At a time when the trust in government is at low ebb, they bring back Peter Mandelson, whom for some reason they have made a Lord, to once again take up a post of being an adviser, rather than having been voted in as an MP. Whether it is the press or just public opinion, there seems to be the same amount of controversy over his appointment and his statements that wwre the case previously, one of which of course is his pay.
On a daily basis we are receiving woeful news about our finances, personal and national, the forecast for unemployment, and the general reduction in our standard of living, yet we also receive on a daily basis, from a government that didn’t realise the effects of the huge internal debt, new costly schemes in the various departments of our political structure, some as I have proven elsewhere, untried. Once again the government has grandiose schemes and innovations. A large proportion of the electorate, who could see the collapse coming, and were writing about it in newspapers and on blogs, including repeatedly on this one, are now giving warnings again which also will go unheeded. The last thing we need at this time either from this government or any other that is voted in, is innovation for the sake of innovation, we need to draw in our horns. If you read Peter Mandelson’s latest outpourings, you will find that he is urging the opposite to what I’m suggesting. I think some of them in Downing Street have even forgotten we still have to pay for the Olympic Games in 2012, in billions.
More costs in NHS. There is something called ‘The King’s fund health think tank’ which states that they want to improve care for patients by more innovation. They want to make use of video-conferencing – web chats, and patients should be able to send and receive e-mails from their GP, which all comes as the health service is in the middle of a 12 billion revamp, otherwise estimated at 50 billion. To me this is more like a case of having to say something to justify your existence. I never heard of anything so crazy, when only 45% of households are actually online, a proportion of them only the children in the house, and I suspect that 20% to 30% of the overall are the most vulnerable, the elderly, and those with only carers to look after them, who would never be online anyway. This sort of thinking underlines the fact that what we have are laymen pretending to be technocrats, while at the same time having no idea of the financial and technical ramifications of this type of proposal, both to the service and the individual. Yet again, when it is expected that our welfare bill will reach astronomical proportions, and the government is losing information, and having computer breakdowns on monthly if not a weekly basis, someone wants to throwaway more money on an untried scheme
Examining this aspect overall, underlines the fact that central government just does not work. More importantly, in this technical age of high-speed communication, records and number-crunching, instead of being in localised units, controlled locally, it has become a massive undertaking which I believe is totally unnecessary and undoubtedly exceedingly expensive and vulnerable. Big is no longer best