All Too Traceable

Among the national religion's more robust points of doctrine is that adequate training is bad for business. It's bad enough that companies are still occasionally forced to pay their employees and avoid subjecting them to immediate physical danger, without imposing upon the world's most persecuted victims any kind of obligation to ensure the education of their serfs. Training is potentially a slippery slope: it leads to knowledge, and knowledge leads to experts, and we all know how unpatriotic and disobliging experts can be. Hence the general corporate preference for utilising, incentivising and opportunifying the untutored and inexperienced: they are far less expensive to maintain and to dismiss, and in the event of a complete disaster any wider costs can always be covered by the taxpayer.

Those brilliant people at Serco are famous and enthusiastic masters of this venerable and holy practice, notably in their recent extortion of taxpayers' money in return for tagging and monitoring dead and imprisoned offenders, who are less of a strain on the dividends because they don't move around too much. For that little number Serco received the usual reward, namely a slap on the wrist accompanied by a compensatory package of squillions contracting for Her Majesty's Government. One such contract, which presumably received as much care and forethought as all our other pandemic policies, was for the recruitment of some non-experts to assist in identifying people who have recently been in contact with victims of the virus. Sparing the shareholders as ever, Serco entrusted a confidential email communication to someone who didn't know the difference between cc and Bcc, so that three hundred recruits all received one another's addresses, along with Serco's prudent message instructing them not to bother contacting the help desk if they should happen to need any help.

Naturally, Serco has no plans to refer itself to the information commissioner: a leniency which the Minister for Profitable Incarceration has hastened to endorse while assuring a grateful nation that the usual sniggering apology is more than enough. Still, a serious issue is at stake: "It brings into stark relief the importance of privacy about confidentiality which underpins all of this," the minister said. If people can't trust the Government's very favourite boot-boys to keep their information confidential, such information could well be withheld; which, besides the trivial matter of a few thousand more deaths, might cause considerable disappointment among the private health companies to which the Conservatives hope to sell it.