UK Bank Holidays – Where Are They ?

 General, Politics  2 Responses »
Nov 112008
 

Of course speaking strictly they should be called “public holidays” or in the case of Easter, “common law holidays”, but whatever they are called, where are they ? The UK as a whole has just 8 days of public holidays which is decidedly stingy when compared to the European average of 10.8. What is especially irritating is that the part of the UK that has been the least well behaved over the last hundred years gets 10 days public holiday (NI).

But why limit ourselves to raising it to the European average ? That is somewhat unambitious, and we should think of actually increasing the average somewhat. Lets go for 12 days.

First of all we should add each country’s national day – St. George’s Day (in England), and St. David’s day (in Wales). Both Scotland and Northern Ireland already celebrate their national days, and Scotland needs the day it “swapped” to celebrate St. Andrew’s day restored. Frankly a country that cannot celebrate its own national day does not deserve to be called a country!

Secondly (and with good timing), we should be commemorating Remembrance Day as a bank holiday. Frankly not having this day as a national holiday is a complete disgrace and an insult to those who died in WWI. It could also serve a dual purpose as a sort of “Britain” day.

That leaves two left to distribute, and I would suggest having both in the summer – perhaps one on midsummer’s day and another in July.

Next all public holidays need to be properly protected. Many do not realise that there is no statutory duty for an employer to recognise “bank holidays”; we simply rely on them behaving properly. Employees need to be protected by being given the day off, or if it is necessary to work to be given double-time pay. And public holidays should not count against the yealy leave entitlement – as implemented in most of Europe.

Undoubtedly businesses will complain about the cost to business of all this extra loafing around. Well tough. You guys get it your own way far too much. Besides you might be surprised. Not only is there the surge of productivity that an employee gets when he or she has had a good break, but many also feel the need to “clear the desk” before a day or two off. It is possible that more work would get done with more public holidays than the current state.

Remembrance Sunday

 General, History, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 092008
 

Today is Remembrance Sunday; a day to remember those killed in war. It should perhaps be on the 11th November (this year on a Tuesday), but the British government is too cheap to give us all a day off for remembrance.

As this is the 90th anniversary of the armistance of world war i, it is perhaps understandable that some concentrate on the dead of that war. As a general rule one of the things we remember when we remember the dead of the wars, is that they died for our freedom. For the wars since that is definitely on the true side, but perhaps not for WWI …

After all WWI started when the Austrian-Hungarian “dual monarchy” declared war on Serbia after Serbian military intelligence had been involved in assisting the assassination of a Grand-Duke. Russia was pulled in to support Serbia, and the rest of the European ‘powers’ were similarly pulled into the war.

But that is over simplistic – historians are still arguing over the causes of WWI. But what is clear is that there was initially no great villain that needed bringing down although many of the men who volunteered to fight were led to believe (in the case of Britain) that Germany was some sort of great villain.

To those who survived WWI, Rememberance Day was less a day for remembering those who died for our freedom, than just remembering the dead. It is difficult to appreciate the level of casualties today, but one clue is on the lists of the dead given on memorials in almost every little village. Probably just about everyone living in Britain in the 1920s would have been close to someone who had died in WWI.

To put it into statistical terms, Britain lost 2.1% of its population in WWI compared to 0.93% in WWII.

Some of the blame for the horrendous level of casualties can be placed at the door at the incompetant military leadership who took far too long to adjust to 20th century warfare from their 19th century mindsets. Or in the words of more than a few, the British army were “Lions led by donkeys”.

UK Data Leaks: Public Sector Vs. Private Sector

 Computing, Media, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 022008
 

Today we woke up to learn of yet another UK government data leak. Apparently a memory stick was left in a pub car park. Of course as always, not is all quite as it seems; the person who actually left the memory stick where it was, actually worked for a private sector company doing contracting work for the government. So was this really a UK government data leak at all ?

Well yes, the data was government data and it does not matter who leaked it. From memory (i.e. I am too lazy to hunt down the links to check) this is not the first time that government data leaks have been caused by private contractors. Perhaps the government should stick to doing their own work when it comes to working with data that contains personal information; if there is anything more aggravating than being slated for your own stupidity it is being criticised for someone else’s stupidity.

