It’s not just that I’m a crabby old bat – I really do believe the world has gone mad. For example, take these three seemingly unrelated articles that caught my eye today on the Times UK news website.

Firstly that the MOD have managed to lose a laptop containing the personal data of 600,000 people, including serving personnel and thousands of people who have shown an interest in a military career. Now we’ve known about identity theft for years, and the ‘War or Terror’ has been the government’s excuse for all manner of infringments of our personal and civil liberties… so when is somebody going to heed the lesson that if you must have people’s personal data you owe it to them to at least look after it?

The second piece was about how Claire Verity, a so-called Nanny who appeared on some TV programme advising parents to leave their children scream all day and night had ‘fabricated her qualifications.’ Clearly although the rest of us have to give all sorts of personal data the moment we want to move from Job A to Job B, the people who demand such data seem incapable of checking it. Perhaps it’s all be lost on a laptop somewhere.

Thirdly, a judge has ordered an inquiry into how an asylum-seeker got a full-time job with an asylum and immigration tribunal service. That’s a nice own goal. Apparently routine checks (which presumably meant just looking at the application and saying ‘Yes, that’s an application’ failed to detect that his documents were fraudulent. The Tribunals Service has promised that checks have since been updated.

So what is really going on here? Sounds to me like the powers that be are telling us : We must have all your information and if you don’t provide it we shall not consider you for a job. If you DO provide it, however, we shall:
(a) ignore it
(b) fail to check it without first taking the paper bag off our heads
(c) lose it
(d) sell it to the highest bidder.

Take your pick, it could be any one of them.