utterly predictable and indeed predicted

Here's a story from the Grauniad about privatised forensics lab LGC getting it Very Wrong Indeed.

Now here's another.

LGC said one of its staff members made a "typographical error" while inputting code, leading Scotland Yard to spend more than a year trying to trace a non-existent suspect. It was confirmed last month, when LGC carried out a review, that the partial DNA profile belonged to a scientist involved in the case.

"Having made further checks, LGC identified the partial profile as matching that of a Metropolitan police scientist who was involved in the original investigation of Mr Williams' home," a LGC spokeswoman said

I think what they mean is that the Met police guy's DNA was taken in order to eliminate him from the inquiry, running the profiles of the police who entered the place against the target samples in order to isolate anything interesting and also to confirm as a positive control that the analysis was indeed working. Then somebody fatfingered, with the result that the elimination profile used wasn't actually the right sequence and therefore didn't match. And what a case, too.

Only Theresa May and Francis Maude cooperating could have thought privatising forensics was a good idea. Mind you, who on earth thought retyping DNA hashes by hand was a good idea?

The politics of call centres, part two: sources of failure

So, why did we get here? Back in the mists of time, in the US Bell System, there used to be something called a Business Office, by contrast to a Central Office (i.e. what we call a BT Local Exchange in the UK), whose features and functions were set down in numerous Bell System Practice documents. Basically, it was a site where the phone company took calls from the public, either for its own account or on behalf of a third party. Its practices were defined by Bell System standardisation, and its industrial relations were defined by the agreement between AT&T and the unions, which specified the pay and conditions for the various trades and workplace types inside the monster telco. If something was a Business Office according to the book, the union agreement covering those offices would apply.

In the Reaganite 80s, after the Bell System was broken up, someone realised that it would be possible to get rid of the union rules if they could re-define the site as something else. Not only could they change the rules, but they could move the site physically to a right-to-work state or even outside the USA. This is, it turns out, the origin of the phrase "call centre".

In the UK, of course, call centres proliferated in parallel with utility privatisation and financial deregulation. A major element in the business case for privatisation was getting rid of all those electricity showrooms and BT local offices and centralising customer service functions into `all centres. At the same time, of course, privatisation created the demand for customer service in that it was suddenly possible to change provider and therefore to generate a shit-load of admin. Banks were keen to get rid of their branches and to serve the hugely expanding credit card market. At another level, IT helpdesks made their appearance.

On the other hand, hard though it is to imagine it now, there was a broader vision of technology that expected it all to be provided centrally - in the cloud, if you will - down phone lines controlled by your favourite telco, or by the French Government, or perhaps Rupert Murdoch. This is one of the futures that didn't happen, of course, because PCs and the web happened instead, but you can bet I spent a lot of time listening to people as late as the mid-2000s still talking about multimedia services (and there are those who argue this is what stiffed Symbian). But we do get a sneak-preview of the digital future that Serious People wanted us to have, every time we have to ring the call centre. In many ways, call centres are the Anti-Web.

In Britain, starting in the 1990s, they were also part of the package of urban regeneration in the North. Along with your iconic eurobox apartments and AutoCAD-shaped arts centre, yup, you could expect to find a couple of gigantic decorated sheds full of striplighting and the precariat. Hey, he's like a stocky, Yorkshire Owen Hatherley. After all, it was fairly widely accepted that even if you pressed the button marked Arts and the money rolled in, there was a limit to the supply of yuppies and there had to be some jobs in there as well.

You would be amazed at the degree of boosterism certain Yorkshire councils developed on this score, although you didn't need top futurist Popcorn Whatsname to work out that booming submarine cable capacity would pretty quickly make offshoring an option. Still, if Bradford didn't make half-arsed attempts to jump on every bandwagon going, leaving it cluttered with vaguely Sicilian failed boondoggles, it wouldn't be Bradford.

Anyway, I think I've made a case that this is an institution whose history has been pathological right from the start. It embodies a fantasy of managing a service industry in the way the US automakers were doing at the same time - and failing, catastrophically.

