The issue of the incongruity of having a Minister for Women but no Minister for Men is raising it’s ugly head again, with a new campaign blog – The Rights Of Man – calling for the creation of the post.

At first-glance, it’s the kind of idea that looks like the creation of a job for the sake of balancing out the appearance of government. It looks a little bit like political correctness with no particular aim and nothing in particular to achieve. It possibly even seems a little anti-feminist.

But actually, as the blog’s priority list for a Minister for Men shows, there are quite a few predominantly male-orientated issues, just as there are for women:

1. Make improving the educational attainment of boys a priority
2. Make the state recognise/support male domestic violence victims
3. Improve care and funding for prostate/testicular cancer sufferers
4. Make judges enforce child contact orders
5. Support equal parenting laws
6. Provide better help and retraining for unemployed men
7. Force a review of the CSA maintenance criteria where the mother has left her husband for another man, re-married or has simply walked out of a marriage with the children
8. Support anonymity for men accused of rape, unless found guilty
9. Improve care and support for men suffering from depression
10. Campaign against anti-male propaganda and male sterotyping in the media
11. Support equal sentencing criteria for men and women
12. Stop the political disenfranchisement of individual men by abolishing all-women shortlists and priority lists

Whilst I don’t agree with all of those points, it does illustrate that there is real work to be done in the world of masculism. So, as a proposal, perhaps a Minister for Men is not all that silly an idea after all.

FLASH: John Reid is to resign as Home Secretary when Tony Blair resigns as Prime Minister ‘towards the end of June’. So now we know when Blair and Reid be packing their bags. Will Patricia Hewitt follow? Almost certainly.

Voting is (sort of) underway in the French Presidential elections. Nicholas Sarkozy is, of course, taking on Segolene Royal to become President of France.

Most of the world seem to think that Royal is the better candidate, and hence, most likely, the French will vote for Sarkozy to piss everyone off. It seems to be what they do best. My trusted, reliable informant is predicting a Sarkozy win, and it does look like he’s ahead in the campaign. It’d be nice to see Royal win, though.

That’s about the limit of my knowledge on French Presidential politics. Rather pathetic, really. So, for better quality, more in-depth coverage, check out the Social Europe Blog. Going by that name, I’m guessing the coverage won’t be exactly unbiased, but since I’d prefer Royal, I might as well link to another blog that would, too.

It’s probably unlike me to say this about an election, but wasn’t it incredibly dull!

For the broadcasters, it seemed to be an exercise in going through the motions to come to a result that we’ve all been able to predict for weeks – but a slightly more dull, less damaging to Labour result. They might as well have played the results show from the last local election – I doubt anyone would’ve really noticed.

The BBC resorted to bizarre graphics apparently borrowed from The Day Today involving a rapping Menzies Campbell cartoon (‘Ming’s Bling’) and Tony Blair playing virtual tennis, presented by a Radio 2 DJ. I’m all in favour of making these things more accessible – but Ming’s Bling?! ITV were so bored by the story that they didn’t even bother with a special.

The only moderately interesting thing about the election is that the SNP have the most seats in the Scottish Parliament. But it’s no majority, they have one more seat than Labour. Again, it’s interesting to see, but only slightly interesting – and less interesting than the prediction of the SNP doing very well.

The Scottish elections were a practical disaster, with hundreds of thousands of spoiled ballots and an electronic counting system that didn’t work. That was unexpected, and perhaps there are lessons to be learnt, but it’s hardly the 2000 US Presidential Elections.

Dull, dull, dull.

[flashvideo filename=”http://sjhoward.co.uk/video/pat.flv” title=”Question Time, BBC One, 3rd May 2007″ /]

After finding that the MTAS system was a complete balls-up and had not only failed in its designed intention to match doctors to jobs but had also spewed applicant’s intimate personal details onto the internet such that they were publicly accessible (see here), it would seem reasonable for Patricia Hewitt to take some action.

Perhaps you might expect that she’d sack the people who design the system. Perhaps she’d resign, and admit that the system she’s introduced was an absolute unmitigated failure. Mad Pat did neither of these.

Instead, she reported Channel 4 News to Ofcom. She hasn’t done anything in terms of getting rid of the company who designed this lamentable system, but has reported the programme which exposed the problem to the broadcast regulator, on the basis that Channel 4 should have reported the problem to the Department of Health more quickly.

