Scope for Improvement

Having found itself in yet another hole, the Government has decided, against the habit of a lifetime, to stop digging and leave the taxpayers to make good the damage. A "multimillion pound project designed to improve Britain's security" (which by now must surely qualify as the most overworked comedy opening since an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walked into a pub) has been shelved because of reasons which are "believed to be both financial and technical". In Oldspeak, presumably, this means that the reasons are those staunch Whitehall natives, corruption and incompetence. As one would expect, the project (christened SCOPE, perhaps because somebody could spell it) was "due to be up and running three years ago", at which point Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee expressed mild concern. Two years after that, the first phase was launched. The idea was to "speed up communications between the UK's intelligence agencies as well as with four other government departments"; naturally, the result was "a serious process failure". In Oldspeak, the information which was supposed to be communicated ended up being erased instead. The Intelligence and Security Committee offered the minor comfort that, in its estimation, the Cabinet Office wouldn't have been able to staff the project anyway. For some reason, the Government appears disinclined to inform the taxpayers how much has been spent. Imagine that.