Among yesterday’s front pages was a data visualisation which, at first glance, was one of the most effective I’ve ever seen: the Independent had made an infographic showing yesterday’s £6bn budget cuts in context - as a fraction of a debt mountain.
Then I looked closer - and something’s very, very wrong.
Can you tell what it […]
The Home Office are a meticulous bunch, it seems. I dropped a Freedom of Information request their way on the 5th November - as I haven’t had a reply yet I won’t say too much more about what I asked for, but the following dropped into my inbox earlier this week:
“Dear Mr Ball
I am sorry to have to write to you again to say that we have not yet completed the consideration of your request for information of 5 November. We therefore need to extend our reply date and hope to reply to you in full by 28 February.
I apologise for the further delay.
Yours sincerely
XXXXXXX*
Information Rights Team
Information Management Service”
“Consideration” refers to the public interest test - they’re deciding whether the public interest is better served by dishing out the information I asked for, or keeping it under wraps. All well and good, but they’ve had 65 working days to agonise over the decision so far. If it takes them this long to decide whether to release one piece of information, they must in wracks of self-doubt about policy making.
The police pay claim, for example, affects hundreds of thousands of officers. Wonder how long they must have spent working out the public interest implications of that ‘un?
Gordon Brown got called a ditherer for pondering an election for a week. Anyone got a good term for 3 months of consideration?
Also worth noting what a useful tool the public interest consideration is - it’s the only way to extend the timeframe for initial response beyond 20 days, leading some cynics to suggest it’s used to kick a few requests into the long grass…
*Name redacted by me - Government policy on releasing documents is absolutely not the fault of the particular civil servant I’m communicating with, so I shan’t name and shame the innocent,
With apologies to Blur, and credit to Mushroom for the idea. In the interest of balance, I’ll consider doing one on Dave and whoever the ‘Dems elect sometime soon.
I met him in a crowded room
During New Labour’s spending boom
He sat me down and so began
The story of a charmless man
Headed over from the treasury
Told me all his fiscal policy
But then all his macroeconomic stability
Ran into Northern Rock’s fragility
He went… (blah, blah, etc)
He thinks as heir to Tony Blair
Labour wouldn’t dare
Brief against him
Won’t reject him
He’s the man for five-year plans
He makes demands
But then his circle of advisers
Never criticises
And when you put it all together
Theres the model of a charmless man
He was a new broom with a moral plan
Which was scuppered by David Abrahams
But when my ID went missing from the van
I was getting sick of this charmless man
He’s late to sign the dotted line
Says it’s fine
To sign a “treaty”
Hopes it will be
He’s just so keen to keep the keys
To number ten
But yet again
The polls don’t look good for him
And when you put it all together
There’s the model of a charmless man
He thinks as heir to Tony Blair
Labour wouldn’t dare
Brief against him
Won’t reject him
He’s just so keen to keep the keys
To number ten
The polls just don’t look good for him
Could he be heading for the bin?
And when you put it all together
There’s the model of a charmless man
Best Prime Minister’s Question of all time? Patrick Cormack MP: “What does the Prime Minister want for Christmas?”. Seemingly knocked the Gord for six, too. Eventually he decided “a single day off”. Ambitious.
Final, irrefutable proof of Conservative bias at the BBC was anonymously handed to TwentyNothing today. Have a look at the screenshot below:
(Click to enlarge)
It’s subtle, but you may notice extra prominence was given to David Cameron’s picture than Gordon Brown. Shocking, eh? Of course, they shrunk it straight back down once they realised I was on to them….