Clearly, she thinks that it was absolutely unacceptable that a news programme should take 120 minutes to verify a story before notifying the interested parties, yet spewing junior doctors’ and medical students’ personal data all over the web for anyone to see is merely a minor error.

She said she was sorry ‘to junior doctors or foundation programme applicants who have been caused anxiety or, in some cases, inconvenience as a result’, which is all very nice. But remember, she has broken the law. This is an enormous breach of the Data Protection Act. Saying ‘sorry for causing anxiety’ doesn’t really cut it. If I were to post her intimate details on a website for all to see, would ‘sorry’ be enough?

She also claimed that

There is no evidence that members of the public or other commercial interests, apart from staff at ITN and “Channel 4 News”, accessed the site.

That is an out-and-out lie. There is evidence, and the MTAS project manager has that evidence. And, what’s more, it’s clear from her own speech that it is a lie. She said:

The overwhelming majority of individual accesses before the security breach was closed came from an internet address belonging to ITN, the providers of “Channel 4 News”.

The ‘overwhelming majority’. That means, quite simply, that some of the accesses were not from these internet addresses, but from elsewhere. Therefore, there is evidence that other people accessed the site. She is quite clearly and openly lying to Parliament. If you want to read more of her misguided spiel, check Hansard.

The system has criminally failed, and now she’s lying to cover her own back and kicking off against the people who exposed the flaws.

The Ministerial Code is quite clear about this. Section 1.5.c:

Ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation to the Prime Minister

She surely knows what she has to do.

There’s a danger of this turning into the MTAS blog at the moment, but I can’t hide my incredulity at the complete and utter failure MTAS has been.

Now it emerges that Patricia Hewitt was told about the problems with MTAS security (covered here and here) by the British Orthopaedics Trainees Association a month ago, yet chose to do absolutely nothing about it. She knew that intimate details about doctors’ personal lives could be viewed by others, and even modified by them, and yet chose to take no action. If that doesn’t make her personally liable for prosecution under the Data Protection Act, I’m not sure what would.

Lord Hunt has confirmed today that the MTAS system is down, and he’s no idea when it will be back up. Until then, doctors will be missing interviews, because there is no mechanism in place to communicate the times and dates of these interviews to them. And he refuses to guarantee that the process of matching doctors to jobs will be completed by the August deadline. What he plans to do if it’s not is a mystery: Leave doctors without jobs and hospitals without doctors?

Patricia Hewitt has agreed to appear on Channel 4 News next week. Other than resigning live on air, I’m not sure what she can say or do to make up for this absolute shambles. Junior doctors have today voted for her to go, and I don’t know if she can survive the pressure long enough to go when Blair goes, as she inevitably will. It’s just a shame that won’t fix the problem.

I thought we’d hit rock bottom yesterday. Once you’ve openly and illegally posted intimate details about applicants on the internet, I didn’t think there was anywhere else to go. I was wrong.

The failed system has been shut down. But now, thanks to an utterly contemptible lack of contingency planning, doctors don’t know if they’ve got interviews next week, or even where and when the interviews will be held.

MTAS was supposed to make NHS job applications more like the private sector. Do companies really try and attract people to work for them for the next thirty-five years by ignoring their past work-related experience, posting their intimate personal details all over the internet, and then not telling them when and where their interviews are? Is that how Mad Pat was appointed?

We no longer have anywhere near enough NHS dentists thanks to this government’s policies so people use other dentists from services online like Asecra. Soon, we won’t have any doctors either.

Latest Update 16:20: It’s now emerged that after a failure of the security of MTAS’s predecessor MDAP, the BMA was promised that the new system would be super-secure. Now we know that not even a password was needed to access thousands of people’s personal details. And I guess we also know the value of a government ‘promise’.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said Mad Pat should resign. I’m starting to get a reputation. But she really is not fit for purpose. After presiding over a catalogue of failures, she’s still in post.

She thinks services for rare diseases should be scrapped, doctors and nurses who don’t wash their hands should go to prison, hospitals should treat animals alongside humans, that NHS debt doubling is a good thing, that the NHS has too many doctors and nurses, and that dirty sheets are the way forward. She’s presided over an absolutely catastrophic failure in reform of medical training, and yet still thinks the NHS has just enjoyed its best year ever. She’s even cut the most vital of services because it’s not a political priority.

