Handing Over Health To The Beardy Bastard

Branson, the beardy bastard, is sniffing around the health service for easy profits.

Exams Marking Fiasco

The American firm, ETS, was awarded a £154 million, five-year contract (though some confusion here - is it three or five years?) to mark school tests for 11 and 14-year-olds. This is the first year of its operation and it is proving a disaster.

Sats Company Faces Bill Over Delay.


ETS Europe - The Company Behind The Marking Fiasco

English schoolchildren are tested more than any other pupils in the world. This idiotic system, introduced first by the Tories in the 1980s and cretinously embellished by New Labour after them, has spawned a multimillion pound industry. It has also proved stressful, pointless and against the educational interests of children.

When chaps such as I went to school back in the Dark Ages of decent education, pupils were tested at the end of each year by the school and marked by their teachers. I suppose the crude premise was that since your teachers were teaching you day in, day out, for years, they had a pretty good idea of how well you were doing. Results were made known to the parties involved and did not contribute to a ridiculous league table system. Teachers did the marking as part of their work and no money was paid out to external companies or individuals.

The simplest, most reasonable and most equitable system - and the cheapest - would be to abolish all such modern testing in its entirety and revert to the earlier set-up: external marking only for GCSEs and A-levels.

It is appalling that private companies (whether flying under the 'non-profit' flag or not) should be raking in public money for a pointless activity, and doing it so badly.

ID Propaganda Aimed At Young People

The government are obviously very keen to convince young people that ID cards, etc, are a Good Thing and that they ought to join in the fun. So much so that they've set up a website mylifemyid, which they bill as 'the site where 16-25's can have their say about identity issues in the UK'. No doubt they can have their say and be ignored, as is par for the course with the government's 'consultation' practices.

This is obviously part of a long-term plan, ie, get them young and you've got them for life, kind of thing, along with Mrs Pudding Face's PR campaign earlier in the year pitching ID cards at students. That's either bold or deluded, considering the government will be out on its ear in a couple of years.

It's a pretty disreputable tactic, given that the rest of the population are deliberately kept uninformed or misinformed about the ID-database policy. Virtual Surveys Ltd, however, are obviously happy to make a few quid out of the project. Our money, of course. You can't say this government doesn't encourage entrepreneurs.

EU Happy To Hand Over Our Details To The US

Why not just have all our telephone, banking, travel and internet activity automatically sent to the government, the EU and the fucking Americans as well, just to make sure we have no privacy, no protection and no rights at all?

US licence to snoop on British air travellers (Telegraph)


Brussels to sign away our private data to US (Times)

Fuck Off Gets You Marks And Other Mad Stories

Sometimes I have to check that it's not April 1st when I read various stories in the UK press. As far as I can tell, the following are all correct.

Pupil gets marks for writing "Fuck off" in GCSE exam. Apparently, if he had correctly added punctuation, in the form of an exclamation mark, he would have earned extra points. Punctuation, however, is not high on the agenda of contemporary schooling.

Community copper forbidden to ride his bike until he has taken official course. A spokeswoman for Kent Police said: "If you have a civilian driving licence you can't drive a police car. The same applies to a bike. Poodling up and down the road on your bike is very different from riding a bike on duty." Somehow I don't see riding a police bicycle is so different from riding a civilian one, do you? And I think she meant "pootling", not "poodling".

Gateshead Council decided that the salt-shakers in their local chippies had too many holes in them. In the interests of health and safety, of course, this could not be allowed. Read on...and in case, you don't trust the Daily Mail (and why should any sane person?) here's the proof.