UK News
Insights from the UK and beyond
Is the DNA database too big?
Whose DNA is it anyway?
A “citizens’ inquiry” instigated by the Human Genetics Commission, a government advisory body, wants the records of people who have not been convicted, or whose convictions are long spent, to be deleted from the forensic National DNA Database and says the whole archive should be overseen by an independent body.
The database was established in 1995 in Britain – the country where scientists first pioneered the technique of DNA fingerprinting.
It now contains genetic profiles on more than 4 million people, representing the highest proportion of any population on a forensic DNA database in the world, at over 6 percent.
A future government might misuse the information, members of the inquiry fear. One says keeping all the DNA records would be the first step towards a totalitarian state.
Does Glasgow spell the end of Gordon Brown?
Gordon Brown has woken to some unhappy headlines during his year as prime minister but the verdicts on newspaper websites following Labour’s shock defeat in the Glasgow East by-election were probably the worst he has faced.
“Disaster” was the description of the Daily Mail and The Independent after one of Labour’s safest seats fell to the Scottish National Party. The Daily Telegraph called it “Humiliation for Brown” while “Catastrophe for Labour” was The Guardian’s verdict.
Can the government be trusted with your personal data?
“Woefully inadequate”, “a muddle-through ethos”, “a lack of awareness” – just some of the phrases used in scathing reports to describe data protection practices at the HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC).
The inquiries followed Britain’s biggest data loss scandal, when two discs containing child benefit records, including names, addresses and bank details, of some 25 million people, went missing after being put in the post by a junior employee.
Who’s worth more: a squaddie or a traffic warden?
General Sir Richard Dannatt says men and women in the armed services deserve above- inflation pay rises.
He argues that at the moment an individual soldier gets paid less than a traffic warden, and a failure to address this state of affairs would affect motivation.
Witnessing a stabbing
The government has launched a series of hard-hitting adverts, featuring gruesome images of mutilated hands and knives sticking out of victims’ chests.
But even these fail to truly capture the real horror of what knives can do and the trauma it can cause. I know from first hand experience.
The pensions runaway train gathers speed
Few people are more on the pensions money than Scottish Life’s Steve Bee. And he has some strong views in his latest “BeeHive” post following publication of our exclusive story on the soaring costs of setting up “personal accounts” — the government’s brainchild aimed at solving a looming pensions crisis.
Reality seems to be kicking in early on in the dream, says Bee, who finds the whole thing “really depressing”. A chink of light amid the gloom came in this week’s Budget, he says: the extension of the ability of pension fund managers to allow trivial commutation of small pension pots should make things easier and cheaper for occupational pension schemes. But, sadly, such rights are not to be extended to personal pension schemes, a move that only serves to “drive a horse and coaches through the whole idea of our having one simple set of pension rules for all types of pension scheme”.
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The Wall
