It's All In The Billion Pounds Dodgy Databases

More than £100 billion is set to be wasted on scary dodgy databases over the next five years, with a quarter of them illegal, while the government admits it hasn't a clue just how many are 'all in the database'. 

In a stark warning of minister's obsession with a surveillance society, a scathing report claims a quarter of all the databases are illegal and should be scrapped. 

Dissing the report and burying his head in the sands of smug arrogance, justice minister, Michael Wills, rejected the report, saying although it will be examined, it is a headline with no argument behind it. "What the report doesn’t do is show the advantages of these databases," he added.

And therein lies the problem for those concerned about this Big Brother intrusion from both big government and big organisations. Over the last decade the government has spawned a devil's child of databases to control our lives. 

Calls to scrap those databases only scratch the surface. The databases are an end result. What needs to change is the cultural obsession with collecting and collating information about people. 

Massive IT projects are big business. In an effort to  control our lives, a massive magic bullet of Big Brother databases sprang up without any checks or any nod to privacy, just waiting to be lost or stolen. 

Now the UK has become the "most invasive surveillance state and the worst at protecting privacy, of any Western democracy", according to the report from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.  

As officials "struggle to control billions of records of our most personal details', more than £16 billion a year is spent on public sector IT and another £105 billion will be spent over the next five years but less than a third of such projects ever succeed.

It's said there are thousands of databases operating and the government does not even know the precise number. 

At the heart is an ominous warning about the relationship between the individual and the state over the last decade with a government hell bent on control. 

A decade of arrogance of an elected government which believes it is the state rather than just a wheel in its cog. 

Taxpayers' vote in a government which then forces people to stump up billion of pounds on big government databases which are used - to spy on the very taxpayers and families who forked out the cash in the first place. 

The study reviewed 46 flagship databases and gave just a handful the green light. 

Singled out for stinging criticism are 11 particularly bad eggs,  including the DNA database, the National Identity Register which will store personal information linked to ID cards, the children's ContactPoint national index of all children in England and the NHS Detailed Care Record.

Another 29 databases were on dodgy dubious grounds, meaning they have "significant problems and may be unlawful".

And the report warns personal data is readily shared between public bodies or to help snoop on the public with virtually no control.

Phil Booth, National Coordinator of NO2ID campaign puts it well: "Government now sees collecting and collating information about the people as a primary function: snooping is the first resort. To stop the database state, the surveillance reflex must be changed."

BBC News is not alone in flagging up the report and appalling obsession with government databases. But that's the same BBC which scares the pants off everyone, with a series of chilling licence adverts warning "It's all in the database".

Nothing will change until ministers wake up and realise distasteful databases demolish what little trust there is left in government and the public becomes increasingly fed up and angry at the way databases are harnessed by government to snoop on people and stigmatise them.

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Chaos In Brown's Big Brother House

The fag-end government is fighting a rearguard action to brown-beat voters and cling onto power. Tarred with the brush of sleaze and scandal, Brown is bringing his own brand of chaos to his Big Brother House. 

Parliament is powerless. Democracy a joke. The people are revolting. The Queen is not amused. In the second English Revolution, chaos is descending on Brown's Big Brother House and the long-suffering public are the losers.

A parliament for the people has been exposed as a rotten house prostituting itself to the iron grip of a shamed and discredited government. 

In the thick of it is a deluded Supreme Leader using the scare tactics of "chaos" against anyone who dares question his iron will. That sticks in the throat.

Bent on a desperate last ditch bid to fool some of the people some of the time, disturbing signs of delusions of grandeur are setting in.

Ridding the commons of the spivs and crooks with a purge of MPs should be self-selecting and deselecting. 

Instead angry, disillusioned voters are being forced to sit through the squalid spectacle of a game of cat and mouse as the truly rotten eggs try to keep their cushy numbers and cling on to power.

Leaders from all parties have a magic bullet in their armoury to deal with the bad and the ugly faces of politicians. 

Withdrawn the whip and without the Party comfy cushion, an MP will be forced to stand down and force a by-election. But will Brown use it and risk losing it? Will he heck. 

