it just goes to show you can't be too careful
It's been a good week for transparency, which is bad news for people who get undressed with the light on. Last Tuesday, Gordon Brown said: "We have clearly got the balance wrong when online businesses have higher standards of transparency than the public services" and announced that, as a result, people are going to be able to comment online about GPs, hospitals, nurseries, schools and the police, just like they can on Amazon, eBay, TripAdvisor and, indeed, the Observer website.
I expect that'll sort everything out. The prime minister is deploying what he calls "the enormous democratising power of information". Well, you don't have to do much surfing to find books, CDs, YouTube clips, newspaper articles, restaurants and theatre shows that have all had the shit democratised out of them. He's invoking the collective wisdom of the nation to pass judgment on and improve our public services. Unfortunately, he'll mainly attract the same self-selecting bunch of inexplicably livid weirdos who infect the comment sections on all websites.