Sunday SDR, Chapter 5: People, Equipment, and Structures

So we've had the grand tour d'horizon; we've had the self criticism; we've had the very rapid skip over the nuclear issue; we've had a careful balance of general-purpose capability and counterinsurgent language. Now for some hardcore bureaucracy. It's Chapter 5 of the SDR Green Paper - People, Equipment, and Structures.

This kicks off with the MOD's personnel problems. As in essentially any organisation of the last 15 years or so, there's an invocation of having to learn new skills many times in your career, etc, etc. There's going to be a "whole force concept" review of how the MOD manages its people. There are warm words about looking after our veterans being a moral value. And then there's this:

The provision of accommodation, for example, is a potential disincentive to home ownership and may not represent the best investment we can make in helping families and personnel deal with the demands of Service life.

I would have thought the disincentive to home ownership would be the wages, and the, well, demands of Service life. (How many mortgage lenders are cool with the idea that the signatory may get shot at any moment?) Seriously. What the fuck? Apparently they're looking at "alternative models for accommodation", which might be good if it involved killing off the Annington Homes money pit, but it doesn't sound like it.

On equipment, the general theme of a renewed interest in industrial policy is there, although the section is very general indeed, in fact vague. Tellingly, the issue of operational sovereignty - which has flared up all over again with regard to the F-35 - is raised:

We will have to revalidate our overall approach to:
* Operational Sovereignty. Our Armed Forces rely on assured overseas sources for some important equipment and support but there are cases where specific industrial capability must be located in the UK for operational reasons

There's also a nod to arms exporters, presumably to pass the document through the bits of the MOD involved with DESO and friends.

On organisational issues, the chapter contains a bit more meat; it appears a major re-apprisal of the MOD's structure and business processes is coming, although the drafters warn that the costs of constant reorganisation have been a very serious problem.

Change must be considered carefully in the light of the risks associated with reorganisation highlighted in the Haddon- Cave Report. The future Review will offer an opportunity to re-examine the model and to determine whether and how we might be able to improve on it.

Haddon-Cave is the report on the Nimrod XV230 crash in 2006, which demonstrated that the Nimrod fleet was essentially unairworthy in its entirety and that the engineering and management systems intended to guarantee the safety and effectiveness of the MOD's aircraft. A major issue it identified was the impact of constant organisational change - something of a theme throughout the public sector in the Blair era.

The chapter finishes with a ritual call for greater efficiency. There's also this worrying statement, in the light of the bizarre property-booster bit:

the scope for further rationalisation of the defence estate;

Not again...

In short, if Chapter 3 was impressive, Chapter 5 is poor - with the exception of the reference to Haddon-Cave, it's mostly either made up of truisms or else simply too vague to mean anything at all. And what on earth is this stuff about property? Notably, the comments home in on it at once; it's also noticeable that by Chapter 5, the trolls have landed.

Magic and the decline of railway privatisation

There is something pleasantly surreal about this story. London Reconnections reports on the appearance of the heads of Tube Lines, the Underground, and Mr. Chris Bolt before the London Assembly's transport committee. It doesn't sound obviously hilarious, but then, who is Chris Bolt? You may vaguely remember him as the Rail Regulator, the chap who had the unenviable task of acting as ref between Railtrack, the train operators, the rolling stock lessors, and the Government in the glory years of rail privatisation. That was all 10 years ago, so why is he being quizzed by the committee?

Because the Tube PPP contracts specify that he, and only he, act as arbitrator of any disputes between the contractors and the Tube. Not the institution of the Rail Regulator, which in any case has been abolished - Mr Bolt personally.

It's been a while. Did they ever lose touch with him? What colour was his hair when he answered the call? I can imagine Department for Transport civil servants looking on park benches and in squats in Dalston, scrutinising all the Facebook pages ending in Bolt, placing advertisements in provincial newspapers. What if they hadn't been able to trace him? Would his next-of-kin have inherited the heavy responsibility - the DfT Director, Railways descending on an otherwise harmless citizen, like some Sicilian matriarch in a grey suit bringing news that the vendetta is now up to you?

Or is the process less brutally secular? Perhaps a Bolt will simply emerge, like the next Dalai Lama.

