pumpkinstrokemarrow

Having dumped the copy of the DT in question, thought I would check in the online version, where I could find no trace of the item. So much for news online.

Next stop Mr G., who had a bit of a blockage about coin of the realm, but he did turn up a few bits and bobs. For example, an accountant who had done some consultancy for the project. More relevant, some gang called the taxpayers alliance who build lists of monumental governmental inefficiencies. The COINS project was included, was alleged to have cost £1.5bn and to have overrun by 9%. So a monumental project but scarcely a monumental overrun, at least not in percentage terms. But it rather looks as if this was the rather slender source for the item in the DT. Perhaps they were scraping around for bits and bobs to fill up odd blank corners and the print deadline was rushing up on them.

Then moved onto the Treasury website where the existence of this seemingly important project was admitted but there were no details. Certainly couldn't turn up a project initiation document or anything like that. So pretty much a dead end. No-one out on the web wants to tell me anything serious about how much this project cost and I don't think I can be bothered to pester the DT for clarification. I'll just put it down to the DT getting it wrong again.

And while I dare say that the Treasury has more important things to do just now than publish details about it inner workings, not too impressed with the lack of such details. Not so open government at all.

The day before, being out of town, I had bought a Guardian for once in a while. Now the last time I did this, I think a month or so ago, I was rather disappointed. Two Guardians on the trot seemed very dull. Not even the usual sprinkling of outrageous job descriptions among the advertisements for social workers and the like. But on Tuesday it did much better. An entertaining read. Apart from being told about the new pedestrian crossing arrangements at Oxford Circus, there was lots to read about drugs. About how heroin kills a 1,000 or so of us a year while tobacco clocks up 100,000 or so. So while I am a bit doubtful about the second figure, it does make a bit of a nonsense of the current laws on substances. Maybe the nutter furore will promote a better class of debate. Then I learned about an odd Swedish novelist deceased and the unseemly squabble about the spoils from his estate. That bactrian camels are probably on the way out. Of a lady careless enough to drop a data stick in immigration at Liverpool airport containing thousands of very dodgy files. That most immigrants in France live in the south east of that country. That some eastern countries are buying up great swathes of African farm land. Colonialism with a 21st century face. And a Monbiot item about how all kinds of people are in denial about climate change and the deep shrinko reasons, nothing much to do with the climate, there might be for this. And with all kinds of people including some whom one might of thought should know better. All in all a splendid read, well worth the pound I paid for it.