Bold, strong leadership is being cast aside in his squalid game of tribal politics and brinkmanship being played out at Westminster. 

Cameron's Conservatives and the LibDems are coming out on top but only because with fewer MPs, the odds are stacked in their favour and the top tiers of Osbourne, Hague and Cable have come up squeaky clean. 

But as the expenses scandal unfolded, clear water began to emerge. In the main, Tory toffs were caught lording it up on lavish expenses while the New Labour wannabe elite made the most of their mortgages with crooked second homes fiddles. 

A mixture of chancers, spivs and downright criminals left the poor taxpayers in the middle. You pays your money, now you takes your choice with a handful of honourable and decent folk who can hold their heads high and now ride out the storm. 

Cameron's lot are being forced to bite the bullet. Brown's lot hiding away in the bunker of shame playing for time. The chaos is set to get worse the longer Brown and his tight cabal of cronies try to put off the inevitable day when power is prised from their cold dead fingers. 

Bleating Blears, set up for the chop as a lamb to the slaughter, is now being backed by Blairite cabinet colleagues, leaving beleaguered Brown and his government in tatters as they struggle to contain the fall-out in the squalid world of self-interest. 

Her 'crime' is no worst than most others among the smug arrogant bunch in the cabinet highlighted here. Sacrifice Blears and the whole rotten pack of cards will come tumbling down.

Only ex-postie Johnson and the useless Miliband brothers are coming up clean. Get rid of the cabinet crooks and there'd be few left to fight another day. 

The disgraced speaker was finally ousted through the 'will of parliament' as Brown faced up to the stark home truth that it was either his pal or him. With the downfall of a disgraced speaker came the downfall of democracy.

Now voters in their droves are calling time on the government and calling for a general election. 

Brown tried to ignore the 'will of parliament'. Now he's trying to ignore the will of the people. But he does so at his peril. Behind the will of parliament and the will of the people lurk powerful dark forces lying in wait in the true 'national interest'. 

After the expected Euro rout of June 4, stand by for the spin of a cabinet reshuffle with the same old cronies sliding up and down the greasy pole and a grand "national plan", a magic cure all for all the country's ills in the last chance election saloon. 

The cheap trick is to turn the agenda back on what only deluded Brown thinks is his election strength - the economy - already featuring heavily in the June 4 campaign for what is supposed to be an election about, er, Europe. 

This has all the hallmarks of a phoney general election war set up before the dark nights of autumn and before the legals kick in and force fair, balanced broadcast news.  

A national plan, national unity, national government with a power-crazed megalomanic and a tightly knit bunch of cronies ruling the country with the iron fist of a Nasty Party. This is all starting to sound scary. 

One person, one party and one voice to save the country and save the world. "One Folk, One Party, One Leader" has a very nasty ring to it. Churchill will be turning over in his grave.

The only hope for the doomed and discredited New Labour brand is Johnson. Other left-wing backbenchers sure, but that's wishful thinking best left for the big debate after New Labour is left licking its wounds ousted and outed.   

Johnson may be despised by the grass roots Party as a Blair prop. The Orange Party's big concern is that it would be Mandy and the gang pulling his strings. But he's a decent sort of chap and, as an added bonus, he used to have a proper job before he took the Blair shilling. 

Johnson would sure as hell give Cameron a good run for his money in that much needed general election. And that would make for healthy politics all round. 

The Party should pull its finger out now before it's all too late and the iron fist turns into an immovable iron grip and a new Brown Order of crooks, smearers, spinners and bully boys crawls out of the chaos.  

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Frantic Friday In Brown's Big Brother House

Bunkered Brown has escaped from his Big Brother House leaving a trail of chaos in his wake. Leadership challenges and election slaughters are playing second fiddle as the ex-Supreme Leader rearranges the few deck chairs left on the sinking ship and the stuffing is knocked out of his waning authority. Left in limbo land with a collapsing compromise cabinet, it's all hands to the Downing Street pumps. 

Away from the over-active spinning, one thing is certain. This is not the cabinet reshuffle Team Brown wanted or planned for. 