Of course, Bolt's role is deeply mythic. Alone, the Bolt continues to guard the sacred wisdom of the Railtrack years, wandering in the wilderness. One day, he will return to judge Tube Lines' trespasses, or rather not:

Chris Bolt felt it was important to reiterate that the increased cost of the contract was not based on the failures of Tube Lines so far, but on a natural increase in the theoretical cost of the upgrade work.

The faith cannot err; it can only be betrayed.

Even Boris Johnson has repented of rail privatisation.

It is time to bring an end to this demented system.

Actually, he's only recanted - I see no sign of repentance from the man who accused Stephen Byers of being as bad as Robert Mugabe, not once but twice, in order to defend Railtrack after the corpses had piled up.

first mover advantage

If it's possible to get Americans to start a string of minor riots in order not to have at least $80bn worth of national healthcare, surely it must be possible to start a good row about whatever it is the Conservatives have in store for us? We stand to lose at least that and more. I ask in the light of this post at Bickerstaffe Record, which suggests, not stupidly, that making an Aunt Sally of the credit rating agencies might be a good idea for a demo.

After all, it's very true that they played a key role in the great crash, and before that in the post-dotcom Enron/telecoms fraudfest. As Eavis & McLean point out in The Smartest Guys in the Room, the rating agencies were in the best possible position to work out just how much debt Enron had hidden down rabbit holes and in other people's wheely bins - because every time Enron pulled another fancy dan financing, they had the ratings agencies rate the bonds that came out of it.

We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.

And, strategically, this is always going to be a problem, because unlike all other forms of credit risk assessment, the agencies make their money from the party issuing the debt, so it's always in their interest to be optimistic. (Similarities with this little beauty of a deal are entirely appropriate.) When they are dealing with private clients, that is; if it's Argentina or Britain involved, they just go ahead and shoot. John Quiggin has an excellent post on their failure and their role in pushing PFI in Australia.

But I have my doubts that any such action will change their opinion; in fact, it wouldn't be the aim of such an action. The point would be rather to render their opinion less relevant and alter the conditions under which it is formed. However, I have just ordered the domain name standardispoor.com, and I welcome suggestions for what we might do with it.

More broadly, what worries me is that the Tories will pull some horror out of their back pocket in the financial year 2010-2011, and by the time it's passing through the House, we'll just have started getting angry. This is one of the historical lessons of On Roads; if you really want to stop something, you need to start earlier than you think.

This is why, by the way, projects like FreeOurBills are important. If there's no point protesting about a road project after it gets into the national programme, the answer is to shorten the feedback loop and react quicker. This is much more interesting and important - real citizen technology - than Twittering for Iran, DDOSing low value Russian Web sites, or any of the other manifestations of the fake version.

So this is one of the few good features of open primaries I can think of; they provide an opportunity to put together an organisation early in the game, which is roughly how Obama dunnit. In a parliamentary system, though, this is much less important.

Shouldn't we be getting our lists together now, rather than waiting for the Tories? I agree that this implies giving up on the elections, but then, who wouldn't, and who doesn't suspect that a surviving Labour government wouldn't be just as bad?

is there anything stupid going on at Tim Worstall's?

We've blogged before about the NHS's computer project. So I'm not at all happy about this remarkably silly post at Timmeh's. He takes issue with a post of Richard Murphy's about bank nationalisation:

Yup, the people who brought you the NHS Spine are to be put in charge of developing all banking software in Britain.

Well, this is a strawman to begin with. Is Murphy the Chancellor now? But let that pass. Really? A group of mostly American healthcare computing specialists? Several of which no longer exist? Or does he mean the big IT consulting firms involved - like IBM, BT Global Services, and Accenture? Because I'm pretty sure they do a hell of a lot of financial work as it stands; in fact, everyone was worrying last week about IBM's third quarter results precisely because banks are big customers. (They turned out to be OK, in that mysterious IBM way.*)

But perhaps he thinks the NHS NPfIT was developed by teh government bureaucrats? Or at least, he's willing to pretend it was to suit ideology? The whole problem with NPfIT, as we've said before, is that the system was developed completely in isolation from NHS bureaucrats or indeed anyone else who would have to use it. The NHS trust IT departments were kept well out of it. The upshot was that the developers knew literally nothing of the NHS's requirements, its business processes, or the data the system was meant to handle.

