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Thursday 18 June 2020

Told ya ...

From Wednesday 6th May

I have no confidence at all that the tracing app being developed by Whitehall will work. If it's up to the abysmal standards of error, malfunction, delay and inadequacy that have characterised the rest of the actions of the Department of Health, it will collapse half an hour after release, the first week''s central data will be hacked, warning SMS messages will be sent to everyone by mistake and the bluetooth errors will destroy thousands of phones.

Ahem. 


17 comments:

Anonymous said...

No shit, Sherlock.

Dave_G said...


Love the hypocrisy. They expect a Google/Apple product to be 'more secure' and offer 'greater security'.

Jeebus H........

Sobers said...

One thing this covid crisis should have shown people (though very few will draw the correct conclusion) is that the State really can't 'do' anything, not in a hurry anyway. Even when the spending taps are turned on 100% and money is no object, the State apparatus just can't operate at anything other than a glacial pace. The food production/processing/distribution/retailing industry managed cope when the hospitality trade closed overnight, and all the country's demand for food was focused entirely on the retail outlets instead. An up to 50% increase in demand overnight. Despite a few wobbles in the first 2 weeks, there was never any doubt that they would keep the stores stocked and people fed. In the same time the NHS and PHE managed to run low on PPE, despite the non-covid parts of the NHS being a ghost town. There's 1.5m people employed by the NHS and it seems that none of them are responsible for anything whatsoever. Their sole role is to turn up, collect their pay and pension entitlement, and when the SHTF because they haven't done their job properly, turn around and blame the Tory Health Minister, because 'Tory Austerity' of course!

Anonymous said...

You aren't looking at it in the right way. These initiatives are a means of funneling cash into the pockets of Dom's Brexit pals. Sod the outcomes. All that money spaffed on Suella's Brexit tweets, Dyson's ventilators, Nightingale hospitals, agencies recruiting staff for said hospitals and contact tracers etc.

Keep up!

Span Ows said...

What Sobers said...

Greg T said...

Typical of BoZo the clown & his gang of corrupt amateurs, I'm afraid.
Scummings is the poster-boy for their antics.
Even more than before Brexit is going to be a total disaster ON TOP OF this utter shambles ....

Dave_G said...


The sh1t hardly hit the fan in the NHS over the Covid scam - most (all?) hospitals show a dramatic DROP in throughput and wards are vastly under-used.

They even started by abrogating their responsibilities and offloaded 'infected' pensioners to retirement homes and sticking THEM for the trouble instead.

Save the NHS? How about saving US from them?

Anonymous said...

I'm convinced. Our Prime Minister is a one-trick pony: Boris is very good at being Boris.

Of topic but England is a lot older than the North Atlantic Slave Trade - if you looked out of the windows of Lulworth Castle in the 1700's you'd see across the way hundreds of white people toiling in the fields.

Their lives were no better than the slaves in the New World.

An observation written in her diary by the negro companion to Lady Drax.

Steve

Doonhamer said...

Ventilators?
Tumble weed.
Is/was there a shortage?
Did they kill people?
How many companies and workers are now manufacturing these things?
Can you get them on ebay now?
Look, a squirrel!

Anonymous said...

The penny seems to be dropping over the pond

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-eu-is-a-more-powerful-partner-on-china-than-the-us-might-think/

Anonymous said...

@ Anon 18:19

Dido's probably pocketed a nice pay packet from Test and Trace.

Married to the Brexit party?

Sen. C.R.O'Blene said...

I never understood why it was so important to protect 'the NHS', when I was always brought up to believe that I - as an individual - was the subject of all laws and creeds, not the mechanics of an organisation.

It seemed that the need of individual was not the issue, it was how to somehow deal with it, and the general public were just looked on as an entity, not citizens who actually pay the money for the NHS people, their front line staff, their under-managers, their failures, their pensions, their protection (?) equipment - an issue which was handed about like a man with no arms - and of course, the appropriation of places like Excel, which, as a 'precaution', were highly publicised, but only to place the NHS on an even higher pedestal, while normal people judged for themselves what they could and couldn't do.