Blairite Party greybeard, transport secretary and expenses fiddler, 'three homes' Hoon, is the latest to quit. 

A prime minister is being held hostage by his own cabinet. The piper is no longer calling the tune, despite the Downing Street spinning 'lines to take', revealed here by the Guardian, trying to fool some of the people some of the time. 

The Orange Party asked on Monday if the Party could wait until Friday. The answer came back loud and clear - no way. The knife has been wielded, the challenge is now real. The die is cast. 

At the stroke of Number 10, Blair-boy Purnell dropped his bombshell and spectacularly stuck the knife in, urging Brown to go, the first direct challenge from a cabinet minister to his leadership. At a stroke he pushed the impending New Labour wipe-out in the English shires onto the back burner. 

How on earth could you have a guy up to his neck in MPs' expenses fiddles in charge of catching benefit cheats? But unlike fiddlers iffy Smiffy and bleating Blears his resignation came uncoded with the full force of a direct challenge to Brown. 

Beleaguered Brown won't stand down. Power will have to be prised from his cold dead fingers. Without a home secretary, communities secretary, work and pensions secretary and defence secretary, Brown's last throw of the dice was to salvage something from his fag-end government with a damp squib reshuffle to capture the news agenda.

Dogged by record poor poll ratings, facing disaster in the elections and a very real political coup,  trying to win back authority over a rebellious Party was the last throw of the dice. But instead of a radical reshuffle for born-again-Brown, it's the last gasp of a dead duck.

Serial flipper Darling refused to budge, despite Saint Vince calling for his head. 

Defence secretary Hutton quit the cabinet, putting loyalty to Purnell and the Blairite cause above any loyalty to the PM. 

He who wields the dagger never wears the crown, so both Johnson and Miliband are staying schtum for the moment.

But Johnson has shown his true colours. A turn-coat and Blair prop, reviled by the grass-roots Party but revered as a so-called 'working-class hero' by the Guardianistas, he's lumped with the poisoned home office chalice taking the Brown shilling from the hand of a fallen and discredited leader. 

In the end Brown didn’t have the balls to make Balls chancellor. That will cause dismay among Balls' City spivs but bring relief to the parliamentary Party and the country. 

With wife Yvette off to DWP, the Balls-Cooper partnership is now firmly entrenched in the top echelons of government. The first time a couple of triple homes flippers have got their feet under the cabinet table. 

Despite the best efforts of the Downing Street spin machine, the Orange Party isn't going to take the total wipe-out unfolding in the English local elections lying down. Even a New Labour spinner would be hard pressed to find some crumbs of comfort. 

Four English shires are set to put two fingers up to New Labour and boot them out of local government in a modern day Lords Of The Rings:

Despised New Labour Orcs are being driven out of the Shires in the battle for Middle Earth and Gordon the Brown is left licking his wounds. Now all eyes turn east to the Land of Backdoor to halt the rise of the evil EU empire. The Dark Lord took his eye off the ball, leaving Dave the White to lead the fight and clean up the moats and votes. 

As the Orange Party has pointed out throughout this hectic week, the seeds were sown by the parliamentary Labour Party showing increasing anger and frustration at Brown's dismissive and autocratic style. 

Moves to oust Brown are still very much alive. Senior backbench loyalist, Barry Sheerman, not known for plotting and boat-rocking wants a secret ballot of New Labour MPs to test the Brown water.

PoliticsHome has an indispensable tally of politicians who've quit, taken sides or haven't yet come out the woodwork. Brown seems safe enough for the moment but he's a broken man heading up a dismal government. 

Between now and the expected Euro massacre results on Sunday into Monday anything, quite literally, could happen. And with a collapsed government it very often does.

But it's not all doom and gloom in Brown's Big Brother House. Billy no mates Brown goes off to the Normandy beaches for a photo-shoot with his new found pal Obama while making sure Her Maj doesn't get a look in. 

The head of state should dissolve parliament while broken and busted Brown is on the road to nowhere. 

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The Day Brown's World Fell Apart

The wheels are falling off bunkered Brown's bandwagon with the carefully leaked departure of two homes secretary Smith as a raft of ministers jump ship and Brown's cabinet slowly falls apart. Chaos has descended on the Big Brother House. A week is a long time in politics for the struggling Supreme Leader.

Ministers are dropping like flies using the cushy escape route of standing down at the general election to collect their blood money. Not bothering to wait for the humiliation of a Euro defeat and expected reshuffle, they've decided to reshuffle themselves. 

The government is clearly out of control. Brown is so weak he cannot even keep the weary troops in order. 

Key Brown bag carrier, digital minister, Tom Watson, up to his neck in the Smeargate scandal against the Tories, is the latest in a string of New Labour MPs and ministers quitting at the next election.  

Now all it takes is one of the top dogs to join the growing band of angry backbench Labour MPs with a vote of no confidence and leadership challenge and Brown could be toast. 

The rats are deserting the sinking ship but the question is did they jump or were they pushed and was Smith's departure craftily leaked to steal Brown's thunder.

Or perhaps it is all part of the Supreme Leader's master plan to create chaos in the Big Brother House, leaving just Brown and his Masters Voice Balls to save the world. 

New Labour MPs have latched onto a crafty plan to "step down" at the election to make off with their ill-gotten gains and be rewarded for services to brand Brown with a fat pay off.  

The announcement from shamed MP David Chaytor, suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party over his expenses, came as under-fire minister Beverley Hughes and Blair's former health hatchet woman Patricia Hewitt both announced they would be stepping down at the next election. 

But the biggest fish to jump out of the net is disposable two homes secretary Smith, the first cabinet minister to announce she is quitting the frontbench. Though it is unclear whether she'll stay on to fight the election or quit to spend more time with the family. 

Iffy Smiffy's departure comes as no surprise, only the timing. Her days were numbered. Expenses claims and her husband's penchant for taxpayer porn sealed her fate long ago. She was handed the poisoned chalice of the home office as the fall-guy. It was a dirty job and someone had to do it but Smith was not up to the job. 

The leaking of Smith's departure steals the thunder from Brown's reshuffle. Harbouring dreams to be the other man with a plan, today's shenanigans blow out of the water any authority left in the beleaguered prime minister and turns his 'bold, decisive leadership' over MPs' expenses into a joke.

All eyes are now on what this means for Brown's long-awaited cabinet reshuffle expected either this Friday or next Monday after the disastrous Euro elections are announced. 

If there's a run of cabinet resignations, then the heat will be on, making a mockery of his plan to use the reshuffle for born-again-Brown. 

Brown is making it clear he ain't going anywhere but he's now on a road to nowhere and the plotters and political pundits will be having a field day. 

Maybe all it takes is a latter day Geoffrey Howe to savage the ex-Supreme Leader and signal the end of his disastrous premiership? But Brown is a plotter not a quitter. He won't relinquish his iron grip on Downing Street, government, parliament and the people without a fight. 

A vote of no confidence seems to be getting closer and louder, either from his own backbenchers or from an alliance of opposition parties in the commons. 

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Arrogant Johnson's 'Reefer Madness'

Arrogant home secretary, Johnson, has sacked his top drugs expert for daring to do his job and speak his scientific mind. Now when a New Labour lackey spouts forth, it should be taken with a pinch of salt. It's not the truth - only what the Big Brother government wants you to think. All part of the wacky world of Johnson's 'reefer madness'.

Public trust in government advisers has been blown out of the water with the off-hand manner angry Johnson dismissed out of hand his chief drugs czar David Nutt over his cannabis stance.

The adviser strayed outside his scientific remit goes the spin, committing the cardinal sin of questioning government policy. Nutt has hit back, saying his views have been "devalued and distorted", accusing 'Luddite' Brown in particular of digging in his heels, playing irrational politics.

Forcing Nutt to quit for having the cheek to tell the truth with criticisms of half-baked New Labour drugs policy, Johnson, like his predecessors, took the easy option pandering to the likes of a Daily Mail 'drugs shock' bandwagon.

