For those of you not on my personal journal's friendslist, I dropped a Hoegaarden Glass on my head yesterday (yes, I am that talented!) and am not feeling too fabulous. This has necessitated a drastic change of plans with regard to my posting schedule. I've been meaning to do the "why I am not a republican" post for three days now (note to American readers: republican in the "not wanting a monarchy" sense, not in the "votes for an oil-baronic-maniac" sense. I should have thought the latter would be sufficiently obvious without me having to explain it ;)), but my brain is not sufficiently cogent for me to formulate it right now. However, it will happen at some point, I promise.

Also, my eyes are tending to glaze over when I try to backread, which is a shame, because alixmortimer's post about education looks very interesting. This is a note to self to read it later.

There is a substantive point to this entry, though. The dear boy I spoke to at the Inland Revenue this morning, bless him, was really lovely. He was called John, and had a heavy Scouse accent. You see, my cheque cleared yesterday; the cheque from my ex which gives the final settlement to the end of our relationship. So, this morning, I rang the student loans company and paid off my student loan, emailed smile for a settlement figure for my personal loan, paid off my credit card, and emailed becky_spence to check that the figure she previously gave me to make my wedding dress still stands. Once all these payments have cleared, and assuming that Becky is still happy to proceed at the same amount, I will be left with the princely sum of £4.86 from my settlement.

None the less, even though I will not actually gain much money from this, I thought I had better ring the tax credit office at the Inland Revenue and let them know; I don't want to end up being chased for undeclared income, even though it's technically capital, not income. So, I navigated the labyrinthine "press 1 for x, 2 for y" system on the phone, and finally got through to the lovely John. My first clue that something was amiss came when I didn't get the usual barrage of security questions. He didn't even ask for my NI number. After a few preliminary pleasantries he admitted that he couldn't actually do anything today because his computer was down. Why is your computer down? I enquired. Because they're upgrading the system today he replied. They're not upgrading the security, by any chance, are they? I giggled. Yes he whispered, sorrowfully. He recommended I try again on Monday, and I wished him a good day and hoped that he didn't get too many annoying people demanding he do things that he couldn't do; he wished me a good day in return and I hung up.

Poor John, being lovely, on the sharp end of the HMRC's cock-ups, will be getting barrages of abuse from idiots at the moment. Having spent all of my working life in various positions of dealing with the general public, I can confidently state, from long years of empirical observation of a statistically significant sample of several thousand people, that most members of the general public are thick as pigshit and twice as objectionable. They seem to think that shouting at the poor powerless peon in front of them/on the other end of the phone, that this will achieve the impossible and get them what they want, even though the peon does not have the power to grant them their wish (much as they might wish they could, to get the objectionable idiots to shut up and go away). It reminds me of a song my daddy sings:

It's the same the whole world over
It's the poor what gets the blame
It's the rich what gets the gravy
Ain't it all a bleeding shame.

Poor old John is getting shouted at by idiots, probably even as I type, while the guy who resigned from the top of the HMRC (Paul Gray) has got a huge golden handshake. Does this leave a bad taste in anyone else's mouth?

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Vince Cable Watch

Vince was on the radio again this morning, being eloquent about the Northern Rock scandal. It's got to the point now where they don't even ask the guys from the other parties to comment, they just ask Vince. The man just gets better and better.

ETA: breaking news: Nick Clegg just stole a Vince Cable line on Any Questions on the radio, and didn't deliver it half as well - the one about pumping taxpayer's money into Northern Rock being the equivalent of 30 Millenium Domes, without even the benefit of a decent pop concert at the end of it, except that Nick stammered and said "I can't even remember how many Millennium Domes", which dulls the impact a little.

Poo. Apparently you have to suffer material or financial loss before you can trigger the stripping-of-licence thing mentioned in this post.

On the bright side, the CDs have appeared on ebay....

I have seen comment on a couple of blogs that this might actually be spun as a reason to force the ID card database through because if you've lost everyone's NI number then re-issuing them might be prudent and if you're re-issuing everyone's NI number then you might as well start the database up... This scares the living willies out of me. Anyone up for moving to the I Love Man Isle of Man?

With reference to the HMRC losing my (and every other person in the UK with a child under 16's) name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and bank details in two easy to use discs (see this entry):

Mister Mat has just pointed out to me (whilst rubbing his hands together and giggling with glee) that under the Data Protection Act any entity registered on the Register of Data Controllers has quite stringent obligations to store data securely. One who fails to do so can be booted off the register by the Information Commissioner. Obviously, someone who is affected by the breach has to place the complaint... Now, can we think of anyone who has been affected by the breach who might want to do such a mean-spirited thing? I think we can... >:D

I do feel a little bit sorry for poor old Darling, though. Clearly this is a cock-up of monumental proportions which has been brewing for some time. Like somebody said in a comment on this entry on PoliticalBetting.com: imagine if Blair had held on for a few more months. Gordon would be being slapped in the face with this, instead of Darling. Alternately, imagine if Gordon hadn't bottled it last month, and had called an election. This would now be confirmation of Tory inability to manage the economy on the scale of the Major Years and the poor old Tories would be reaping the whirlwind. So, on reflection, I'm rather glad it's Darling that's being the patsy for this, as I reserve a special level of hatred for him after the complete arse he made of transport when he was running that. I'm afraid bikerness runs deep.

ETA: No2ID have a cunning plan too. Who knows; between all the cunning plans doubtless being hatched right now, we might actually make a dent in something...

HMRC have sold my details to the mafia let my details fall into the hands of criminals "lost" my bank details, along with those of about 15 million or so other people. Now, really, given the track record of government departments on IT issues, and leaving laptops everywhere, etc. etc., I shouldn't be surprised that Teh Revenoo thinks it's perfectly OK to put everyone's bank details on an unencrypted CD-ROM and send it via the normal mail service (not even registered!), but really, those are my bank details! FFS, Darling, can't you be a bit more careful with my sensitive data?

Predictably, the BBC's Have Your Say on this topic is full of crowing from the anti-ID crowd. I'd join in, if I didn't think it was undignified. My only comfort is that (given my long travails with teh revenoo) I am fully aware that any data they have lost is likely to be inaccurate, out of date, and with typos in it. If it's all 15 million child benefit claimants' bank details, too, then the security services'll be making some effort to find the discs because (for example) among those 15 million are the current Prime Minister and his predecessor.

Seriously, though, are we really going to trust this lot (or, indeed, any lot, all governments being huge behemoths which are only as competent as their least competent flunky) with a huge database of personal information including our very DNA? Are people still going to insist that if you've done nothing wrong you've nothing to fear?