Man in a Shed: NHS IT time bomb ticks on...

Computer Weekly keeps up the pressure on the government with a brief report by Tony Colins. Although its a trade magazine I recommend reading it and following its links.

In short the key point is:

"Their open letter to the House of Commons Health Select Committee echoes a call last year by Computer Weekly for an independent audit of the project.

The letter is unprecedented. Suppliers say they have been warned off speaking about the NPfIT, and IT directors in the NHS fear being victimised if they openly express critical views. Academics, who are independent of the NHS, can express their concerns without fear of repercussions. " - Tony Colins, Computer Weekly, Wednesday 12 April 2006.

This is all likely to go critical around the time of the next general election - which will harm Gordon Brown greatly. However, the real harm will be to the innocent patients of the NHS and the swindled tax payers who fund this project.

Remember the technical people can see this coming. They have tried to warn everyone else.

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman