Voices from the Past in Politics

It's interesting that various voices from past governments keep cropping up or even worse, getting jobs in current governments.

Notwithstanding Kier Starmer, who is a left-over from the Blair government (why anyone who identifies themselves as of the left would vote for anyone that had anything to do with that government I do not know). But I digress. Starmer is a voice and an ideology from that government. He's in charge and it's hard to argue that things will be different under him.

We'll get the same Globalist, don't care about the poor guy policies that Blair instigated back in the Nineties. I will not vote for Starmer or a government run by him, because I know that government will not work in the interests of the people that vote it into power. It will be instead favour corporate sponsors and supra-national undemocratic organisations.

The Tories are no better. They've just brought "Blair Mk2" David Cameron back into the cabinet. Another globalist, who is now foreign secretary. A soothing voice for the globalists after the wobble of Liz Truss being voted in by the Tory party members. Truss was dispatched by the media with suspiciously extreme haste in order to anoint another globalist in the form of Rishi Sunak.

So we now have David Cameron back on the News, telling us we need another war. In a replay of the Libya playbook, we're now bombing the Huthi rebels in Yemen. And we know how well that went for Libya, the West and David Cameron. It wasn't the spectacularly successful military campaign the media made it out to be.

Of course the dark horse is Blair himself. The globalist warmonger-in-chief with the dodgy dossier is still around, every so often popping up and giving his opinion. As if we needed his advice.

I just wonder, why can't these people slip into retirement quietly? There used to be in the past an unwritten rule about making comment about current government policy. In other words keeping quiet.

This is just one more indicator of the globalist elites and how they rule over us, rather than governments ruling FOR us. 

I'm really sick of it. I'm sick of hearing their voices, sick of their policies that favour global corporations, sick of their endless warmongering that benefits no-one, sick of their endless virtue signalling at the expense of the people that put them in power.

The Post-Office Enquiry Just Keeps on Giving and A Memory. When Incompetents Collide.

Sadly a couple of weeks ago my Mother passed away. As you do at these times, there was a lot of reminiscing.

One thing that came up was the various jobs I'd done and the tale of the HR manager manager for ICL knocking on my Mum's door asking for me back in the days before everyone had telephones.

My Mum, bless her assumed that he was a friend of mine and kept him on the doorstep while I came downstairs.

Basically he was offering me a job at ICL after I'd done a couple of months as a temp but then been let go.

Could I start next week? You betcha!

Of he walked back to the factory about 200 yards away. Yeah, not everyone had cars back in the early eighties either.

Anyway, ICL eventually got took over by Fujitsu, but one of the policies that crept in while I was there was the parachuting of graduates into senior positions straight from University.

And I wonder if it was a Fujitsu policy that was being adopted, because the singular thing that came out of that policy was the incompetence of those parachuted in place. I had been working as the effective network manager at the factory for a while by then after the previous manager Ralph, phoned in one day and said he wasn't coming back in. Ever. 

Given that the factory was about to go through the very serious rework of the network, going from point-to-point networking to the (then) new fangled open systems like Ethernet, management of the project on a technical and fiscal level was required. So muggins here got stuck in and started the upgrade (completed under budget and in time I'll have you know).

So there I was, hoping my position was going to be made permanent eventually, when along comes a graduate parachuted into the network manager's position above me. It was quite obvious that he wasn't a technical guy. He wasn't even much of a manager either. When he opened his mouth at technical meetings with other factories in the wider network, it was very obvious. The remedy was for the techies to band together and just get the job done.

But it seemed the longer he was in his position, the more he wanted to interfere and meddle in the technical aspects, or the financials, or just basically take over the project to try and take the credit. 

A while later I left, because I could see the writing on the wall: all the good technical people were leaving and it was pretty likely that the manufacturing arm was going to be sold off because it was making a loss due to mismanagement.

I went working for an American firm down South and doubled my salary. The factory I left bled away all it's competent people and eventually the only people left were the managers. Sadly the non-technical staff got shafted when it was sold and then moved abroad. They lost their jobs.

Now I can't say that with more competent management the factory would have stood up to the outside pressures from competition, but I could see a lot of "faffing around" with vanity projects that maybe looked good in technical journals, but cost huge amounts of money and staff resources. Certainly they never saved any money, or improved efficiency. The sort of impractical and expensive stuff that Universities love. One that came to mind was the installation of delivery robots, that were supposed to deliver PCBS and components to assembly workers and then assembled PCBs and chassis' to the final assembly line. 

Robots that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and broke down a lot replaced a very reliable old guy with a trolley that you could have employed for years for the same money. 

I get the same vibe from the Post Office enquiry. The technical guys knew what was what and it seems they tried to avoid making legally binding statements in court and it was left to managers to go up before the judges and make statements that it appears they couldn't back up. Managers that from the current enquiry, were sleepwalking in their jobs. I mean, to not be aware of the implications of the faulty software, or to be complicit in prosecutions when they knew the cause could be the software is borderline criminal let alone incompetent.

It seems that for some reason that the procedures weren't put in place to involve and inform all levels at Fujitsu of the shortcomings of Horizon and no effort was spend resolving the issues. In fact it appears that when the work involved got too substantial and the technical guys said it might impact other areas of the Horizon system, the managers just decided not to implement the changes. 

It seems that possibly that Fujitsu management liaised with the Post Office about the issues, but no-one took the seriousness of them seriously. 

Instead the machine plodded on and put people in prison. 

I assume somewhere people were too afraid to admit they were out of their depth, both at Fujitsu and the Post Office.

A case of when incompetents collide. Management at Fujitsu and the Post Office appear as incompetent as each other and it just may have become a culture of "I won't tell if you don't" as to the incompetence of the various management teams.

<Sigh> something we see across the whole country, across the public and private sector. And even to the civil service and politics.

What's Going on in America? Lawyers Want No-Risk Operations Now?

 In America, an Obstetric surgeon has been charged with Homicide after a baby being delivered was decapitated during the birthing process. 

By decapitated it's meant the neck was broken.

The neck was broken during the birth as the doctor manipulated the baby to allow it's passage through the birth canal after it's shoulders got stuck.

It's fait to say there is a risk in every medical procedure, but the lawyers successfully argued that excessive force was used to manipulate the baby. Says who? Were they there on the day? Did they take into consideration that the same force had been applied on other babies under the same circumstances and they survived? Do lawyers understand the concept of risk?

Now they have successfully argued for a payout for their clients and no doubt caused a criminal enquiry against the doctor, they have set the profession of obstetrics back decades.

Because now, faced with the same circumstances, would an obstetric surgeon do the same thing? I doubt it. The risk (to the surgeon) is too high. Who cares if the baby dies, or worse the baby and the mother dies. The doctor doesn't want to go to jail, nor does the hospital want to be sued.

So we now have a situation where doctors will now have to wait until the baby and the mother are at real risk of death before they act, so that they can argue in court that they had no choice but to use the force they did to save the mother and it's unfortunate that the baby died. 

Good old litigious America, setting the course of medicine back decades.