No wonder it was a disaster. In fact, when a group of US hospital bureaucrats had a go at designing a medical IT system, they came up with a beauty - there's even a satisfied customer in the comments. Why? Because they knew what it was meant to do and how. Compare this comment:

I met a guy who works for this company. I cannot repeat what he said, since he has a family to feed. But suffice to say he was deeply worried about the implications for safety of life. That was a few months ago.

The whole thing is rotten to the core, and desperately needs to be scrapped. Now.

The good news is that the thing still doesn't work well enough to turn it on even as a pilot project, so we're safe for a while yet. But what did happen the last time the Government took on a really challenging in-house IT project? You ask Daniel Davies.

(* probably something to do with asking the fucking users - that or the staple Nazi market, or wearing a lot of pale blue shirts.)

Can't we be more helpful and appropriate?

This story; from China is predictably horrible:

Chinese authorities have sentenced two women in their 70s to a year's "re-education through labour" following their application to hold a protest demonstration during the Beijing games, a relative said yesterday.

Officials said this week they had not approved a single permit for a demonstration, despite designating three parks as protest zones.

The International Olympic Committee's communications director said she would look at the women's case, but stressed the games were "not a panacea for all ills".

Wu Dianyuan, 79, and her neighbour Wang Xiuying, 77, sought to protest about their forced eviction from their homes in 2001. They went to the Beijing Public Security Bureau (PSB) four times this month to request permission to demonstrate in the zones - created for the Olympics to counter criticism about restrictions on political expression in China...

But that isn't my point. My point is that it's all oddly familiar. For a start, they have been placed under an "order" which restricts their movements, subjects them to the scrutiny of a neighbourhood committee, and isn't subject to a court hearing or to an appellant jurisdiction of any kind. Why not? Because, of course, it's not actually punishment. Only breaking; the order would be a crime, and would result in your being sent to a labour camp.

Yes; they've reinvented the ASBO. Meanwhile, 77 applications to demonstrate have been made and absolutely none granted. 74, apparently, were "resolved through consultations", another two turned down because the form wasn't properly filled in, and another rejected on the grounds it involved a child. (Won't somebody think of the children?) And I was fascinated by this quote from Sir Mucho Pomposo Wang Wei of the Organising Committee:

Wang Wei, vice-president of the Beijing organising committee, told reporters they should be "satisfied" with the protest zones. "The idea of demonstration is that you are hoping to resolve issues, not to demonstrate for the sake of demonstrating. We are pleased that issues have been resolved through dialogue and communication - this is how we do it in Chinese culture," he told a press conference.

He added: "We want everyone to express their opinion. Everyone has the right to speak; this is not the same as demonstrating.

It's so familiar; the insistence that anyone who disagrees is doing so out of spite, that only acquiescence is "serious" or "helpful". I'm surprised he didn't offer them a Big Conversation, but in fact, with the right mistranslation he might have done. Similarly, the re-education through labour order for disturbing the public is just a translator's caprice away from an anti-social behaviour order.

Perhaps there's a wider truth here; this sort of events/urban regeneration politics seems to follow the same grammar all over the world. It's conceived of as a project; which implies there are only participants, or else obstructions. Despite the money and the bulldozers, it respects class boundaries; veering around the villas of the rich. It needs special security arrangements which always turn out to involve some sort of summary justice based on vague and unchallengeable notions of appropriateness, propriety, or order; similarly, these are always temporary but are never revoked. The state authorities and private interests involved are indistinguishable. (Interestingly, the legislative foundation tends to be very hard to get rid of; the Act on the Great Exhibition of 1851 is still in force and still a major headache for anyone planning to build on or near the original site.)

More deeply, it seems to include a sort of quasi-medical view of society, or more specifically of the city. It, and we, need to be made better. Not only the method of this treatment, but the definition of better, is reversed for the doctors; but we are responsible if it doesn't work, because we didn't comply sufficiently. The nudgers' cognitive biases are not examined; it's our fault if we don't press the right coloured shape in response. Equally, no-one suggests subjecting the Home Office to compulsory psychotherapy in order to get rid of its hysterical anxiety, but it seems to want to make everyone happy.

