It's crash, not flash

Yesterday, I made the throwaway remark in the comments of this thread that I didn't think the taxpayer should bail out Northern Rock, or any bank for that matter. This produced a reaction from one poster saying that the Bank of England wasn't the taxpayer. As we see from last night though, it really is the taxpayer that is underwriting Northern Rock's customer liabilities now. Saatchi & Saatchi are right, he's not flash.

Image shamelessly lifted from Guido

Lib Dems brand England rugby captain a bully

If you ever needed just the smallest bit of evidence that the Liberal Democrats are not really very serious then you can guarantee that the discussions and motions at their conference will provide it to you. Take for example yesterday where they passed a motion calling for schools to develop policies to tackle bullying. Sounds perfectly reasonable I know, but at its core is the assumption that school's don't have bullying policies already, which obviously nonsense.

However, what is more bizarre, and frankly absurd, is that during the debate, the England Rugby captain, Phil Vickery, was called a bully because he tripped someone up deliberately in that full-contact sport being played on the world stage in France currently. According to the Times, Maureen De Beer, from Harrow, asked "What is the culture we transmit to children? If you look at our sports fields, we have recently had the England rugby captain. What do we see in the papers? Oh, he's going to miss a couple of matches".

It is not known at this point whether someone took her down at the knees.

Using cabs to nick illegal immigrants?

Last year the Home Office apparently spent £962,533 on taxis. This in itself is quite an impressive sum of money, however, in a response to Mark Hoban MP, Liam Byrne seems to have let something quite worrying slip. In writing to Hoban and giving him the above figure he also said,

The majority of expenditure, £666,440, was incurred by the Border and Immigration Agency on operational activities.

For once I don't care about the money (that much). I'm slightly more bothered by the news that the Border and Immigration Agency - who as we all know now have flashy new uniforms - are using taxis as operational transport!

I mean sure, I've heard of hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to your own staff. But should the people "protecting" our borders be relying on them to carry out their operational duty? I now have visions of Agency staff waiting to go on a raid in their new uniforms whilst a voice from a phone says in their ear "yeah, it'll be two minutes mate, it's a blue mondeo"

Saudi's agree Typhoon deal

The Government of Saudi Arabia has reached agreement with the UK Government to purchase 72 Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft. The agreement follows plans outlined in December 2005 to establish a greater partnership in modernising the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces.

Amazing what can be achieved if you just drop a Serious Fraud Office investigation, huh?

More like money slipping through their fingers

If like me you watch far too much television you may have seen the following advert (found on YouTube which is being slow (again!)) in the past month or so popping up during the advert breaks of The Bill and X Factor. It's part of a campaign called In Our Hands by the Learning and Skills Council.
Should you be by any chance wondering, it cost the LSC, £324,367 to commission. This represented 4% of the total budget the LSC has for the campaign of £8 million. A snip of the budget really, until you realise that to show it during the summer as meant they've paid the TV channel £2,410,716 (ex VAT). They're also planning on spending a further £658,380 in Jaunary on the campaign.

The purpose is, of course, to drive people to the website, the website itself only cost £6,460 (ex VAT) to design, which sounds cheap, but then that figure excludes scoping, information architecture, development management and project management costs. Anyone who knows a little bit about IT project will know that a hell of a lot of money excluded.

So what's the traffic like? Well, in the eight weeks since the campaign launched they've managed to get 79,296 visitors. The vast majority of which were during the first couple fo weeks since when it has tailed off to an average of about 1,200 visits a day. So currently it's costing them somewhere in the region of £20-£30 a visit.

Money well spent then!

Well you could stop producing expensive documents for a start

I've just learnt about a rather neat little report from the Cabinet Office called Making Government Work Better". A laudable goal you may say, but you do have to wonder whether spending £50,299 on an 80-odd page document (that's £625 per page(ish)) is in keeping with the spirit of the title, no?

Joined-up Government at its very best

Apparently between 1st January to 30th June 2007, 84% of beef, 93% of lamb and 76% of pork used for catering in the headquarters of the Department for Children, Schools and Families was imported.

I'm guessing they missed the memo from July 2006 when the Secretary of State at DEFRA, David Miliband said "I want British government to support british farmers".

Well that didn't take long....

Northern Crock

Government to start three month financial advice trial

Oh how I laughed when I read this little gem. Apparently the Government is funding a three-month trial in the North West of England so that people can obtain sound financial advice.

But remember boys and girls, making note of the high debt-based society we have now, or noting the failure of Government to encourage financial awareness is nothing more than political opportunism, unless its the Government that is acknowledging it of course.

Will Sheffield Hallam be the birthplace of the coup against Ming?

A couple of anonymous posters have commented in recent weeks asaying my post are getting too long. What can I say, no Parliament means the short punchy stuff based on the day-to-day stuff just isn't there. However, I hope this post will do, as it poses a simple question.

Why did the former Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam, Richard Allen, register a domain name in July for his successor, Nick Clegg, of nickclegg.com when Nick Clegg already has a website at another address?

Is Mr Clegg having a redesign done by his predecessor? Is his predcessor planning to usurp him and make a run for Parliament again? Or maybe Clegg is preparing the way for a 'special' website that differentiates him from his standard MP one? I can't help but remember that Hazel Blears used .com for her deputy leadership bid whilst maintaining a .co.uk as her MP site.

All very curious indeed, I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation though!