costing us billions.

donpaskini reckons the Tories are crap at the economy:

A historical fact which occurred to me earlier today:

Over the past half century, every time a Conservative government has come to power, it has introduced disastrous economic policies which have plunged the economy into far greater crisis and made their government desperately unpopular.

The last time that a newly elected Conservative government managed even minimal competence was when they were led by Winston Churchill in 1951. The last time they managed this feat with a leader who had no previous experience of being Prime Minister was in the 1920s.

Of course, history is not always a good guide to how a party will govern. But since the current Conservative economic policy is 'ask us after the election', their candidates for parliament are mostly unembarrassed Thatcherites, and many of their highly regarded thinkers spent the past few years urging that Britain should be more like Ireland or Iceland, the signs are that they aren't likely to break their 58 year run of messing things up if they do win the election.

Which makes it all the more important that if Labour is defeated, we work out quickly how we need to change and what the lessons of the past twelve years are, in time to fix the problems that the Tories will cause.

The second paragraph works just as well if you substitute 'Labour' for 'Conservative', to be quite honest. Not once in my 55 years years has the British economy been sound and thriving; it's always been a state of crisis, or immanent crisis or just getting over one crisis in preparation for the next. The truth is, these people (politicians and economists) haven't got the faintest bloody idea what's going on or how to handle it.

Do I expect the incoming Tory government to be any more competent than the current Labour one? Not a lot. But it doesn't change my desire to see New Labour stuffed into a dustbin and pushed over Niagara.