You've now been given permission to ask ....

Or you will be to ask your employer for time of to train. [Context planned government legislation announced by Gordon Brown this afternoon.] So lets see how this works in practice:

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*Before*
"Can I have some time of to do a training course ?"


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*After*
"Can I have some time of to do a training course ?"

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The answer will, of course (no pun intended), be the same in both cases - at least in the private wealth making sector it will.

The following changes nothing (from BBC News report):

The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills said employers would be "legally obliged to seriously consider requests for training" but could refuse a request "where there was a good business reason to do so".

ie;
Legally consider - ie for 3 seconds.
Good business reason - you're needed for the job you were employed to do - now bugger of back to work.

My guess it will just drop productivity in the public sector, who live in a complete dream world anyway ....,

[ I am aware that many of the ideas rolled out were Conservative to start with - but even if its true in this case the idea is still rubbish. It will only help keep civil servants employed wasting time administering it and thousands of government bodies revising all their procedures to take it into account - my guess is thousands of man years wasted.. hold on we can guess how much:

There are around 17,504 primary schools and 3367 secondary schools in England.

Each one will require its procedures revising at a cost of say 10 man hours of salaried staff at say £25/hr. That's going to cost 25*10*(17504+3367) = £5,217,750 ie about £5Million. Add all the other government bodies, councils, quangos and what have you and I doubt you'll get change from £50 million. The private sector cost will be higher, and that's without considering the cost of the training that public sector organisations will be too afraid of legislation to refuse.

Just burning our money as usual ... ]

Labour to use chocolate fireguard to keep our kids safe online

The shameless morons who are currently Labour ministers have a new scheme to grab headlines and win votes keep our kids safe online.

Apparently convicted sex offenders are going to give their email addresses so they can be sent to social networking sites to block these people getting access to our children.

Of course anyone with a heartbeat will realise that this is just for show. Anyone contemplating illegal activity on a social networking site or anywhere else, will have no problem with generating new email addresses for that purpose.

The plan is unworkable and so obviously so that you have to conclude that its only purpose is to deceive parents that the government is doing something.

This is just electioneering. Its about as useful as a chocolate fire-guard for any practical purpose except grabbing headlines and keeping useless socialist councillors in their jobs after the may election apocalypse they are facing.

Update: See The Register's take on this. They poke fun at "Wacky" Jacqui Smith's complete failure to grasp even the basics of the internet age.