The grass is several shades of blue; every MP trips over you...

So, the Tories are currently making hay on the economy, while the black clouds are overhead. Unfortunately it's all drivel, and specifically, it's drivel because the current economic crisis is entirely the result of the Tory economic settlement. The promise of infinite free money from property was the core Thatcherite proposition, and its costs (specifically, high interest rates and a high pound) were traditionally covered by North Sea oil. Of course, rising house prices aren't actually money, just a way of borrowing from your kids, with the special feature that they don't get any schools or railways for the borrowing. But the Tory achievement was to get an economy specialised in property speculation accepted by both major parties. And, as we have seen, they have very good personal reasons to pretend that the government could just stick the bubble back together if it wanted.

All oppositions pretend something like this, of course; but it's incumbent on them to have some idea of the difference between bullshit and government. Just look at the Tories' performance over Northern Rock. To recap, they thought the Bank of England's money was taxpayers' money in August but not in January; they thought the Bank of England was an independent agency in August but under ministerial line management in January; they imagined the Bank of England had vastly more money that it does throughout. Thank God for the civil service.

And even if you grant them a huge pass on administrative reality, their stated positions are wildly incoherent. In the pastel corner, there's Huggy Dave's quality of life reports. In the phlegm-spatter corner, there's Mad Jack Redwood's report on how the economy can be revived by letting private "care homes" pack in more codgers per square foot. What an invention - the battery granny farm. Will the staff get Dave from PR's improved work-life balance? Bollocks they will. However, Greasy Phil Hammond's specialist NHS property development firm, Castlemead Developments Ltd, would presumably find investments in this field rather tastier. More seriously, what the hell does Mad Jack think our problems are? Aren't they more about the tradable sector, and what happens to the balance of payments with an energy import bill and tanking City volumes?

None of this should be any surprise. Look at the chief economist of chouchou snackthinkers Policy Exchange. What has he discovered? Well, his tube train was late, and so he's written "England: An Obituary on a Great Country". Seriously. And he apparently thinks "Britain" supplies IKEA goods and services, rather than a huge Swedish multinational. This used to be the quality of a middling to poor Tory newspaper columnist. Now it's their intellectual foundation.

A Truth Moment at the CRB

According to the BBC, the Home Office really, really doesn't get the basic truth that 0.01% of a really big number is quite a big number. The Torygraph reported that the Criminal Records Bureau had mistakenly told its customers between February 2007 and February 2008 that some 680 people had criminal records when in fact they had none. The Home Office's response:

The Home Office said CRB has a 99.98% accuracy rate in vetting people working with children and vulnerable adults.

Indeed. I keep saying this; 99.98% accuracy, which is the politician's way of saying a 0.02% failure rate, is only good enough if 0.02% of the total isn't a large number. It must seem silly to people outside the telecoms business that we go on about 99.999% reliability. But that is a percentage of up to hundreds of millions of calls and signalling events.

Fortunately, there are some numbers in the story. The Home Office claims that 80,000 (a round number, but we've got nothing else to go on) people were prevented from taking up posts involving "vulnerable people"; there's no way of telling whether this means only ones involving "vulnerable people", only ones where a job offer was withdrawn, or just the total CRB checks that came up positive, and there's no telling what period of time it refers to. If it was the total for 2007-2008, that means the chance of a positive CRB check being a false positive is 0.85 per cent (99.15 per cent in contractorspeak). And we *haven't* even considered the false negatives....

So where's your 0.02 per cent now? Naturally, it's possible that the 80,000 covers more than one year...but hold on. If there were many more, some such figure recurring every year, then this suggests the actual numbers are even worse. The CRB has been going since, what, 2002? 13,333 refusals a year on average. We know the 680 false positives are for just one year; which would make it a 5.1% false positive rate for 2007-08. (That's 94.9% in contractorspeak.) So, the Home Office's figures cannot possibly be right; it's impossible to have a negative number of false negatives, so we *know* that the CRB does not provide 99.98% accuracy. Surely this means the Government should be suing Capita or whoever?

