The Return of the Departing Department

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A little over a decade ago, I used to track speculation that the D.C.M.S. was going to be closed. What actually happened was that the ‘D’ was changed to ‘Digital’ and things carried on as usual, but that change was reversed in 2023 and so we’re back where we started: the Times reports that ‘Starmer’s team … wants to abolish the Department for Culture, Media and Sport — splitting it between the business department, the education department and the Treasury — allowing them to fire Lisa Nandy, the secretary of state’.

(Having to abolish a department in order to be ‘allowed’ to remove a minister suggests a more fundamental problem.)

Perhaps this time it will happen. Politics is highly febrile these days. If it does, though, the grand new reallocation of powers will look an awful lot like a decade-old plan, pulled out of a dusty filing cabinet. We may be about to find out why previous governments kept putting it back there.

Ink Losing

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From the consultation on digital identity verification:

Inclusion is at the heart of GOV.UK One Login. The proposed data-sharing legislation will ensure that more people than ever before will be able to prove their identity online and access government services, so that anybody who wants to use online services is able to.

Also from the consultation:

Our preference would be for you to respond online through our survey. We cannot accept postal responses to this consultation unless there are exceptional circumstances.

Database Stale

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Has the threat of the database state ever involved people who actually understood databases and how to maintain them?

Defined as Fine

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Bad news for researchers in museum ethics, whose field is now officially redundant: ICOM has announced that museums operate ethically by definition.

It must have startled the sector’s numerous internal critics to learn that they can’t do that any more.

So There

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From a Wikipedia page: [by whom?][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][excessive citations]