 | 27 January 2002 |
The Scottish Sunday papers are full of stories involving Wendy Alexander, Minister for ...just about everything. The Sunday Post of all folk has made a front page story out of insinuating that Wendy is to blame for one civil servant rumoured to have had a minor heart attack after being asked on the phone put a report together within an hour. What I don't get is the implication both in this and other articles that asking civil servants to do their jobs...and to do it quickly is somehow typical of the "unreasonable demands" and "impossible to work with" reputation that is being spread about. The way the SP paints it it's as if the poor chap nearly died of a heart attack because nasty Wendy told him to do some work. How much of this 'negative' press is down to her being female? If we don't pay Senior Civil Servants to give up to date advice to ministers then WTF *are* they for? especially the plethora of £60K+ folk.
Back to Wendy: "Close to breaking point" says one "Wendy's a workaholic...she can do this in her sleep". Who do you believe? Don't want to get into the grubby business that is Labour Party internal politics but one minister being given so many portfolios is a strategy determined to undermine your opposition - even if it is in the same party! Maybe Jack just relished the opportunity to do to Wendy what was done to him by McLeish - remember when Jack lost the leadership he was given Education and had SQA and Teacher pay settlements to sort out. Hope JMcC can show some common sense and decency by sharing out the workload no matter how 'brilliant' someone is, you can' t be in two (dozen) places at the same time. Christ knows were not short of politicians in Scotland. One of the best things about the Scottish Parliament has been that important but often negelected sectors were given ministers or at least deputies who took responsibility for them e.g. Communities (now Social Justice). It has made an immeasurable improvement just having people in government available and at long last with some measure of knowledge of their portfolios, just as important is having the committees where an unbiasd cross-party approach is reaping dividends in paying attention to things some ministers would rather sweep under the carpet, The Scottish Parliament has made steady progress possible but not the kind that our press will ever report.
Back in November Wendy Alexander was due to address the inaugral meeting of Women in Technology. The Atlantec phone company has just left the mess of Scottish businesses looking for help in keeping their companies phone services intact until they could be transferred. Wendy had a full day helping sorting out that issue, getting extra emergency funding aranged and yet she managed that and reporting back to parliament in the late afternoon and still found time or more likely the energy to still come to our event, much to our surprise and delight and she give a speech highlighting the need for women to take up technology-related work to combat our skill shortage. Maybe she just need a new job title "Minister for Getting Things Done"
7:18:19 PM
"Innovative Uses for Educational Technology Funds?" [Slashdot]
6:59:18 PM There's no place like home. What place now for 'General Waffle'? Well Amazon have just alerted me that my DVD of 'The Wizard of Oz' has been dispatched so it's winging it's way up a virtual yellow brick road along with 'Shrek' oh aye and a couple of O'Reillys for good measure "Wireles Java" and "Programming Web Services with SOAP" . Now Radio has a 'Home Page' category. I've tended to dump all my general posts into a category called 'General Waffle' - should I now just use the Home Page? What happens if I attempt to remove the General category? 6:35:13 PM
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