Keeping Britain Tidy

So, yer National Staff Dismissal Registry. Several people have asked me to comment on this horrible intersection of Blairite justice-style product and the good old Economic League, and they won't be surprised that I'm against it. For all the usual reasons - you don't actually need to do anything wrong to be on it, and there is no effective limit on who gets the information, and no way of getting off it again.

But the curious thing is how it fits into a very specific set of Government policies and ways of seeing. I started making inquiries about it, thinking that some of the old Economic League/Caprim folks might be involved. I haven't found any yet, but the people I did find were interesting. It kicks off with something called the "Alliance Against Business Crime", a Home Office-sponsored talking shop for large retailers (basically). It actually runs the NSDR, and until this year it received Home Office funding.

Here's the board of directors. Note that its independent existence doesn't even run to a Web site - it's part of the British Retail Consortium's facilities. The board is a lineup of interest group representatives, cops...and who's this? Richard Barron, Director, Encams. Encams? That has a good, sinister sound to it. Right? In fact, Encams is what used to be called Keep Britain Tidy, and Barron is indeed its Director of Community Safety and Town Centres. What does this mean in practice?

Well, it looks like he and his organisation have become part of the general government-inspired push for greater private control of public space. He shares the board with one Dr. Julie Grail, chief executive of "British BIDs". BID here means Business Improvement District, a government scheme under which private companies essentially get to take over the management of a chunk of a city. It's been much protested about, and it's probably worth mentioning that such police/business hybrid entities often run CCTV deployments. The AABC appears to link these with Business Crime Reduction Partnerships, which are yet another Home Office-driven security privatisation exercise. You won't be surprised to learn that it's Hazel Blears' fault.

Unsurprisingly, its head for the North-West is a casino security manager. Me, I find the very words give me the cold dreads. Barron, it turns out, actually went from the AABC to Keep Britain Tidy; note that this AABC newsletter encourages members to lobby the government for heavier sentencing and more toughosity in general. There you have it - the Home Office actually paying people to tell it how scared of crime they are. It's a kind of inverted Stafford Beer process - a recursive feedback loop with the bullshit output coupled to the input.

Here we have Barron speaking at a conference for the private security industry:

The patrollers, largely young, many women, visit premises, note problems, and are in radio contact with PCSOs – as in Lincoln, four are paid for by the BID - and police. There’s a dedicated town centre police team. Bedfordshire Police entered into a baseline agreement as to where and when the team will work. As a result police in the town centre have moved from being an ‘arrest squad’ to a ‘prevention squad’. The BID runs a retail radio link and equivalent Nightnet scheme, and runs a photo-exclusion scheme for the day and night-time economies. Reported crime and stock loss have fallen.

Richard Barron, previously a regional manager for AABC, is now community safety and town centres director with charity Encams, the former Keep Britain Tidy. He too stressed the government’s cleaner-greener-safer agenda.

Note the bit about the police actually handing part of their role over, as well as the delightfully Orwellian "photo-exclusion scheme for the day and night-time economies" (I think it means people in uniforms ostentatiously photographing and following persons suspected of being poor). They are literally rolling back the frontiers of the state. Further down, you'll notice him encouraging the distribution of more fixed-penalty tickets (thus increasing the reported crime figures).

We used to imagine the totalitarian enemy as being insanely, unnaturally orderly - Prussians heel-clicking around general staff situation conferences, Soviet officials poring over their input-output tables. Whatever short-term advantage this machine society gave them, we thought, it could never overcome the smelly creativity of our democracy. But now, keeping Britain tidy extends to a state-sponsored labour blacklisting exercise, which seems to be conceived of as a subsidy to commercial property developers. What does it say about us when a campaign against litter is part of a scheme like this?

Further, what does it say about Dan Norris MP, that he was directly involved in killing off the Economic League, but voted for ID cards?

