Every British Citizen To Have a Personal Webpage

Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is about to announce that within a year everyone in Great Britain will be given a personalized webpage for accessing Government services as part of a plan to save billions of pounds by putting all public services online. The move could see the closure of job centers and physical offices dealing with tax, vehicle licensing, passports and housing benefits within 10 years as services are offered through a single digital gateway. [This] 'saves time for people and it saves money for the Government — the processing of a piece of paper and mailing it back costs many times more than it costs to process something electronically,' says Tim Berners-Lee, an advisor to the Prime Minister. However, the proposals are coming under fire from union leaders who complain that thousands of public sector workers would be made jobless and pointed to the Government's poor record of handling personal data. 'Cutting public services is not only bad for the public who use services but also the economy as we are pushing people who provide valuable services on the dole,' says one union leader."

Comments

Every British Citizen To Have a Personal Webpage

[dethadol]

Complete b*ll*cks. Look at their record on IT.

Re:Surveillance.

[zippthorne]

That's not why Obama's healthcare plan is a bad idea. Whether it "works" or not is immaterial. There are two aspects of the plan that are extremely troublesome.

First, there's the obvious moral issue. The plan is to pay for the health care of 30M people who are either paying their own way or are unable to afford access to some health care options. The idea being that "health care" is a right. It's not a right, though. It's a product. A product that can help you to live longer or more comfortably.

A product that must be produced by the hands of men. It's certainly a nice thing to have, but in order to establish it as a right, men must be enslaved to the needs of others. Their output taken for the "greater good." Their time spent forcibly on another's well-being.

If you come into this earth without health care, you get the time that you get. We would all like more, but if you're getting extening your life using health "products" obtained without a voluntary transaction between parties (whether philanthropy or trade), then you might as well be holding a gun to someone's head and directly taking their time for your own.

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Then there's the constitutional issue: namely that there's nothing in there specifically authorizing the federal government to nationalize (and make no mistake, the eventual establishment of a single payer is indistinguishable from single provider) an eighth to a sixth of the nation's activity like this. The contortions that one has to go through to call the current bill "constitutional" are so twisted as to render the document impotent as a limiting contract between the government and the people.