I don’t think many people will miss the British Pig Executive, British Potato Council or Love Pork websites, it has to be said. OK, I know this isn’t funny, in fact it makes perfect sense to have a less confusing structure to accessing government information rather than the myriad of often outdated and difficult to find sites that exist today. The fact that government expect to save £9 million a year as a result of the big chop can’t be bad either.
But now the scene is set, the dark comedy starts to take a grip. You see, at the same time as transforming access to government data some bright spark thought it would be a good idea to do the same with my data, your data, all the data about all of us in fact. This will come about by relaxing data protection laws to enable the government to be able to legally share information about us all, between multiple agencies, something it cannot do currently. Does this sound a little too close to Big Brother for comfort to you?