Young Enterprise Curse Watch

I recall I once told readers of this blog to watch out for anyone who starred in a "Young Enterprise" program or won an award for the so-and-so most likely to succeed in business. They'll be the ones vanishing over the hills with Acme Materials Science Ltd's total cash balances, while you try to work out what you'll do with all the squid beaks and what to tell the Financial Services Authority, or else they'll be the ones being sucked down the whirlpool at the centre of some kind of fraudulent trainwreck, just as the fascist octopus sings its swan song.

Something similar appears to have happened in the case of these young entrepreneurs, who took on a contract to supply US-supported police and soldiers in Afghanistan with arms despite a total absence of relevant experience, common sense, or integrity. The result has been the export of a scary quantity of Albanian ammunition, much of which is either dangerous or useless or both, and the waste of large sums of federal money.

It is highly probable that our friend Viktor Bout got in on the deal at some point, too, as it involved sending armaments from the Balkans to Afghanistan and Iraq by air freight. (I just did a Freudian typo: "air fright".) But the whole business has a saving personal touch. Here's a photo of executive vice president and licensed masseur, David Packouz:

I have to say that had I been the NYT pictures editor, I'd have been unable to resist captioning this photograph Dude, Where's My Kalashnikov? There's also this:

When the police searched Mr. Diveroli, they found he had a forged driver’s license that added four years to his age and made him appear old enough to buy alcohol as a minor. His birthday had been the day before.“I don’t even need that any more,” he told the police, the report said. “I’m 21 years old.”

Oh, the humanity!

Can haz air-to-air refuelling? Oh noes...

FT: the AirTanker bond issue has, not surprisingly, gone pear-shaped as the monoline insurers fall apart. The story includes some vital detail on precisely what the Defence Procurement PFI team and the consortium have been doing all this time; essentially, trying to finance the deal at an acceptable rate of interest in the middle of a credit crunch. The alternative plan, to issue bonds, is now dead, so it's back to the banks.

Meanwhile, the VC-10 fleet soldiers on; better hope the cracks aren't serious. (This should be an unintended benefit of the credit crisis; silly PFI deals will be really, really difficult to get away for some time to come.)

Paying the cost to be the boss (of the civil service)

I knew roughly what Resource Accounting and Budgeting was all about, but I never imagined they could invent a system that would require NHS trusts to pay back any overspend twice. Especially as, at the same time, the introduction of payment-by-results means that their income scales directly with their output. So, they can't reduce the number of operations performed, because their income would go down still more. That also means they can't really cut any variable or semivariable costs - pay is set by long-term negotiations with the unions that aren't readily adjustable, and inputs such as drugs are dependent on the scale of production.

Worse, a lot of them are committed to paying unalterable PFI charges, so even the overheads cannot be trimmed. It's less well known, but MOD has been struggling with RAB ever since its inception. By definition, MOD has a lot of stuff that is only used if there is a war on - vehicles, sets of combat body armour, bandages. RAB requires government departments to pay a notional cost of capital charge on the value of their assets back to the Treasury, which is or used to be 6 per cent. This was a significant drag for the MOD, which responded by flogging stuff it then had to buy back when the wars started. There are vehicles in Afghanistan that were acquired for Kosovo, sold, bought back for Iraq, sold, and bought back again. It's hard not to see the whole thing as an exercise in treating the public servant as a servant.

Latest is that the RAF is leasing-back two Canberra PR9 reconnaissance planes it disposed of literally months ago. The Canberra was the RAF's first jet bomber, going into service in 1949 or thereabouts, and it is planned that it will finally be replaced by the (delayed) ASTOR reconnaissance plane, a business jet stuffed with gadgetry. That isn't in service yet, so it's yet another of those "capability gaps" Blair's defence secretaries are so fond of. PR-9 had some extremely advanced cameras, the like of which are unavailable on anything else - it was one of the few UK or NATO assets the Americans specifically asked for in Afghanistan in 2001.

I'd very much like to know what the two (officially civilian) PR9s are doing.

Another Killer Boss Sent Down

I'm absolutely delighted to see that, after the chap responsible for the Tebay rail accident that killed four workers got nine years, the employers of the 21 Chinese cockle pickers drowned in Morecambe Bay have been convicted. Now come on...let's see a proper sentence.