I hope they do not "overlook" the benefits of switching government and educational IT systems to open source; benefits such as millions of pounds saved each year of licensing and administration costs, increased (taxpayer) data security, and storing data in a standard format which can be read by all (instead of just those with the latest Microsoft Office).

This would involve:

1) Ignoring "financial incentives" and discounts offered by Microsoft -- designed to facilitate user lock-in to Microsoft products -- and instead looking at the bigger picture of long-term savings and benefits to the taxpayer.

2) Looking at energy costs of running thousands of "fat client" workstations, compared to greener power-sipping "thin client" Linux workstations (running software from Novell and Red Hat, for example).

3) Instituting an open bidding process for all IT contracts which take into account long-term savings to taxpayers, and which are open for viewing by the public which ultimately funds these projects (no more back room deals with Microsoft).

If the Tories are serious about saving money, they should definitely look into Open Source.

What are you talking about? Your link points to Labour corruption. Where is all the Tory corruption and spying you're accusing them of?

The tories will stop at nothing to spy on everyone. They won't stop spending the military budget of every other country on the planet on IT. Who the hell do you think is propping up Dell, Compaq, HP all the big suck companies.
This is what they are all about.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5592511.ece

You might like to consider that the Tories have a far better plan with AIMasterful Control of the Cloud Environment, although as you might very well expect, that is something which they will be most circumspect in acknowledging, for all the very best of easily understood, critical and strategically advantageous reasons.

Dave has boldly gone and promised Change and he is not such a helpless puppet as is the great flip flopper renegade, Obama? And shared as a question to encourage the Renegade President to find his cojones, or even better, for scratching nuts is for monkeys, buy in a workable Globalised Script for Renaissance ....... for the Tales he's Spinning aint going anywhere Good for the Chicks and the Dudes in the 'hood or on Wall Street.

* Please be fooled into thinking IT is NonSense, for then is Progress Stealthy and Unhindered and Remarkably Rapid. :-)

You don't go to the best schools in the land/world that money can buy and not learn how to learn and deliver what is FutureBuilder required.

"Tories tell Civil Service: You are crap at procurement and managing IT projects"

That should go down well...

From my point of view, the various smaller (5K - 500K) projects do get managed fairly well, its just the monsters dreamt up by a minister as part of their legacy which go horribly wrong. But these are big organisational change projects (and problems) rather than "IT" issues.