Free Webpage For All And Other Lunacy
In another twitch from the Führerbunker in the last days of the war, our mad drug-addled leader is sending 874 regiments against Moscow giving us all a free webpage! Woohoo!
An article in the Daily Labourgraph (with this picture…what’s her web address please? Mmmmm) makes for amusing reading:
The Prime Minister has previously hailed the potential for the internet to slash the costs of delivering services by reducing paper forms, face-to-face contact with officials, postage, phone calls and building costs.
Welcome to the 20th Century you spanner. Most of us worked this out a few decades ago.
He is now set to use a speech on Monday to unveil plans to give every voter a unique identifier allowing them to apply for school places, book GP appointments, claim benefits, get a new passport, pay council tax or register a car.
Monday? Nothing like trailing a crap speech two days in advance so we get to laugh at it twice. Way to go. So we’ll have *another* database we’ll all be on, and *another* unique number (why not just tattoo them all on our arm – it’s tried and tested technology) so that we can book GP appointments. Booking GP appointments in the past has been a complicated business involving painting arcane runes on a dead kestrel, although TheEye discovered almost by accident (don’t tell anyone) that picking up a phone also works.
Clicking on the “Get New Passport” button won’t get you far either, because this once-every-10-year exercise already involves providing a sperm sample and the left arm of your firstborn in an envelope signed by a priest who hasn’t been accused of molesting farm animals. So don’t bother clicking there.
Marvellously, you’re able to afford a computer and adsl attached to your phoneline but still need benefits. Or handouts taken from my pay-packet, as us people with jobs know it.
The interesting thing is “every voter”. So if you drop off the electoral roll, do you get a new number and a new website? What if you were never on it? What if you are a Muslim woman and the father of the house casts your vote for you anyway? And what happens to Labour councillors in Glasgow? They’ll have voter registration forms for hundreds of dead “voters” which they need to cast every few years…how will they cope with the extra workload of clicking on all of their websites regularly to keep them active? Maybe they can use the time they’ll be saving by not having to pop to half a dozen Handout Centres to pick up all those Disability brown envelopes in all those confusingly different names.
The move could see the closure of job centres and physical offices dealing with tax, vehicle licensing, passports and housing benefit within 10 years as services were offered through a single digital ”gateway”, Downing Street sources told the newspaper.
Closing the paradoxically named “job” centres and other Government buildings sounds very good, which of course is why it will never happen. Government never shrinks – its a fundamental law of nature. Various lobby groups and special interest organistations will claim that it infringes the ‘uman rights of the hermaphrodites with three ears section of society if there isn’t a dole office on every corner, so that is a non starter.
But the proposals came under fire from union leaders who complained that thousands of public sector workers would be made jobless
Oh yes, that as well.
Questions have also been raised about the impact on some older people unable to use the internet.
Ah, not half way down the Telegraph’s article and the second (after the Unions) special interest wrinkly lobby flexes their old and creaking muscles. Well we can do away with Handout Centres because your free cash can be paid directly into bank accounts. Not got one because you are too old? Get one. Or use your drug-dealer grandson’s account; he’ll like that. Don’t know how to use the internet? Ditto with the grandson thing.
Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, said: ”Cutting public services is not only bad for the public who use services but also the economy as we are pushing people who provide valuable services on the dole.”
Sorry, but TheEye got as far as skimming over the surname (which looks like a bad hand at Scrabble) and gave up at the Union bit. It’s bound to be nonsense. Oh well, I’ll read it so you don’t have to…here goes…right, ignoring the fact that it’s not “cutting” (which would be fantastic) it’s “shifting the deckchairs” (which is slightly not too bad) we’re back at this whole leftist ratchet of moving everyone on to the Government tit as either an enabler or a dependent. So just fuck off.
Among the Prime Minister’s advisers on the drive to put services online is world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
This is the man who included the unnecessary // in web addresses because it looked funky. And everyone knows Al Gore invented the Internet anyway. So we’ll discount him.
TheEye has had enough. Exhausted from so much hatred. Perhaps Gordoom can spare some of his pills.
I begin to wonder if speech will die out completely within a couple of generations. Already employers complain that school leavers are incapable of communicating properly.
And you only need look at the poor standard of language used in many comments and posts, to see where we are heading.
I may be a convert to modern technology, but I sometimes wish the internet would completely crash for a couple of weeks. Then some of us “Old Farts” might find our equally old skills in demand again!
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That was a great post Eye.
On the topic of language, did either of you happen to catch this very sinister development recorded by Inspector Gadget:
http://inspectorgadget.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/oh-how-we-laughed-but-not-too-loudly/
“With new probationary officers (now called Student Constables) encouraged to note down any “inappropriate” conversations between their peers, the ability to “challenge” ones colleagues for politically incorrect language a prerequisite for career advancement and the new Police Regulations making it an offence to even hear something “inappropriate” without reporting it, even the van is strangely quiet.”
!!!!!
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Thank you for the kind words. It was typed start to finish without going back to edit and “publish” was hit in annoyance, which are the signs of a heartfelt post.
I don’t get over to Inspector Gadget as often as I should – so I’ve just added it to my blogroll as a personal reminder. Cheers for that nudge. Worrying story. Without getting all Godwins Law on it, how many other democracies encourage children to report on parents, workers to report on superiors, life-affecting databases such as CRB to intentionally include unfounded rumours and gossip…and so on?
It’s not healthy and it’s not right.
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Stories of pupils using text-speak in essays (and teachers accepting that work) are now commonplace. All good things are progress, but not all progress is a good thing.
But if the internet fell apart then TheEye’s chief method of funding the red wine intake would take a terminal hit, so as far as that is concerned the show must go on…sorry.
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What if I choose not to take up the government’s amazingly generous offer .. and simply ignore my “personal” webpage, in the same way that I ignore Facebook & all the other crap sites .. What then ?
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Apart from the fact that it’s not going to ever work (remember a Govt IT project which did? No, me neither) you’d imagine that they’d try to make your life as awkward as possible if you avoid it.
All of these non-compulsory things, biometric chips in passports which *might* be used to store scary stuff in the future-but-not-yet (5 seconds in the microwave has done for my chip), ID cards which you won’t be required to carry except when you will….life will just be made to be more irritating if you don’t conform.
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Thanks Eye ..
I’ve spent an entire working lifetime conforming & doing as I was told, when I was told ..
Now that I’m retired, kids grown up & off my hands, living alone .. I think its time for a little fun being as awkward as its possible to be .. Heh heh …
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If the government can only get bigger then the result must eventually be a catastrophic collapse. We are going to have to find a way to give the State a vigorous pruning before that happens or even the Winter of Discontent will look like a cheerful day at the fair.
“painting arcane runes on a dead kestrel”
All this time I’ve been using live buzzards, no wonder the doctor is always surprised to see me. Excellent stuff.
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“encourage children to report on parents” It was good enough for Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Pol Potty, what’s the problem?
btw, the CRB does not “intentionally include unfounded rumours and gossip…”, it’s the up and coming which will be doing that 😀 for us.
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wtf r u goin on bout? dude 😛 .
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Nothing new to add about the nonsense of this new 1984ism but I take umbrage at the Telegraphs use of the word ‘citizen’. I am not a ‘citizen’ of anywhere thank you, I am a Subject of Her Majesty and nothing the vile EU says or does will alter that.
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Yes, I picked up on that too but adding that to the rant would have distracted. It will be moaned about on other occasions, rest assured!
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