Slashdot Mirror
Database of All UK Children Launched
An anonymous reader writes "'A controversial database which holds the details of every child in England has now become available for childcare professionals to access. The government says it will enable more co-ordinated services for children and ensure none slips through the net. 390,000 people will have access to the database, but will have gone through stringent security training.'"
I'm not an UK national and I'm living in the UK (London) at the moment.
Judging from the TV, the newspapers and the people around here, I can tell you that the locals have pretty much what they deserve - the average brit is hard-drinking, unpolished and uneducated, easily fobbed by spin, entertained by shallow "celebrity news" and having really short memories. UK politics are those of appearance and of the moment - always chasing the the news that are news now, announcing grand measures while the news are hot and quietly dropping them (or setting things up in such a way that they are bound to fail in the long run) once the news have moved on.
Local politicians are deceitful, untrustworthy an often corrupt. They will say one thing one day, a different thing another day and yet another the following day and people won't even blink twice at it - they just keep on voting on the same crowd for Parliament (either Labour or Tories - same shit, different flies).
London is a rat-race of a city with bad roads, aging public transportation, lack of parking spaces, pollution and where local councils use all sorts of sneaky ways to get money out of people's pockets (Congestion charging, speed cameras for profit, expensive paid parking everywhere, resident parking licenses). Everything around here is expensive except non-specialized services which are done by uneducated emigrants that moved here mostly from the countryside in some third world country or other (the same people whose kids, born in Britain, grow up feeling that they're the bottom of the barrel, neither part of this society nor of their parent's society, and sometimes turn to ideologies like extreme Islam to find a sense of belonging).
Honestly, the only good thing about here (from my point of view) is the good contracting rates payed in finance.
That said, London is an atypical part of Great Britain and at least the English and Welsh countryside (never been to Scotland or Northern Ireland) are quite beautiful.