I don't really blame Boris Johnson for all this, most politicians are not the sort of people who are particularly bright, and in normal life would be pretty worthless, except that they yell a bit, moan about racialists, and generally make a nuisance of themselves, while making very little difference, so anyone in Westminster would have been seen to f*** things up at some stage, but, the question still remains in Scrobs' ol' grey head - am I a citizen, or just a number...?

DeeDee99 said...

....and the country shrugs. We're used to the Public Sector and the Government being absolutely effing useless but most realise there's nothing they can do about it.

They're protected by an Establishment which wants no change whatsoever in the way we're governed or who gets the lucrative taxpayer-funded jobs, since they're one and the same. And they're confident that, although they've completely wrecked the economy and unnecessarily ruined the lives of millions, they'll be alright.

Poisonedchalice said...

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over again but expecting a different result. And so it goes with the UK government of all stripes. Blairs national program for IT, aptly called NPfT, was a waste of £13.5 Bn. Why? Because all the work was given to the same cronies; the usual suspects live CrapCo and Crap4S and BTCrap. And here we are again giving the job to large scale cronies.

In my home town there is a small App developer that I use to aid my business. Primarily they are a games developer who have been operating for 15 years with just two guys. Truth is, they can turn there hands to anything in cross-platform development. They could have knocked this job down in 4 weeks.

Sobers said...

" Because all the work was given to the same cronies; the usual suspects live CrapCo and Crap4S and BTCrap. And here we are again giving the job to large scale cronies."

"In my home town there is a small App developer that I use to aid my business. Primarily they are a games developer who have been operating for 15 years with just two guys. Truth is, they can turn there hands to anything in cross-platform development. They could have knocked this job down in 4 weeks."

Has it ever occurred to you 'why' CrapCo get the gig rather than SmallTownFirm? Its because SmallTownFirm don't have a Diversity Policy document the size of the phone book, or a document detailing how they aren't involved in Modern Slavery, or a massive department whose job it is to fill in the Tender Documents the size of another phone book. Thats why. The reason CrapCo and its ilk exist is precisely because of all the regulations the State declares that every contractor who tenders for government work must jump through. Heck, the owner of SmallTownFirm might even had voted Leave and that would never do for a Government contractor! And its a pound to a penny his workforce isn't suitably 'diverse'.

What you need to understand is that the State turns everything it touches to crap. Even when it involves the private sector in government work it manages to get the worst of both worlds, private sector prices and government sector sloth and inefficiency, because the regulations imposed on private contractors effectively make them just another State department.

Its a fallacy to think that a private sector organisation is intrinsically better than a State run one, it isn't. All organisations fundamentally trend towards self interest and inefficiency at the expense of the customer, whether publicly or privately owned and run. The one difference is that in the private sector the customer has choice - he can spend his money with X, and if he gets bad service he can take his custom elsewhere. Thats it. Thats entire driving force within the free marketplace that keeps businesses honest. Take a private sector business and place it in the public sector, with no market discipline and they'll be about as bad as any public sector organisation. Maybe just slightly better as the owners will want to keep sucking on the public teat as long as possible so will try and keep things working at least marginally better than the public sector does. But the customer of a private sector State contractor is not the public they are serving, its the Government who pays the bills, so the customer can go hang as long as they keep the civil servants who hand out the contracts happy. State sector = no market feedback, regardless of the nominal status of the service operator.

The State sector will continue to be utter crap until it is reformed such that ordinary people who use the services are free to take their custom and money elsewhere. Until that point it will continue to fail dismally, regardless of whether it runs things in-house, or employs outside contractors.

Poisonedchalice said...

@Sobers

Your reply is funny, true and sad in equal measure. I'm sure that my SmallTown firm contractor would be delighted to receive the lower OJEU limit money of £122,976 in order to get the job done, tested and released onto Apple Store and Google Play Console :(

Anonymous said...

The slogan should be "Save us from the NHS"
M.