Cameron to give your most personal secrets to Microsoft

The Conservative spin machine is winding up its motors, issuing instructions on how Nudge should be implemented and is now in full swing as it tries to influence the population on its cost cutting measures.

There are a range of stories in the Torygraph this morning, but my interest piqued after looking at my site stats this morning and noticed that there had been an unhealthy interest in one particular posting, Quangos: The Unseen Government of the UK, which I had published in May last year.

The aggressive slashing of the ever growing numbers of quangos and their spiralling costs has been Libertarian Party published policy from the time of our launch 18 months ago.

Suddenly Libertarian Party policy is becoming all the rage, as The Telegraph has told us:

So just before Mr Cameron was due to outline his quango-cutting plans today, which involve "reviewing every independent public body", Liam Byrne, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, announced that he had ordered a detailed breakdown of the bodies to "make sure every penny of public money goes to front-line services".

The Telegraph journalist Ed West goes on to say:

I wonder if, after Mr Byrne dictated that to his secretary, the whole room burst out laughing. Is the Milk Development Council a front-line service? Is Culture West Midlands a front-line service? How about the Zoo Forum?

Quite! However, the plans which are likely to come from Cameron and his Conservative policy makers are likely to make little difference to the quality of democracy, as the imperative on the Conservatives part to ensure the continuance of corporatist interests by deftly moving those quangos to corporate bodies are ably highlighted in a second Telegraph story with regards to NHS patient records.

The Conservatives, who have close links with Google, argue that developing a database would be unnecessarily expensive, and it would be more beneficial to hold the information on secure systems which already exist, such as Microsoft Healthvault or Google Health. Patients would be given the choice of storing their records with private companies, although it is not yet clear what would happen to the notes of patients who do not consent.

And this is where the Conservative and Libertarian Party most definitely part company. It is clear from Cameron's plans that he still believes in big state ownership of everyone's personal records. By giving such a contract to corporatist partners such as Google or Microsoft he is saying that he believes that these records are his to sell on as he sees fit to commercial organisations. Nor would there be massive cost savings as he claims, it would merely be redirecting the costs from uncountable quangos to an even more unaccountable commercial body. But then, that would be easier to keep off the books, so perhaps they have learned something from Brown.

The Libertarian Party firmly believe that those medical records belong to the individuals to whom they correspond, not the government, and that if they are to go anywhere, then they are to go to the individuals concerned. This method works well in France, where every X-Ray, every note, every record is the patients' property to take to whichever medical service provider he/she wishes.

It is this very bureaucracy that keeps and maintains those medical records in a centralised fashion which is one of the major cost centres for the NHS.

There has already been major arguments in government over the planned access to be provided to NHS records by medical research companies without recourse to the individuals concerned, and the farming of those records by big pharma companies. To put those records into the hands of commercial organisations en mass, organisations that are not even based in the UK and are therefore out of the jurisdiction of any UK government is in our view criminal on the part of the Conservative planners.

As part of The Libertarian Party's planned reforms of the NHS we will see those records being returned to their rightful owners, the patients. There is also a provision in those LPUK reforms to allow GP's to store those records on behalf of their patients as GP's are given greater autonomy to create revenues for their surguries and clinics locally in a variety of other ways.

The Conservative plans today will demonstrate that Cameron is getting ever deeper into the corporatist world, his Nudging will produce less democracy in the UK not more, but the conservative spin machine will pound away relentlessly pulling the wool over your eyes in the same way that Labour have done for the past 12 years.

So beware Cameron and his plans, they are not in your best interests, but as always in the interests of the commercial organisations that entwine themselves with government. There is a world of difference between privatisation and corporatism, but what Cameron brings you with these proposals is most definitely corporatism, and he will bring this to you with a smile and kind words..

Corporatism
Political scientists use the term corporatism to describe a practice whereby a state, through the process of licensing and regulating officially-incorporated social, religious, economic, or popular organizations, effectively co-opts their leadership or circumscribes their ability to challenge state authority by establishing the state as the source of their legitimacy, as well as sometimes running them, either directly or indirectly through corporations. At a popular level "corporatism" is used to mean the promotion of the interests of private business corporations in government over the interests of the public.

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” said Benito Mussolini. He would have known, wouldn't he.

History should teach us much, and over the past 10 years we have seen so much history repeating itself it is now endemic, but essential to that is one vital truth, that truth is that the last people to realise that a fascist state has been created, are those who live within it..


UPDATE: 6/Jul/09

David Camerons Conservatives really have now lost the plot completely: Almost as if by magic,David Cameron has just held a press conference where he told the assembled press:

“it would be far too simplistic for me to stand here and announce some kind of ‘Bonfire of the Quangos.’ People have heard that kind of talk many times before, and seen little to show for it. Instead, we need a more sophisticated approach. Yes we need to reduce the number, size, scope and influence of quangos…”

Well here are another 17 quangos the Tories have just proposed:

1. Office of Tax Simplification
2. Office of Budget Responsibility
3. Free national financial advice service
4. ‘Sports Commission’ (Australian model)
5. Office for Civil Society
6. Social Investment Bank
7. Skills advisory service for service personnel
8. Service for families of departing armed forces personnel
9. Military inquest family advisory service
10. International Aid Watchdog
11. Innovative Projects Agency
12. National Foundation for STEM
13. HealthWatch
14. Defence Export Services Organisation
15. All Age Careers Service
16. Voluntary Action Lottery Fund
17. A ‘development agency for libraries’

Source : Labour Party press office.

New quangos to interfere in almost every part of your life. An Office for Civil Society? This is a government takeover of everything and bringing it under State control. This is pure Communitarianism, a hybrid centre ground Fascism/Communism.. My political map, and my instincts are rarely wrong.

Communitarianism (Idea and Movement in politics) - "With the demise of true socialism as a viable intellectual force, communitarianism is now the most active philosophical opposition to libertarianism. Communitarianism is usually presented in a vague terms, but it is probably best understood as a mild form of collectivism or "democratic socialism."

That is the reality of Cameron's conservatives. Ed West, the Telegraph journalist who wrote the original article about Cameron's patient record/google plans said this in a Tweet to me earlier today:

Very sinister, this Conservative Party-Google reacharound party.

I now hope that this latest move by Cameron is sinister enough to get journalists everywhere writing about it.