Debates over cannabis classification has been raging since the 70s, with Schofield separating fact from fiction in his ground-breaking book The Strange Case of Pot. The Orange Party well remembers slogging away on a post graduate thesis looking at the very question of when social issues becomes political hot potatoes.

Politicians can't get their heads round 'pot smoking' student days and the US scaremongering campaigns of the 1950s, with dope demonised as dangerous as heroin.

Here, the history of cannabis classification is a history of hapless home secretaries.

Compromises, yo-yos and U-turns on cannabis classification have come thick and fast, all the way back to Labour home secretary, Callaghan, who came up with a special class B/C half way house for cannabis.

Home secretary Blunkett, tried it on with a downgrade from B to C in 2002. Home secretary Smith rejected advice to keep cannabis at class C in 2008 and finally vetoed ACMD recommendations.

At the centre of the row is the idea that drugs should be classified according to the perceived physical harm they do and punishment meted out accordingly. But on that basis of physical harm, the sliding scale would put alcohol and tobacco up at the top.

Nutt's only 'crime' was to repeat his long-held view that illicit drugs should be classified according to the actual evidence of the harm they cause. But politically it's much easier to cave in to spurious newspaper campaigns and back up useless government propaganda, rather than produce a classification system based on scientific evidence.

There are, however, social as well as physical factors, not least if the masses should be allowed Huxley's "chemical crutch" to get them through days of despair and despondency. A subdued society stoned out of its mind keeps a lid on dissent but plays havoc with the work ethic.

Independent advice to the government on the vexed and highly emotive issue of drug use and classification is essential. Nutt is no two-bit crony promoted to the top echelons as a New Labour patsy or member of the elite Common Purpose.

Nutt is one of the most respected scientists in his field and that makes him a not so nutty professor. Now an independent scientist has been removed for reporting sound scientific advice and more advisers are set to follow suit.

But if scientists are barred from the debate, then who does the public listen to and believe? Who do they trust when trying to come up with an informed opinion? Home secretary Johnson or a respected scientist?

Where does that leave the supposed 'independence' of advice to the government?

In the Big Brother world of Johnson's home office, respected researchers and scientists are being treated like little Victorian children - who should be seen but not heard, only allowed out of the box if they toe the government line.

Note to spinners: He isn't a "nutty professor". Professor David Nutt is the Edmond J. Safra Chair of Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London and heads up the Psychopharmacology Unit at the University of Bristol.

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It's No Longer TUC, R.I.P.

The TUC, once a powerful and for some, scary voice, was left to Rest In Pieces. The TUC had morphed into New Labour - all style and no substance. Now its voice is starting to reflect the frustrations of voters with a gloves-off attack on the Blairites and some very strong language, according to the Observer.

As a reporter in the 1980s, covering the TUC, you were taught just two thing. It's the Trades Union Congress and your copy had to be sprinkled with "lefties", trots", "hardliners", "troublemakers". Everyone called each other Brother this, or Brother that.

The Guardian yesterday hasn't moved with the times, with a picture throw-back from the 80s - flying pickets with jackboots - and a piece on this week's TUC get together with those words liberally sprinkled all over the copy.

How simplistic can you get? What has happened to the TUC is mirrored in the Labour Party and among Labour MPs. 

It's the on-going struggle between those with their roots in the labour movement and Blair and the New Labour Project who, to get conservative voters on-side, side-lined them.

With the unions it was easy - take away their influence. Don't rely on their funding. Use big business instead, with the odd peerage thrown in as a sweetener. And, if that didn't work, try to stuff the union leadership with New Labour yespersons. 

Enter the new breed of union leader. Out goes big brother and study leave at Ruskin College, Oxford. In comes the high-flying, fully-paid up trade union professional. A fully paid-up member of the New Labour elite.

Shop-floor experience, working through the ranks, gave way to a good university, little industry experience, good suit, good sound-bites, good choice.

It will be played out this week at Brighton. But True Labour will be there (without the jackboots) and its values and voice, with the funding power restored, is getting stronger and is beginning to show through in reasonable and realistic TUC 'demands'. 

And, please Guardianistas, that's no bad thing. Trade unions now speak for their members - the people who work long hours, earn a pittance and are worried sick about how they are going to cope.

