Asylum Seekers

This one is particularly aimed at my father-in-law. Radio 4 has a weekly program for kids, Go4It, which often tackles some pretty serious issues in a way that does its best to really engage with its audience in a productive way. This week they had a big feature on asylum seekers, which involved quite a challenging bit of roleplay where the kids had to take on the roles of a family being forced to flee their home and had some very tough decisions to make which would affect what happened to them later. We had to stop what we were doing and listen to this compelling radio. It's available to listen again until Sunday. (Hopefully it can be listened to in the RoI.)

Unknown Beneficiaries

It turns out that HM Revenue and Customs have given our family's personal details to persons unknown by sending them, along with those of 7 million other families who claim child benefit, on disk, via a courier, who lost them. Nice. Chancellor Alistair Darling has apologised for the security lapse, but apparently there is little danger of identity theft. According to the BBC:

The records include parents' and children's names, addresses, dates of birth, child benefit and national insurance numbers and in some cases, bank or building society details.

That sounds like plenty of information for bad guys to be going on with.

There are, of course, calls for Darling to resign. While I love to see a good bit of bloodletting, I'm not sure that he needs to go in this case. The chairman of HMRC has already resigned over this and an investigation is underway. The Revenue had better get its arse in gear over data protection before this happens again.

Actually, when I first came across this story I thought it was just a follow-up to the story from a few weeks back where HMRC lost a load of personal data in transit and more details were now coming out. But no, this is a new and separate cock-up, albeit one of a very similar shape.

Parliament Goes Quack!

Thanks to Rich for raising this one... A few months ago, one Rudi Vis, MP, raised an early day motion on NHS homeopathic hospitals. Basically, an EDM is a sort of petition used so that matters of interest to individual MPs can be aired without needing to take up a lot of time. This particular one calls on the government to support homeopathic hospitals through the NHS as they have "the potential to offer clinically-effective and cost-effective solutions to common health problems".

Now let's be clear on this: homeopathy is, according to all scientific studies undertaken so far, snake oil. It relies on patients taking doses of water (active ingredients are diluted to the point that not one single molecule remains in a typical dose) or similar carriers and can be shown to have no benefits at all beyond the placebo effect. At a time when proven effective treatments are being withheld from patients because there just isn't the money to go around, should we really be spending public money propping up superstitious quackery?

I've written to my MP about this as he is one of the poor, misguided fools who have supported this EDM. With a little luck (and some badgering) he may see the light.

If you want to know more about homeopathy, Google is your friend. There is an article on Quackometer about this EDM and many good debunk articles from fairly solid sources floating around.