State sector in seedy decay

More personal data missing. A laptop containing personal details of 600,000 people has been stolen from a naval officer. Evidently the data was unencrypted and the laptop was left overnight in a parked car. It included passport numbers, National Insurance numbers and bank details.

Doubtless the MoD will say they take this very seriously. If this is the standard they apply when they take something seriously, then God help our defences. What they'll mean is that they take the publicity seriously.

And hundreds of documents containing sensitive personal data have been found dumped on a roundabout in Devon. They included details of benefit claims, passport photocopies and mortgage payments, apparently courtesy of a department headed by one Mr Hain.

The government will doubtless claim it is learning lessons. But these failings are basic to the running of any organisation. And the duty to keep personal data secure is laid down by law. Does the state sector consider itself exempt? Like Mr Hain, maybe?

Elsewhere, a corrupt civil servant behind one of the biggest frauds in Whitehall history has managed to avoid paying anything towards a £1.5m confiscation order because the Crown Prosecution Service delayed enforcing it for 11 years. That money belonged to the people.

One day in the life of the state sector - which we pay for.

The Taxpayers' Alliance (TPA) has calculated that if the Nationalised Health Service achieved the same level of “mortality amenable to healthcare” as the average of the other European countries it studied, there would have been 17,157 fewer deaths in 2004 (the most recent year for which data is available).

To put this in context, the TPA say this is equivalent to over five times the total number of deaths in road accidents and over two and a half times the number of deaths related to alcohol that year. As this blog has said before, ministers and the nationalised health service are killing people.

Increasingly the state sector looks expensive and incompetent. The bigger it is, the dearer it is, and the more there is to go wrong.

So what? All this is obvious, you'll say. Yes, but the state sector is not like the sun and the stars. It can be made smaller. We could keep more of our own money to spend on ourselves ... the way we want to.