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Techies guide to the UK election
WHILE THE MAJOR POLITICAL PARTIES are hoping that they can get people to vote for them in the upcoming UK election by using Obama style hi-tech election campaigns, all of their technology policies show that they are Luddite control freaks.
The Labour Party plans to abandon the compulsory controversial ID card scheme that it has spent a fortune on and no one wants. This makes a great strategy - we stuffed it up and now we are not going to do something that should get us kicked out of office - vote for us.
It will also dust off the 50p tax on landlines to pay for broadband improvements and launch a £4 billion Finance For Growth Fund including an Innovation Investment Fund, and ringfence spending on science research.
However it also promised the media content cartels that it will hand over much of the policing of filesharing over to them so they can knock as many British citizens off the Internet as possible. We guess this means that the 50p tax will not have to connect so many people and the money can be used to pay for MP's expenses instead.
Labour also has a proposal for a "Doomsday Book" database of all government databases that will be made available for commercial use. So that means that all those things you told the government about yourself in strict confidence will be put on sale to the highest bidder.
The Conservative Party has decided that government has had far too much of this technology lark, so it plans to axe a lot of IT projects to save money. The Tories always had a bit of a trouble with technology, starting with the Spinning Jenny which made those nasty middle classes so rich that they had to get political representation.
We guess that with no big government IT projects to manage the Tories can revert to their good old days of being landed gentry. The money saved from these projects supposedly will go towards repairing the ballooning government deficit, but we think a large chunk of it will be allocated to paying MP's expenses.
The Tories also promise to open up the £200 billion government procurement market to small and open-source companies, partly by breaking up large ICT projects into smaller components. This will mean that IT projects will require more management to co-ordinate all of these projects.
While competent management of government IT projects would certainly make for a change, they will probably cost more with lots of groups running around like chickens with their heads cut off and no one knowing what the other is doing.
Then everyone will be hiring expensive consultants who will state the obvious and finally the whole lot will go to a big outsourcing outfit like it does now.
Also in the Tory manifesto is a pledge to increase innovation and boost start-up companies by reducing the number of forms needed to register a new business and moving towards a 'one click' registration.
The rest of the Conservative Party platform talks about how wonderful things would be in the UK if it was in control without actually having anything like a policy.
The Liberal Democrat Party is not really sure what computing is, but it will resolve any information technology issues that we have by painting each computer green [shurely yellow and green. ed].
Like the Tories it is calling for IT project cut backs and, er, did we mention that computing has to be much more green?
It does say that social and health services need to share more data, and puts forward similar proposals for hospitals and the police, but does not give details on how this can be done. Perhaps a nice Big Brother type computer system? Nooo, shurely not.
The rest of the Liberal Democrat manifesto about computer stuff is all linked to green energy and all the other things that impress people who knit their own yoghurt.
It is looking like whichever party gets into power in May, the nation's information technology policies are going to be run by a bunch of cloth-eared control freaks who want to spy on everything you do. The only difference between the parties is that the Lib-Dems and the Tories want to cut back on IT projects.
None of the major parties have suggested that giving big IT projects to people who can run them properly might be a good idea rather than axing them completely. None have said that they will stand up to the music and film industries.
In short if you want to vote for someone on the basis of their enlightened IT policy you would be better off spoiling your ballot. µ
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One thing that might swing it in favour of the lib dems is that they are against the recent digital economy bill, and Nick Clegg recently stated the bill "badly needs to be repealed", although he doesn't actually say thats what they will fight for.
http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1240561
Inq readers of the werld unite!
Spoiling your ballot NEVER helps, certainly not in the UK first past the post system!
Best thing to do would be ... ummm:
Vote Liberal Democrat - they've *never* been in power, if they get into power then they will have something to lose, so they might take heed of voter concerns ... and if they don't, then both the parties and the voters will see that there is room and momentum for new entrants to the political field - hopefully that will in the long term break the 2 horse race that exists now.
Me, I'd probly vote Labour, if I was in the UK, and depending on which electorate I was in.
Having taken this moniker on a whim, guess I'll defend it.
Luddites aren't exactly backwards or against change, only against de-humanizing industrialization, or here, against more gov't control and insane "technology" that leads to loss of personal sovereignty.
What you meant is that those in gov't are the usual savages heedless of the effects of policy on the governed. That's practically the definition of gov't. But just because they use clubs doesn't mean that they wouldn't rather use machine guns.