It’s been a while, but it’s back - my utterly irrelevant, thoroughly inconsequential and largely pointless take on the week’s news.
And before anyone makes a crude joke, the three stories in the title are not related 
Prince Harry in Iraq
Should he stay or should he go…. na na na na na na na na. I’ll mention that’s a poor pun/reference to the Clash record, seeing as my written recital of music is almost as bad a my vocal.
My first reaction was he should - why should a member of the royal family be any different to any other soldier. And then it hit me… like it or not, he IS different. Not more important, but definitely different. As has become perfectly clear, he is a specific target for the insurgents, and therefore will draw even greater enemy attention to his unit. Of course they’re not “safe” anyway, but we shouldn’t be giving the enemy any more reason to attack than they already have.
I’m sure that there would be no pressure from the family or the MoD to take special consideration for Harry, certainly not officially. But with the greatest will in the world, anyone with influence over his deployment would be terrified of losing him on their watch. It’s a distraction, and all just to secure one more solidier. This isn’t about the risk to Prince Harry, it’s about the risk to those around him.
I have nothing but respect for anyone who is willing to fight for their country, including Prince Harry. He has gone into this with the best of intentions and it would be ridiculous for his training to be for nothing. But the mistake was made long ago when he started that training.
If you say the royal family shouldn’t be treated differently to anyone else, then they would not be the royal family. Personally I don’t like that we have an arbitrary family running our country, but we do and we have to live with that. They’re not like you and me, and I don’t expect them to be and certainly don’t want them to pretend to be.
Alcohol and children
Alcohol Concern this week called for parents who give alcohol to under 15’s to be prosecuted in a bid to deal with the serious problem of under-age and binge drinking in our society. It would be stupid to pretend that we don’t have a problem with alcohol in this country, especially with young people both above and below the age of 18. My question is whether prohibition is the answer.
My answer, to be blunt, is no.
Banning things does not make the problem go away - look at drugs. I’m sure there will be examples found of kids of disgracefully young ages drinking to excess, and obviously this is wrong. But there will also be plenty of examples of children occasionally drinking socially at home, or even with peers, which does no harm. I was allowed to drink wine at home with my parents on special occasions like Christmas from about 11 onwards. Alcohol Concern would want my parents arrested for this harmless act which hasn’t left me with any kind of drink problem.
Telling children they can’t do something naturally makes them want to do it as part of their instinct to push the boundaries. Clearly this doesn’t mean they should be allowed to do everything they want, but by drinking responsibly at home children can be shown that drinking does not need to be synonymous with getting drunk. It de-mystifies the whole issue, and removes the peer pressure element which drives a lot of the problems.
In some cases parents go too far, either because they are misguided or due to more systematic abuse. But that makes them bad and dangerous parents, and we already have laws in place to protect children unfortunate enough to have such poor guardians. A blanket, one size fits all policy that criminalises the harmless majority in order to deal with a dangerous but small minority will only make the situation worse.
Terror leaks
The UK’s counter terrorism chief has said that lives are being put in danger by the repeated leaking of information about police anti-terror operations, most notably around the arrests in Birmingham earlier this year amid claims of a plot to capture a British Muslim serving in the armed forces. It’s almost certain there had been a leak to the press before the raids took place - unless of course a Daily Mirror team just happened to be passing at the crack of dawn when it all kicked off.
Is it serious? Well it the person in charge of protecting us from terrorists says so, then who am I to disagree. Most fingers are pointing at the government, but it could also be the security services or the police.
There needs to be an inquiry to find out who leaked this, and why. The government says they won’t respond to speculation and will only open an invesitgation when evidence is presented. And by evidence, they seem to mean evidence pointing to who is responsible. The obvious evidence that a leak has occurred is not sufficient (in their eyes) to prompt an investigation to look for evidence as to the cause.
An analogy: someone dies, cause unknown. There is no particular evidence pointing to any one condition. The government would shrug their shoulders and brush it under the carpet. Most sane people would do a post-mortem to find evidence, and ultimately the cause.
When I first heard this story I didn’t think much of it. Then I thought again… it’s sensational, and all the more so because we have become so used to this kind of nonsense from the current administration that we barely take any notice.
Another leak
Personal details (including criminal history, disabilities and sexual orientation) of junior doctors were made freely available on an NHS website until spotted by Channel 4 News. It sounds to me like someone wanted to make these details available to an authorised colleague, but thought the quickest and easiest way to do this would be to stick the Excel spreadsheet on the web, albeit on an unpublicised URL.
Putting my IT hat on, I want to rant about how this illustrates that IT systems in big organisations don’t work. If this was the easiest way for the information to be shared, they need to sort their system out. Not that that excuses the massive error of judgement that took place to cause this controversy in the first place.
With disasters like this becoming increasingly common, I’m beginning to understand why people are so worried about their personal information being stored on computer. It does seem that with the best will in the world (which many wouldn’t credit the government with anyway), there are still some incredibly stupid people in positions of authority. It’s not a problem with computers (this information wasn’t accessed by hackers), it’s a problem with people. You quite often hear that computers are fallible, but the far more important point is that people are infinitely more fallible. And since it’s people that develop computer systems, and people that use them, computers are therefore at their mercy, not the other way around.
That’s all for this week, no fluffy and finally story here. Thanks for reading, feel free to comment and pick holes in my arguments. More next week…. perhaps.