And now, it’s revealed that not only was MTAS a failure in selecting the right people for the right jobs, it was also a total security shambles.

Thousands of medical students’ and junior doctors’ personal details – including mobile phone numbers, addresses, and even criminal records – were posted, unprotected, on the internet, for anyone to access. They’re even available on Google.

As if that wasn’t enough, highly sensitive personal data which was supposed to be stored anonymously and separately from personal data – things like sexuality and religion – have been posted on the internet alongside the applicants’ names.

When this was first reported to the NHS’s IT commission, they say ‘Ah, there’s not much we can do about that’. That’s when the doctors went to the media. Then Lord Hunt comes along and claims that these were posted by some malicious individual. That was not true. Then it was claimed that the details had only been visible on the web for a few hours. That was also not true. The system was so badly designed that this data was simply being stored online, without even simple password protection, and had been available to anyone with an internet connection and a titter of wit for at least three days, and almost certainly much, much longer.

But just in case that’s not terrible enough, it has emerged today that not only could such information be downloaded and seen by anyone with an internet connection, but it could also be edited. By anyone. Yep, anyone could get into any applicants online application and edit it to their heart’s content without so much as a password.

This is not only incredibly shoddy security, it’s also illegal. It’s quite clearly against the Data Protection Act, and legal experts are predicting that if any junior doctor decides to sue the government over this, then they’ve got a pretty decent chance of winning the case.

But heck, that’s not enough for this failure of a government.

The system which is currently being tested to hold patient records has managed to spew out the personal details of many consultants, including their home addresses and phone numbers. This is the super-secure system that is virtually impossible to hack, spewing out personal details onto the internet in a completely unprotected fashion.

Patricia Hewitt has presided over the introduction of a system which has destroyed confidence, made lives hell for junior doctors, and now broken the law. She’s been an unmitigated failure of a Health Secretary, and has done damage to the NHS that will take years to put right.

I don’t think I can ask her to resign again. The fact that she’s been through all this and not even considered tendering her resignation tells us everything we need to know about her, and everything we need to know about New Labour, and everything we need to know about political integrity. There’s none left.

There’s been much comment recently about politicians reaching out to the ‘yoof’ vote through sites like YouTube, and Labour’s embarrassing efforts thereon. Why is it that politicians believe that they can reach a politically disaffected youth by doing old things via new media? The problem isn’t that teenagers don’t want to see a speech by Tony Blair on TV, it’s that they don’t want to see a speech by Tony Blair. Sticking it on YouTube doesn’t help.

It’s a lot like Blair’s idea to woo the MTV generation by appearing on, erm, MTV. That, too, was a bizarre idea. People watch MTV for The Osbournes, not for a party political broadcast. The medium is unimportant – if The Osbournes was broadcast via YouTube, it would be as popular as it was on MTV. A party political broadcast is as unappealing on YouTube as it is on the BBC. It isn’t the medium politicians are getting wrong, and trying to hijack a medium won’t get far.

The (relative) success of WebCameron comes from the fact that it does things differently. It allows users to post videos like this without complaint. It engages (albeit somewhat reluctantly) with the blogosphere’s proclivity for awkward questions. In short, it allows people to disagree, mock the site and the system, and hence engage in something resembling a two-way conversation (however staged and controlled it is in reality).

That’s why Labour, who are stuck in the Blairite era of tight media control can’t hack it. They fear nothing more than discussion, debate, and a news cycle with a life of it’s own. So they can’t engage with a youth currently obsessed by the idea of the democratisation of the media. Prepared speeches and crafted videos have no place and hold no interest for this youth, whether on YouTube, their iPod, or the BBC.

One of the great historical strengths of British politics has been the administration’s ability to do almost anything it likes for four or five years, after which they will be judged by the electorate. As the electorate becomes more connected, and the sharing of ideas takes hold, then we enter a new form of democracy, where politicians are judged constantly, and opinions are constantly formed and reformed.

And that’s the real message. People want to be heard, consulted, and involved – through any and all media. The political game has reached a tipping point, and however you disguise old-style politics, it just won’t cut it in the brave new world.