Dave Spart is dead, King Arthur just a legend. Holding the country to ransom just sounds rather silly in today's economic climate. There's nothing left to hand over.

A strong trade union movement, with its heart in the right place, can be held in check with a strong employers' organisation and an equally strong government.

We are in the dying days of the New Labour Project. A True Labour voice in the trade union movement, the Labour Party and among Labour MPs, can help hasten its departure. 

There's nothing to lose. New Labour will be annihilated in the general election anyway.

And, for the unions, would getting along with a Conservative government and a True Labour minority in England and the SNP in Scotland, be any worse than the present?

Only the greedy, selfish ministers, MPs and hangers-on, trying to cling onto their cushy jobs, would argue with that. 

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Raising The Roof On Climate Change Con

As 'climate change' protesters storm onto the roof of parliament, Auntie's got her thermal knickers in a twist about global warming. After years banging the drum for climate change, it seems even the BBC is now having second thoughts and starting to wake up to the climate change con.

What happened to global warming? asks the BBC's forlorn 'climate correspondent' Paul Hudson, after pointing to the fact that "the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998."

The Beeb's U-turn may force a rebranding of job titles, along with saddos in the 'department of energy and climate change'. All working hand in glove with pseudo-liberal activists obsessed with climate change at the government-owned Met office.

Big Brother brainwashing and you'd better believe it. Even Corrie viewers were forced to sit through government propaganda with an ad frightening the living daylights out of children, with the brass cheek warning: "Man is causing global warming and threatening life on earth."

Is Auntie having a change of heart after ramming climate change down everyone's throat? It's all grist to the mill for climate change sceptics who argue this is evidence that they have been right all along. There are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature.

Meanwhile ever sceptical Drudge points to climate change con-kid Gore, who got another chilly reception this time in Wisconsin, when a reporter had the audacity to ask some Inconvenient Truths.

Taking a question from an Irish filmmaker, Gore ducked questions over nine errors in his film, before the filmmaker had his microphone cut off by the eco-fascist moderators. So much for the Land of the Free.

In Denver, Colorado, the Phillies-Rockies baseball game was all snowed out with Saturday night's playoff postponed because of cold, snowy weather. How we laughed.

So what on earth is going on, asks the Beeb in its naivety? Not too difficult a question, even for Humphrys dumbed-down Mastermind.

Once again the Orange Party is forced to issue a weather warning to beware the Climate Change Conmen.

Predictions were based on dodgy, discredited climate change computer models. But too late to stop political wannabes seizing on the latest craze to jump on a greenwash bandwagon.

Big bucks are being made out of carbon credit trading. Green taxes help fill treasury coffers by stealth. Jobsworth eco-fascists have a politically correct cause and a big holier than thou stick to beat up anyone who doesn't toe the line of their narrow little minds.

The Met Office and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) need something to hang all their hot air on to justify strutting around the world, making a mint out of 'climate change' courses for dumb fool horses.

No wonder Czech president, Vaclav Klaus, is getting it in the neck. He's not only trying everything in the book to block the EU treaty and Blair's presidency but he's also written a book 'Blue Planet Green Shackles' exploding the man-made global warming myth.

All that doesn't go down at all well with the Masters of the Universe or the eco-brigade.

The Orange Party's view is startlingly simple. Global warming, global cooling. Whatever. Man's influence on our climate has been widely overstated. Throw in a few ocean and solar cycles and it's all part of life's rich natural cycle.

Call a spade a spade. Global greed, not 'global warming' is the Big Issue.

Greed by wiping out the rainforests and its people to prop up the west's addition to cheap beef and plant oil additives. Greed from China's factories belching out poison to prop up western lifestyles with slave labour.

Greed from a country obsessed with cheap polluting air travel. Greed and half-baked 'green' policies on industrial pollution which allows pesticides and poisons to be dumped on land and in rivers.

Wrapping up pollution in the cotton wool con of 'climate change' and forcing poor souls to try to read by the dim light of an 'energy' bulb is a disgraceful eco-cop out.

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