Comments on: Small Steps

By: Eddie

Eddie — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 10:35:02 +0000

re comment 8.

LOL.

By: Nia Stevens

Nia Stevens — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 12:56:36 +0000

From The Times letters page

Sir, So one of the architects of the nanny State is brought down by a nanny.

Yours faithfully,
GEOFFREY SILMAN,

By: Nia Stevens

Nia Stevens — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 12:42:59 +0000

Oh crap. I’ll get my url right one day!

By: Nia Stevens

Nia Stevens — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 12:42:26 +0000

Yes this is true. Greg Dyke style - I backed my staff and they’ve been blamed therefore I shall go. Hehe, perhaps Blair should go for having backed Blunkett then. Of course I’m in fantasy land now. Blair is untouchable.

I hadn’t thought of that wrt blog. (As I’m sure you realise) A cookie makes it default to the I url I gave when I first posted here, pre-livejournal.

By: Nia

Nia — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 12:36:40 +0000

Yes, I found the whole “resigning for that little boy” bit a little inaccurate. Perhaps this was freudian for “risking my job for the little boy” referring to his intervention on behalf of the boy’s Nanny.

I felt uncomfortable hearing him say that. Partly my dislike of seeing children dragged into the public eye but partly because he did succeed in appealing to my sympathies and for a moment I felt it was a shame that he had to loose his job over an error driven by such utterly human compulsions.

By: Andy

Andy — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 12:31:27 +0000

I think there can be a certain amount of falling on your sword if your office is in disrepute, regardless of whether you told someone to bend the rules, or they did it of their own volition.

(You know you could use the URI field to link to your own blog, and increase it’s Google goodness…)

By: Nia

Nia — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 12:27:15 +0000

Actually, thinking again. Though the Nanny visa itself may not be worthy of dismissal, lying about his intervention when accused comes a lot closer. It is reasonably clear he was involved, since it seems highly improbably that his office took it upon themselves to take these actions without any prompting.

By: Andy

Andy — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 12:24:54 +0000

I don’t like his way of dragging kids into the picture when he was ‘resigning for them’, but maybe there isn’t anything else that he doesn’t want discovered. Maybe he realised that he was going to be hounded out of office, and just didn’t want to prolong it any further.

Maybe I’m just being to nice to him.

By: Nia

Nia — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 11:31:49 +0000

I think the point is that to keep life being reasonably fair you need to impose the rules all the time not just some of the time. I’m not saying that the Nanny visa thing is necessarily a “sacking-worthy” offense but some level disciplinary action is a must. You have to draw the line somewhere and if that’s to be effective you have to abide by that. The fact that indescretions do go on all the time is not a reason to turn a blind eye when one is uncovered. As I said, I’m not sure the Nanny visa is a crime quite large enough to warrant a dismissal. It looks a lot to me like Mr Blunkett jumped quite hastily, which suggests to me that there’s more that he doesn’t want uncovered.

By: Shine » Thought for the day :: GravityStorm

Shine » Thought for the day :: GravityStorm — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

[…] it all before, but this is about the indefinite detention of foreign terrorist suspects I metioned last time. “The real threat to the life of the nation, in th […]