Film Is Finished

Nearly. We still have to mix the sound and strike the prints, but we had 3 screenings yesterday and the response was fantastic. Packed house at the Amnesty screening, and people laughed, cried and tutted angrilly in all the right places. Thanks all for coming alone - please spread the word! Cinema listings now up on listings page.

No-one will be disciplined over the shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes, though this is no great surprise. However Sir Ian Blair has announced that they will be pressing charges on Mr Menzes for getting blood on the policeman's boots. Still the finest moment in the Menezes affair was when Richard Littlejohn wrote in his liberal column that the guy basically deserved it for being an iillegal immigrant.

The Cost of ID Cards

We would never question the government’s sense of timing when it comes to bad news but it seems almost uncanny that once again on a day when most news cameras are busy pointing in one direction, bad news should be released in another. This time it is the news that the projected total costs of the ID card scheme has risen to £5.55 billion. This is despite some clever accounting, which means that they will no longer be including any of the costs accrued by the Foreign Office (estimated to be £510 million). It’s interesting that even though these figures are supposed to be released by the 9th May at the latest, the Home Office found that they were unable to do so until the day that Tony Blair announced his departure.

While others may doubt the sincerity of this government when it comes to the timing of its announcements we in the Taking Liberties office believe that all Home Office staff were taken hostage for the past month and have therefore been entirely incapable of releasing this news on any day until yesterday. They have been making pitiful excuses about why they were unable to release the report only because they are too modist to tell the truth which is that they fought off these darstardly attackers armed only with a stapler, a hole punch and some biros (fortunately civil servants are big fans of Macgyver).

Tax Credits – the gift that keeps on giving

It looks like more money is going to have to be written off due to overpayments on the tax credit system. This time they think it is going to be £1.4 billion. I’m going to say that again in case anyone missed it the first time £1.4 billion.

Now I don’t want to quibble with the Treasury about every pound that goes missing, and I understand that there will always be a fair amount of waste in government but I don’t think I am exadurating when I say that it is going to take Gordon a bit more than a quick rummage down the back of the sofa to make up that kind of loss.

BBC article

Tax credits were one of the flagship systems introduced in the last ten years and seem to have been a source of fraud, incompetence and heartache ever since.

Next up from the government that brought you tax credits, ID cards.

Well, nothing could go wrong there…right?

David Blunkett gets a job at ID Card firm

The man who pushed violently for ID Cards during his time as Home Secretary and helped the government write a cheque for £20 billion for the damn things, is now about to earn his keep from a firm that will make buckets of money out of the scheme. Keeping up New Labour’s strong ties with Texas, Blunkett will soon be getting a paycheque from Entrust which already has done very well out of the Spanish ID Card Scheme and has now formally registered an interest in the British ID Card Scheme. Blunkett has kept himself busy since he “resigned to save his party embarassment” (twice) writing a regular column in the Sun. What might have tipped the balance between himself and other disgraced authoritarian lunatics vying for the job was an impartial piece he wrote in the Sun 2 weeks before he got the job: “ID Cards… will protect our identity from fraudsters, stop illegal benefit foreigners in their tracks…” and all the other usual drivel on why we need to give the state ownership of our identities. Clearly David’s plug in The Sun worked and he’s now off to Texas to work for American money, following the lead of Tony Blair and John Prescott.