Brown is clearly to blame

The mainstream media are directing their attacks towards the Chancellor this morning. As Hansard has belatedly now been put on the web I can quote some of the early paragraphs of Darling's statement about the 25 million lost personal tax records as follows: In March, it appears that a junior official in HMRC provided the National Audit Office with a full copy of HMRC’s data in relation to the payment of child benefit. In doing so, the strict rules governing HMRC standing procedures were clearly not followed. Those procedures relate to the security of and access to data as well as their transit to ensure that they are properly protected. That information should not have been handed over by HMRC in the way that it was. However, I understand that in this case the NAO subsequently returned all the information that it received in March to HMRC after auditing it. It now appears that, following a further request from the NAO in October for information from the child benefit database, again at a junior level and again contrary to all HMRC standing procedures, two password-protected discs containing a full copy of HMRC’s entire data in relation to the payment of child benefit were sent to the NAO, by HMRC’s internal post system operated by the courier TNT. The package was not recorded or registered. It appears that the data have failed to reach the addressee in the NAO. I also have to tell the House that, on finding that the package had not arrived at the NAO, a further copy of those data was sent, this time by registered post, which did arrive at the NAO. However, again HMRC should never have let that happen. Later the Chancellor advised he informed the Prime Minister within half an hour of his learning of the loss, vividly illustrating his full lackey status. Gordon Brown was in charge in March when the first breach occured, as he had been for many years before, when our income tax offices were sold off to an offshore company fro tax avoidance purposes, when the Revenue and Customs were quite unsuitably combined and when mass redundancies were enforced. This man whose two defining characteristics of arrogance and incompetence constantly battle for supremacy, as frequently highlighted on this blog, is now in complete and 'hands on' charge of the entire British government machine, which is clearly failing in almost every area. This woeful situation, of which the founders of Veritas endeavoured to give warning at the last General Election, but failed due to the subservience of the media and disconnection of the British electorate has also allowed, in the shape of Tony Blair, probably the most insubstantial and shameless shyster ever to have emerged from British politics to now strut on the international political scene. As I blogged yesterday, Blair was this week accused in Parliament of seemingly having given up some seven billion pounds of taxpayers funds merely to obtain consideration for the post of EU President. A suggestion that even seems to have found echoes in the speech from the Lib/Dems on the pointless loss of our rebate, read here, yet still the spineless Labour MPs troop through the lobbies to allow such a scandalous transfer to proceed.