Bernard Dineen: Incompetence and dishonesty over NHS's troubled database

The letter says it will ensure that the right people have the right information. But what happens if the wrong people get access? The Government's record of botching up data is dismal.

Fifteen thousand innocent people have been accused because of bungling with child protection records. One housewife was accused of being a violent heroin addict when her records were confused with someone of the same name and birth date.

When she complained, she was told it was up to her to prove she was innocent. In 2007, the tax authorities lost 25 million child benefit records. They have never been found. The list is endless.

The election has produced two worrying examples. Doctors have protested after Labour approached senior clinicians and other health staff – via their personal NHS addresses – asking them to support the party by signing a letter supporting Labour's health proposals and attacking the Tories. This would then have been sent to newspapers as if it were a spontaneous act. Even more disturbing are Labour's letters inviting people to join in a scare story about Tory policy on cancer care. They have gone to 250,000 patients treated for cancer. Their names must have been taken from an NHS database.

The new database plan has already run into trouble because patients are baffled by the whole business. Labour tried to rush it through before the election to bind the hands of any future government, but it has now come unstuck and may have to be halted. Can Labour do anything with any degree of competence or honesty?

WE still don't know the identity of the political genius among Tory advisers who agreed to let the Lib Dems have equal status in a TV debate. It should have been between the two parties who can form the next government. The Lib Dems, for all their merits, are also-rans, like Ukip and the Scot Nats.

The rules for the debate were settled during discussions between spin doctors for the parties. Gordon Brown was not going to object to including Nick Clegg, because Labour's only hope is a hung Parliament, and that involved the LibDems taking votes from the Tories. Cameron should have flatly refused, and said it was not in Britain's interests.

The result is that Britain is in danger of including in government a party whose policies would hasten the march to ruin. Take immigration, which Clegg managed to avoid with a dishonest call for a "crackdown".

The Lib Dems' big idea is a full amnesty for illegal immigrants, who would thus get access to benefits and British citizenship. They would also be able to bring in their relatives, swelling the present estimated 750,000 into the millions. Would it stop further immigration? On the contrary, it would boost it because illegal immigrants would know they only had to wait a few years and another amnesty would come along. Since 1980, Italy has had 20 amnesties and Spain six, both followed by further surges in immigration.

There would also be a surrender of immigration policy to the EU, as you would expect from a Lib Dem leader who has spent his life as a devoted fan of Brussels, as Eurocrat, Euro MP, and lobbyist.

The Lib Dems want "an EU-wide asylum system", which means surrendering some of our border controls to Brussels. There would also be "an Independent Agency for Asylum". That's all we need: another quango.

Why has Clegg been able to get away with all this? Because he is a nice-looking young man with a plausible manner, a credit to the thousands of pounds his father spent in fees at Westminster School. But what a way to choose the nation's leaders. Before the debates, he was reported as saying he would be prepared to dress up in a pink tutu for the chance of taking part. In the end, he didn't even need to buy a tutu.

PLANS to spend millions of pounds on legal aid for three Labour MPs charged with fiddling their expenses has aroused anger. A retired judge well known as a barrister in Yorkshire makes an interesting point. The rules probably made it inevitable that the aid had to be granted but the scandal is that the application was made at all.

The Labour benches in Parliament are knee-deep in lawyers of all kinds. Have they never heard of pro bono publico? Why could they not help their accused colleagues without charge? He adds: "Nowadays many reputable and otherwise busy lawyers perform this sort of duty. If former MPs volunteered assistance, it would be far more acceptable in the eyes of the electorate than expenditure from the public purse."