Of course most people will be under the impression that data leaks pretty much only occur when the government is involved; somehow data leaks from private sector companies never seem to hit the headlines in quite the same way. For instance the headlines for this morning’s leaks were all about the government role in the data loss and no mention of the private sector firm involved :-

  • “Government memory stick found in pub” – Independent on Sunday.
  • “Government passwords left at pub” – Guardian; also “Fears for personal data after government passwords left in pub car park”.
  • “Brown says government cannot ensure data safety” – Times.

I have left out a few … I could not find the story on a few websites belonging to the gutter press, and lost interest after one too many pages with lurid colours and half-naked women popping out at me. But it’s all “the government” in those headlines; although they do in the end point out that it was a private contractor who lost the data.

Anyone reading (and trusting!) the media would be under the impression that the Government cannot be trusted with our personal information whereas private sector companies can because they rarely end up as front-page stories for losing data. Well I am not totally convinced that the Government has a monopoly on stupidity; there seems more than enough to go around.

Hunting down stories about private sector data leaks is kind of tedious because there does not appear to be that much out there, but a few stories did show up (not linking to anything before 2007) :-

The last story is particularly interesting – 56 reported data leaks from financial firms in 2008 (who are not required to report data leaks). In a report by Verizon, it is estimated that of all private sector data leaks, only 14% of leaks are from financial firms; doing a little arithmetic indicates that there have been at least 400 data leaks this year.

So is the private sector any better or worse than the public sector ? They are probably just the same – woefully irresponsible. People rarely care about information security of others in their daily lives; in fact they are often also completely naive about their own information security.

So why does the government come in for so much criticism in comparison to the private sector ? Partially it is simply that we do not get a choice in the matter of whether to do business with the government or not. And partially it probably makes for a better media story. Or perhaps the media just wants to attack the government.

Perhaps some journalist can take a proper look at the private sector leaks, do the job properly and just for once the private sector can get some justified criticism. They might also want to take a closer look at the media’s preference for attacking the government on this matter.

Onto another matter; encryption. The government response was that the only personal data leaked in this case was encrypted as though that would protect the data. Well maybe, but only if it was strong encryption. Most people who use encryption are not aware of whether the encryption method is strong or not. For instance a quick google for “Word document password recovery” returns a huge list of choices for applicatiosn which will break the encryption on Word documents – making the encryption built into Word completely pointless. But how many people who use this encryption know that they are getting a false sense of security ?

Olympic Winners Parade – On A Weekday?

 Politics  No Responses »
Oct 152008
 

Tomorrow (16th October), London will host a parade of the UK’s Olympic Games medal winners. It is not something that personally excites me, and I will not be going. Not that I have any problem with the athletes getting a parade – why not?

But why is it on a weekday? And this does not seem to be an isolated case; there seems to be an assumption that if you really want to go, you will find a way of doing it. But what if you are a weekday worker (and most of us are) who might like to go, but cannot take a day off work to get there ? Why should we be excluded ?

It sometimes seems that there is some sort of conspiracy to keep working people away from certain celebrations. Perhaps we would lower the tone.

Banking: Now We Own The Banks, Why Give Them Back?

 Politics  No Responses »
Oct 132008
 

Now that the UK government has ‘obtained’ a large stake in Lloyds, and RBS, the question is whether we should sell off that ownership when things improve. Hopefully we will be hanging onto the banks until we can make a decent profit from helping them out. But what would happen if we kept hold of them ?

Well we would essential lose the capital (or more accurately it would be locked into the investment), but we would get paid dividends every year. Or every year they are paid.

We would also have a greater influence on keeping the banks and bankers well behaved. Given the behaviour of the banks in the past, it would seem to be worth having a “finger in the pie” to keep an eye on their future behaviour.

Some are complaining that the government (and thus the taxpayer) is taking unfair advantage of the shareholder because we are getting a huge number of shares at a very much reduced price. Tough. Those same shareholders were taking advantage of unsound banking practice in the past when they should have been insisting that the banks were properly run.

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