Mr. Carswell: To ask the Secretary of State for Defence how many former departmental staff are working in senior management positions with BAe Systems.I cannot begin to imagine why that might be!
Derek Twigg: The MOD does not hold this information.
Monday, July 23, 2007
The difference between knowing and holding information?
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6 comments:
Perhaps you could suggest a formula for which grades of staff should be tracked, a protocol for how they should be tracked, and a time limit for such tracking.
Preumably folk from other implicated Departments also - DTI and even perhaps DFID? FCO naturally - not to mention former members of the armed forces?
Why this might be Dizzy? Because we don't live in a police state ... however much you'd like to see it! Paradoxically enough.
Police state? Oh fuck off you tit. Yet again you have posted a comment that takes a single sentence and then claim I am saying a paragraph.
The most likely department that could find out that info would be Revenue and Customs as the NI code of the individuals concerned could be tracked. But that would bring up definite DPA and civil liberty issues.
If the MoD did hold that sort of info, how long would you expect them to hold it or to watch their ex-employees for?
At what level to do stop/start monitoring? The lowest, middle, highest, responsibility or section?
The question being asked was ill defined.
Your whole post is surely about tracking individuals' work choices. Stasi snooping if you like. I have not picked anything out of context.
As Neil says "definite DPA and civil liberty issues".
Bollocks Chris, it's about the well known revolving door between senior Whitehall and senior private sector.
You have taken stuff out of context because you have deliberately created a misrepresented straw man end from a straight forward point.
In fact, I have no idea how you have extrapolated that I am saying that I want to track job choices of individuals. It would take a fool to not realise that, when you put together the title of the post, along with the rather obvious revolving door accusation inherent within the question, that, far from suggesting that they should track individuals like a police state, I was making a point about the evasiveness of the answer in relation to the point of the question.
That being that the use of "holding" information in response to the question suggests that they do in fact "know" the information informally, but quite rightly, they do not officially hold the information. The question will evidently return in another format I imagine in order to extract the answer to the essential concern that there is a revolving door between Whitehall and the private sector that may be a bit iffy.
Sop you see Chris, you're response to my post was not only bollocks, it was a bit of thick frankly.
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