Who’s watching you?

Philip Pulman doesn’t like ID cards. In an aside in an interview in The Spectator this week,

Later, the conversation roams unsparingly through officialdom and encroaching regulation (especially in the national curriculum), crass sloganeering and political unspeak (‘Tony Blair was a great bullshitter’), and ID cards: ‘I’d go to jail rather than have an identity card.’

And so say most of us. For a short but excellent take on ID cards, read Grayling’s question in October’s Prospect, Are ID cards either philosophically or pragmatically justifiable? His answer,

Emphatically no. A requirement for every citizen to carry a device that enables the authorities to demand immediate information about them dramatically changes the relationship of individuals to the state, from being private citizens to being numbered conscripts. An ID card or device (technology will rapidly supplant plastic cards because the latter are too easily lost or stolen) is a surveillance instrument, a tracking device, like a car number plate or the kind of tag punched into a cow’s ear.

And to make the point,

The main pushers of an identity surveillance system—the biometric data companies who stand to gain billions—tell us that the iris and fingerprint details that will link you to the computer that stores your address, medical records and so on can be stored on a chip the size of a full stop. This can be implanted in your earlobe, ostensibly to protect against loss or theft, and read by a device similar to a barcode reader. I asked David Miliband what the difference is between this and a number branded on your arm. His furious response was proof that I cut close to a nerve.

Mind the gap?

Yesterday evening at the Business Leaders Forum at Exeter University, and an interesting take on Generation Y by Richard Wyatt-Haines (you can find more on Mind the gap: managing and retaining your graduate entrants on his website). Our table (and it seems much of the audience) was not entirely persuaded. Is Generation Y so very different to the previous one, or the one before that (see my post on Graduate Divas)? My next door neighbour and I (both the same generation) decided that it was not Generation Y that was so different: we thought they were quite like our generation, but the one in between. What is different is the context, how life appears to be, although is what is happening in Tibet as I write so very different to what happened in Hungary in 1956 (I was four) and what happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (when I was 16)?

Human rights down under

Leaving aside the irony in Australia returning a criminal to the UK there is a singular contrast with our treatment of Stephen Lawrence’s killer, whom the courts ruled could not be deported. Few will be surprised at Australia taking the action it has, and Raymond Horne is just the latest in a line of paedophiles deported by the Australian authorities, but he has lived in Australia since he was five, and has no friends or family in this country. Leaving aside the consequences of deportation (as those who treat men like Horne are concerned that the stress may make him more likely to reoffend), there is something particularly inhuman in sending someone who is to all intents and purposes, and notwithstanding what he has done, an Australian, back to a country he now has no connection with save by accident of birth. Our government pleads that this is simply international law, as it suits their purposes (they too want to deport non-UK criminals: it is just that they have to find them first). But it reflects no credit on Canberra.

Teacher knows best

Mary Boustead, the General Secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, wants the focus of teaching to change, to equip pupils with the skills, such as teamwork and the ability to research, required by employers.

“Is the world going to collapse if they don’t know ‘To Be, or Not to Be?’ Our national curriculum should be far more focused on the development of life skills and ways of working than whether or not we teach the Battle of Hastings.”

Although she may be right when she say that a new curriculum should not focus on “regurgitation but more interpretation of knowledge” she is in danger of our throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We already have the least curious generation ever. We run the risk of following it with the least knowledgeable.

The curse of the BlackBerry

A rather depressing article in The Sunday Telegraph, about the world of work. Once work was work, and home was home, but now no longer, or not for a lot of people, if a report by Continental Research for Mitel is to be believed.

Getting away from work is growing harder, with more than half of companies encouraging staff to check their emails while on holiday. Businesses are taking advantage of mobile gadgets such as the BlackBerry to ensure that workers are never out of touch. But critics fear that the blurring of the line between work and leisure time is putting employees under strain.

For the lawyers who work for us, the BlackBerry is still a status symbol. Although they may be ubiquitous in the City, we do not give them out to everyone. Consequently the day IT produce one, you know you have made it (well, think you have). Which makes it all the more puzzling for my team that I handed mine back some two and a half years ago, fed up with the endless email traffic, and the invitation to discourtesy that BlackBerries offer. Not a meeting passes without someone playing with one under the table. I’m with Jim Norton, a senior policy adviser at the Institute of Directors, who is reported as commenting: “Anyone who works 100 per cent of the time will not be working very effectively.”