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Margaret Thatcher, politicians and ID cards

I have written a blogpost for the Manifesto Club, which campaigns for freedom in everyday life, about the politics of ID cards – as promoted by both the Conservative and Labour parties, including that promoter of liberty and preserver of the NHS Margaret Thatcher – including some thoughts about what stage the national identity scheme would have reached:

By now, the link between passport applications and joining the national identity scheme should have been in place; it required a further act of Parliament, but the 2008 target date was 2011/12. So getting a passport would mean providing your fingerprints and a wide variety of personal data. Home secretary Jacqui Smith made the physical card optional in 2008, but left the databases – including the ‘audit trail’ that would track each individual’s usage – intact. The police hoped to be able to identify anyone on the system through their fingerprints (if the biometric technology worked properly, a debateable point). Not your papers please, but your fingers please. Continue reading “Margaret Thatcher, politicians and ID cards”

Margaret Thatcher, preserver of the NHS. Yes, really

Spitting Image Margaret Thatcher
(Fairly) safe in her hands: a Margaret Thatcher Spitting Image puppet in Grantham Museum. © Copyright Richard Croft. Licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence.

Today sees the funeral of Baroness Thatcher, the prime minister who saved/crippled Britain, giving new hope to/tearing the soul out of its communities and reforming/undermining the public sphere, delete according to preference.

But it’s more complicated than that. If it wasn’t, the NHS would not have survived her leadership in its current form. It turns out that, when Margaret Thatcher said “the NHS is safe in our hands”, she was pretty much right. She changed it, but not nearly as much as you would have expected. Continue reading “Margaret Thatcher, preserver of the NHS. Yes, really”

Don’t blame Sir Humphrey for ID cards, he mostly said yes minister

I have written an article for Guardian Public Leaders Network on the civil service and ID cards, based on the research I did for my book on the subject Card declined. Identity systems appear in two separate episodes of Yes, Minister/Yes, Prime Minister – and in both Jim Hacker gets his own way, at least to some extent. And while Home Office officials appeared keen on reintroducing ID cards – we have that from David Cameron in 2004 – my conclusion is that ministers, not the civil service, were in the driving seat:

Home secretary David Blunkett, who lobbied for a new ID card scheme in 2001 according to Alistair Campbell’s diaries, claimed that the use of biometrics including fingerprints would make identity theft completely impossible – a foolish claim of perfection which a crafty civil servant would have warned him off, if one had been secretly running the show. Continue reading “Don’t blame Sir Humphrey for ID cards, he mostly said yes minister”

Review: My stroke of insight by Jill Bolte Taylor

This isn’t a particularly new book, published four years ago in the UK. But if you have an interest in strokes, how the brain works and how you can make yours work better and – pertinently to the NHS, given recent scandals – how some healthcare professionals need to remember what care is, My stroke of insight is well-worth reading.

Jill Bolte Taylor, an American neuroanatomist, suffered a massive stroke at the age of 37. The best section of the book – which follows an admirably concise description of the brain’s structure and function – describes in thriller-like detail how she experienced her stroke, with brain functions and personality traits falling away. You will her to call 911, but “the haemorrhage growing in my cranium was positioned directly over the portion of my left brain that understood what a number was”. It is fascinating, educational and terrifying. Continue reading “Review: My stroke of insight by Jill Bolte Taylor”

NHS C-day: CCGs on Twitter, and other useful information

Today is NHS C-Day – C for commissioning, as in CCG, CSU and commissioning boards now called NHS England. No doubt many people will have some other C-words they would use about it as well, but as the day of the biggest NHS reorganisation for many years is also Easter Monday, let’s look at something a bit less serious: which of the 211 clinical commissioning groups that have just sprung into existence have found the time to get on Twitter? Continue reading “NHS C-day: CCGs on Twitter, and other useful information”