If you haven’t yet decided which way to vote in the parliamentary elections, maybe you could help yourself to decide by putting your questions to the candidates. Send us your question for the any of the parliamentary candidates standing in the Greenwich and Woolwich constituency and we will send your questions to them and try to get them answered.
You can submit your questions by email or by posting them as a comment below. Please state your question and to which candidate the question is directed.
Do Candidates agree with Gordon Brown’s comment (2nd TV Leadership debate) that MP’s should have no extra jobs and consultancies while holding Parliamentary office?
Would the candidates like to comment on Greenwich Council’s announcement that it is to snoop on its own staff?
http://dizzythinks.net/2010/04/council-snoopers-snoop-on-themselves-to.html
This is the thin end of the wedge, in my view. Today, cross-referencing payroll database with council tax database, and then taking out court proceedings against their own staff; tomorrow, who knows – cross-referencing money-advice clinic databases against pension contribution databases …?
Seriously, Greenwich Council employees need to a look at their employment contracts – data protection legislation says that data collected on “data subjects” (employees) by the “data controller” (the Council) must be used ONLY for the purpose (ie payroll) for which it was collected.
Parents of children at Greenwich schools should wise up, also, to the implications of the Council’s computer records back-up service for pupil records at schools in Greenwich. It is mean to be a “rolling back up” (ie latest back up over-writes the older back-up) but Greenwich is a dyed in the wool Labour council, and the Labour government has not given up the idea of a national database in the teeth of public suspicion and resistance. I expect that schools did obtain parents’ permission to keep their children’s details on record but I somehow doubt that the parents were asked for permission to allow their children’s records to be exported “off-site” as well, to a third party. If I were a parent I would be making a close and detailed examination of what happens to what one might call the “back-up of the back-up”.
As a final comment: it is all eyewash, what people are being told about the NHS Summary Care Records – ie about how only having a summary care record will enable hospital staff to help you if you can’t remember your medication or if you are unconscious: the smart cards issued to NHS staff can and will be programmed to over-ride patient preferences (that is clear in the documentation), and then people who shouldn’t have the smart cards will get hold of them, and so on. It seems, too, that if one does not opt out now one cannot do so later – that is opposite to what most organisations have to do to comply with the data protection legislation. Google “Integrated Adastra” (that’s the name of the “solution” being used to put together the Summary Care Records), if you don’t believe me. Medical records should be protected by military-level encryption but, on the contrary, NHS records are going to be accessibly by all and sundry with a smart card (and we all know how “secure” and uncloneable they are).