You know the bit at the end of Animal Farm?  You look from pig to man and man to pig and can't tell the difference.

Well, let me tell you a story.

You may recall that I was a little concerned about the loss of millions of child benefit data records.  The rants are all recorded in here under a general tag on benefit data.  Some of my posts on the topic may have suggested that the Labour party - as the party responsible - was somewhat inept and inefficient (for example, the fact that I knew about the problem before the minister responsible for data protection simply because I subscribed to a feed from the BBC news website suggested a degree of ineptitude).  As a result of the problem it may also have been suggested that the Labour party as the government were inept and couldn't be trusted to run a [insert your cliche of choice].

But would the other lot be any better?  Would Ardman's own David Cameron be up to organising [insert your preferred cliche here].  Well, how can we tell?  After all, the Tories have bugger all in the way of relevanty information one would imagine - short of party membership lists, Michael Ashcroft's various account details, and a diary indicating when they might come up with a substantive policy.  

But during a  by election parties get all sorts of stuff together - carefully targetting constituency electorate and polling and canvassing them [insert cliche].  NOw this is data - voting intentions, names, addresses.  And fortunately for the general public this is the only data the Tories control (oh, apart from various English councils information and London).  Why fortunately?  Because they only went and sent the lot to a radio station in a big e-mail.

Yes, Manx Radio (Manx Radio?  After the three-legged vote?) received an e-mail containing the details of 8,000 voters in Crewe and Nantwich.  

So, what do our flexible friends say about it:

""The email shouldn't have been sent but we have done all that we can to ensure that it remains confidential.  [They mean by posting it to journalists]"

So would you trust that lot to run [insert your cliche of choice] any more than the other lot?

Or do you look from pig to man, and man to pig unable to tell the difference?



ETA 12.17 am  Unity has some more on this and what the intended recipient of the e-mail was.