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The entire NHS is getting a shiny new computer system. Developed by Fujitsu, rather than in one of the government's usual entirely above board and not remotely questionable deals with its most favoured companies, the system stands a chance of being adequate—although that point in its favour has to be pitted against the natural law that any computer system developed by the government is almost guaranteed to fail so cataclysmically that no profanity known to man is sufficient to describe it.

A document about this is being circulated to all NHS staff, most of whom appear to have dutifully ticked their names and passed it on without reading it. This is a shame, as it means they'll have missed, on page 2, Frequently Asked Question 10.

Frequently Asked Question 10: "What is a COW?"

Stop sniggering at the back. As you should all know, a COW is of course a Computer On Wheels. Presumably this is to distinguish it from a Computer On Desk, Computer On Layers Of Netting, Computer *n Clinic Kitchen Surface Under Cupboard Kept Empty Recently, etc etc.

Taking the cynic route

It’s fitting that on the day Tony wrote in the Observer that all his critics and opponents are entirely out of touch with people’s concerns, his health secretary should deliriously announce that the NHS has just had its best year ever. I know a doctor in a London A&E department—that's “know”, not “met in a pub and have half-remembered his story”—who last week was ordered away from a mangled motorcycle accident victim who had just been wheeled in and told instead to treat a man who basically had nothing wrong with him, but he had breached the government-set 4-hour waiting time limit and so, in the managers’ eyes, took absolute priority. The receptionist had already deleted this man from the list once and then re-entered him, so it looked like he had just arrived. Failure to meet the target means your hospital will be penalised financially, making it even harder for it to cope in the next financial year. This has led to all kinds of rich, dark comedy, like my friends who recently found themselves being moved from cubicle to cubicle every couple of hours in A&E, thus constantly resetting their arrival time, and the out-and-out farce filmed undercover last year of patients on stretchers lined up in the car park outside an A&E department, so that they didn’t count as actually having arrived.

Ministers’ persistent refusals to countenance that any of this is true are now creeping beyond standard political denials into the realm of the pathological. Just burbling wildly that “Well, we’ve spent lots of money!” may not prove to be enough from an executive happy to splash out, for example, nearly £8,000 of party funds on Cherie Blair’s hairdos at the last election; or, more to the point, from people who accumulate enormous mortgages like they’re receipts from Boots and apparently think the money to pay them off is delivered regularly to their door by invisible pixies.

Brilliantly, the prime minister whose “whiter than white” schtick charmed a nation (it says here), miffed at the treatment meted out to David Blunkett and others for violating ministerial rules, has been trying for several years now to abolish the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which exists to ensure ministers, civil servants and ex-senior soldiers can’t quit the government one day and start lobbying the government on behalf of a private company the next. Blair has made it clear that in fact he is all for that process, and he doesn’t think anyone should stand in its way. There is no workable, honest reason for that stance, unless he honestly thinks it’s what Jesus would have done. But in the wake of his grubby financial improprieties, he’s unlikely to want to be seen publicly to trash one of the main institutions set up exclusively to keep a beady eye on what the country’s officials get up to. Then again, who the hell knows what he's going to do next, as he seems increasingly intent on putting clear blue water between himself and the plot.

Whatever Blair thought he was up to when he arranged his “loanations”—I’m allowing that his conviction that his personal involvement in any situation can instantly magic it better maybe blinded him to the fact that dodging rules and secretly exploiting financial loopholes aren’t the kind of problems that evaporate just because the Dear Leader has shoved his nose in—the very fact that he apparently didn’t realise what the results would be if any of his private deals became public demonstrates how much of a liability he has become. For a man who has previously castigated his public for being too cynical, he has recently done an extraordinarily efficient job of encouraging public cynicism about his party and his government. People, especially those who don’t really follow politics, will be forgiven if they regard everything he touches with profound suspicion.

Others around him aren’t helping:

Charles Clarke wants to shake up the system of compensation paid to people wrongfully convicted and sent down; he says it’s because the system is unwieldy and takes far too long to administer, but in the slipstream of recent events it just looks like a blatant attempt to minimise money paid out to innocent people by a bafflingly arrogant Home Office that knows it’s going to screw up and imprison more and more of them. The timing of this couldn’t be worse. Whatever Clarke’s actual intentions here, drastically cutting compensation to people who SHOULDN’T EVER HAVE GONE TO PRISON makes him look like he’s desperately auditioning to be a pantomime villain.

A ministerial written answer last week confirmed that the government will after all be widening the information that will be held about you on the national identity card register and the number of public bodies that will have untrammelled access to it. Clarke can’t even be arsed any more with the standard formula of “We have no intention at this time...” Last year he said explicitly: “No medical details will be on the database”. Now your medical details will be on the database. Again, if they’re looking to banish deep concern and cynicism, the government maybe need to stop (at best) frequently changing their mind or (for the most part, let's face it) lying about the introduction of ID cards at every stage.

It's becoming clear that Gordon Brown, in his desire to be seen as the Prudent Chancellor, has been running a scam of his own for years now: any scheme that is classed as PFI is automatically not counted as public spending, which means he’s able to claim proudly that he hasn't broken his “golden rule” (public debt mustn’t exceed 40 per cent of GDP). PFI schemes, however, even when they actually go right, famously involve an enormous amount of public expenditure, thanks to elaborate lending and leasing arrangements. But apparently if we call that money something different, it suddenly doesn’t exist. I’m too weary even to bother being angry that someone expected me to buy that. Gordon’s been having wet dreams about PFI for years, but we’re the poor shlubs who are going to wake up in the wet patch.

In summary: Acting cynically breeds cynicism, and insulting your public’s intelligence invites insults right back at you. Basically, I’d like my politicians to stop acting like they’re wily schoolchildren trying to hide their porn from their teacher, and then maybe their popular image wouldn’t be that they were all simply duplicitous ( ”What? )

The fine art of political satire

Take that, Rory Bremners!