Fat Cat Dance

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Image pinched appropriately, from the Adam Smith Institute - ©FreeForAll

 

 

So test track and trace's 'success' rate has nosedived again. The 'app': the one that appears to be a wraparound 'front-end' to the system-native ones offered by Apple and Google and obviously cobbled together by someone having failed to get to grips with the APIs of either, initially sent out apparent warnings of Covid contacts that were totally spurious, panicking members of the public into thinking they might be infected, when it was just an un-trapped message from the system. Programming 101 dictates that it should really have had a modicum of stress-testing before release, obviating the worry it gave vulnerable people already tested to the limit by the pandemic and its collateral effects; yet another frame in the increasingly exasperating disaster movie that is the Government's performance this year; on Covid, Brexit and well, everything they actually try to do, really.

As George Monbiot puts it: taking back control, referencing either Covid or to Brexit, it matters not; is just NewSpeak for shovelling huge wedges of public cash into the coffers of private companies who specialise in riding the procurement gravy train. Serco is a good case in point. Headed by The Right Honourable Rupert Christopher Soames (Eton & Oxford), grandson of Winston Churchill; the Serco Group are truly jacks of all trades, fielding companies whose activities are as diverse as border security, aviation, speed cameras, and call centres for all manner of 'services' such as Government helplines, there to assist in helping the unsuspecting folk of the UK cope with the Government's own cock-ups and malthusian practices.

That a company like Serco, which has a record of fraud, false accounting, overcharging on [Government] contracts and a raft more unsavoury curricular activities to its name should be kept in the very Pullman car of that gravy train should really, I suppose, come as no surprise. With the PM and Serco's CEO sharing the same almae matres, and the latter's Churchillian connection, which must really float Boris' boat; no, no shock at all, really.

The sickener is, that no matter how much these companies foul up, lie or cheat, the Government contracts just keep piling up. While the rest of the country now faces the end of furlough, 60% wages if your lucky enough to keep your job in the first place, now that we're heading back into lockdown, with the only 'safety' net available to small businesses in the form of bloody Government loans; they keep coining it like there's no tomorrow. The fat cats really are getting fatter: on our money and with the direct and openly cynical collusion of a Government whose only interests are vested ones.

Ita feri ut se mori sentiat [Strike him so that he can feel that he is dying] - Caligula

Comments

  1. Joe Stoner16 October 2020 at 07:22

    Silly me I thought that the Caligula quote was a call to arms but it's actually that of the Fat Cats!!

    ReplyDelete

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