But, but, why is it that people might have less than total trust in politics?
We thought this was interesting:
The Conservative government spent more than £130m on IT and data systems for the scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, which will never be used, the Observer can reveal.
Digital tools needed to put the forced removal programme into effect made up the second-largest chunk of the £715m spent in little over two years, behind only the £290m handed directly to Paul Kagame’s government.
They included a database for anticipated complaints to a “monitoring committee”, which was set up to oversee the deal’s compliance with human rights laws, and systems to enforce the Tories’ attempted legal duty to remove asylum seekers arriving on small boats.
Labour announced that it was scrapping the policy shortly after winning the general election, with home secretary Yvette Cooper calling it “the most shocking waste of taxpayers’ money I have ever seen”.
Well, yes. Under the Brown Terror Yvette was - for a time - Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Which is when this happened:
If there were an award for the world's most mismanaged national health project, England's National Programme for IT in the NHS would be a strong contender, if not outright winner. Started in 2002, Tony Blair's brainchild has, like the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, gone badly wrong.
The main aim of the project was to create a fully integrated centralised electronic care records system to improve services and patient care by 2007. The budget for the undertaking was a substantial £11·4 billion. 9 years on, the Department of Health has spent £6·4 billion on the project so far, failed to meet its initial deadline, and has had to abandon the central goal of the project because it is unable to deliver a universal system.
No, we are not blaming Ms. Cooper for this or any other error. Well, not right now we’re not.
It’s also quite obvious that her comments about the Rwanda scheme are a party political ding on the other people. Which is to be expected in a political system, obviously.
But then that’s why there might be less than total trust in politics. That economy with the actuality, that dinging of the opponents rather than a careful and sensible estimation of reality.
That reality being - perhaps - that the British government cannot plan anything and most certainly we should never allow it any near anything at all to do with computers? That observable reality?
Tim Worstall