Government goes pop

Three oddities from the corridors of power.

First, we are to make people who go and fight for the wrong side in Syria stateless. OK so these are quite possibly very unpleasant people, not just young men being a bit silly, but it does not seem right just to expel them from their native land, to make them someone else's problem. They were born in the UK, they are what we made them and they are our problem. Are we going back to the outlaws of the Middle Ages or the Wild West?

Second, some organ of government has fined RBS for messing up a software upgrade. This does not seem right either. They have made a mistake, they have already paid the customers involved compensation and they have taken the reputational damage. Maybe they have sacked their Director of Informational Services or whatever else they might have called the chap who was in charge of their computing. What business does government have to add to their pain?

The fact the government is majority stake holder is irrelevant. As such, government might chose to intervene, but to invoke the machinery of justice strikes me as an abuse of power.

Third, the hygiene arrangements of some long serving dentist have been called into question, following the recent death of a young patient. So government has instructed the recall of all 22,000 patients who ever went through his doors for testing. In the first place, it seems like rather a lot of patients, but maybe they are counting patient visits rather than patients and maybe they are counting patients of dentists at the same clinic (illustrated) in which the dentist in question worked, or perhaps owned. OK on this last, hygiene is probably a clinic bound, not a dentist bound problem. But OTT on the package. Is it really likely that some uncomplaining patient from 30 years ago has caught some frightful infection which has been lurking ever since? OK, so AIDS had been invented at the time, but it does not have an incubation period of 30 years. Maybe the Metro has just got it all wrong.

We were not told anything about the circumstances of the young woman's death, but presumably at the least accelerated by an infection picked up at this dentist.

I am reminded of the days of the late lamented Blair when they shut down the tube network over one Christmas because someone panicked over the occasional use of wooden blocks to hold rails in place. Although, on reflection, that may have been a complicated & secret bribe to the IRA, via all the Irish who would have collected on all the triple time. All part of the (ultimately successful) peace process.

I am also reminded of the rapacity of lawyers who, like vultures, have gathered around the carcass. Try googling 'dentist hygiene daybrook' to find some of them.