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What this case shows - as did the scandal about illegal immigrants becoming security guards and the foreign prisoners fiasco - is that making the government machine work is so much harder than passing new laws. Tackling this won't be easy for politicians. Instead I hear that after a previous major security lapse, missing data turned up months later in someone's desk marked something like "Nick's disc". Employees should know that data protection is sacred and if they don't there should be systems in place that ensure they alone cannot make serious errors. In reality, there is clearly a culture of casualness toward it which allows one man, apparently, to copy 25 million names and details onto two discs and chuck them in the post.įorgive me if I'm misunderstanding something - I'm sure you'll respond if I am - but I fail to see the relevance of job cuts or unopened post or low morale at HMRC to this. What is clear to me is that the public would like to see the information they provide guarded like a dangerous virus in a lab (or, after the events of this summer perhaps rather better than that). However, what interests me much more than any of that is the yawning gap that has opened up between what we're told about the protection of our personal data and the reality. Sure, Labour MPs are beginning to wonder whether, in the words of one I spoke to yesterday, "we are beginning to look like the Tories in the mid-90s". Sure, it is another sign that ministers wake up each day wondering what will happen to them rather what they will make happen.
Sure, this is another blow to a chancellor who will never again find the soubriquet "safe pair of hands" attached to his name. Somehow, though, that is not what moves me.
I could, you may argue I should, be focusing this morning on the raw politics of losing the personal data of almost half the adult population.