UK Government To Back Off Plans To Share Private Data

Richard Rothwell writes with news that Jack Straw, Britain's Justice Secretary, has made public plans to drop provisions from the Coroners and Justice Bill which would have allowed the government to take information gathered for one purpose and use it for any other purpose. "A spokesman for Mr Straw said the 'strength of feeling' against the plans had persuaded him to rethink. The proposals will be dropped entirely from the Coroners and Justice Bill, and a new attempt will be made to reach a consensus on introducing a scaled-back version at an unspecified stage in the future." After defending the government's intentions, Straw bowed to pressure from a variety of groups and individuals who presented objections to the bill.

Comments

Good for them

[Rog-Mahal]

Glad to hear it. The bill sounds like government data mining, and the earlier /. article made it clear that the data could make it to the public sector. Nice to know that public outcry can still make a difference.

Am I the only one...

[pushing-robot]

...who finds it slightly depressing to read about a representative government choosing to "bow to pressure from [their constituents]"?

It reminds me of an XKCD punchline: "Strictly speaking, it's better than the alternative—But someone is clearly doing their job horribly wrong."

Re:Orwell's 1984

[jeevesbond]

is Orwell's "1984" being used as a policy guide in the UK by her politicians?

No, but Franz Kafka's The Trial is. :)

The people comparing today's Britain to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four are not taking everything into account. For a start the government isn't trying to insert cameras in everyone's bedrooms, they're not that cynical. They actually believe what they're doing is for the benefit of the people.

Also, many of these awful laws are driven by tabloid newspapers (Rupert Murdoch and The Sun). Part of Tony Blair's success was thanks to his schmoozing with Murdoch's and other tabloids, Brown has continued this trend. Now, despite crime rates decreasing, tabloids have been screeching about youth and 'knife-crime' for a while. Now the government are desperate to be seen to be doing something about it (since their popularity is at an all-time low).

So the source of these laws is public hysteria over knife-crime (generated by The Sun et al), pressuring an unpopular government into doing something, anything so they will be seen to be trying to fix a problem that only exists to sell newspapers.

The reason British tabloids have become so sensationalist is they're losing market share to Internet sites. The government are, as are the tabloids, stuck in a pre-Internet mindset where newspapers have more power than they actually do.

This is not Orwellian. The British government have not set out to control the populace, that will just be a purely unintentional side-effect. What they are doing is creating Kafka-esque bureaucracies -- particularly at local level, see: local authorities using anti-terror laws to check whether kids actually live within the catchment area of their schools, for example -- with the power to decide a persons guilt without giving that person an opportunity to defend themselves. Indeed, without that person even realising they're being investigated, or that they're committing a crime. They may not be using The Trial as a reference when doing this, but they certainly seem to think government should be able to determine guilt without any interference from annoying things like defence lawyers and juries. :)

There are many other dissimilarities with Nineteen Eighty Four, but that's the primary one.

Re:Orwell's 1984

[CaptainOfSpray]

Our public libraries have moved "1984" to the Non-Fiction shelves, on the basis that it's a User's Manual, not a novel.