Labour whipped a couple of the motions, which might have helped.

It'll be interesting to see if more parties emerge out of all this disagreeability. Reminds me of Israel, where the smallest and most fanatical ones end up with wildly disproportionate influence.

Labour whipped a couple of motions and didn't some of the shadow cabinet abstain?

Not checked the details, but sure I've read that.

I certainly think that the voting reform argument will rear its head again, which - if it was to come to anything - would certainly empower the smaller parties, and probably encourage other interest lobbies to partify themselves.

From a cursory inspection of the Guardian's explainer, at least some of the shadow cabinet abstained from some of the motions, generally clustered around motions 5 (emergency revocation of article 50 if parliament doesn't get its shit together) and 8 (weird Schengenish shit where we remain within EEA and join Efta, but don't have a customs union).

Hah! Bumped into a former work-colleague yesterday evening. He works on what I regard as 'Nightmare Central', the massively complex mixture of billions of lines of bespoke code across dozens of platforms, and customised SAP modules that run our current Customs and Excise systems. He told me that he's working on 'Brexit stuff' but as nobody knows what this means he's pretty certain that he's wasting his time. He's one of those genuinely technically adept people you meet from time to time, with knowledge that's both broad and deep. He also has an excellent working knowledge of the infrastructure, so basically just the kind of person who would be essential for some kind of sanity to prevail in the months and years ahead. He tells me he plans to retire 'very soon' because he doesn't want to face the thankless future that will inevitably arrive whatever the Brexit outcome. 

But I was able to reassure him that I have it on good authority from Jacob Rees Mogg and Bojo that it will actually be about as simple as installing a smartphone app.

Poor bastard! I wonder if they're building different system models around all of the possible outcomes, or working on the assumption that the most outlandish ones aren't gonna happen.

My guess would be that they are doing almost nothing because these systems are almost incomprehensibly huge and complex with inter-dependencies that are probably not even known in detail, parts dating back to the 1980s, 3rd party elements (e.g. SAP, IBM, BMC, etc etc) that are black boxes and so on. Any modelling of alternatives in anything other than the broadest most superficial ways would be a) very difficult b) very time consuming and c) most important, very expensive. 

Clearly, whatever the outcome of Brexit, we aren't looking at the whole lot being swept away, because there are parts which handle a range of similar international relationships to those we might face. But the point is changes are likely to be substantial and the two main contractors are private companies that don't like doing things for free.

I worked in an adjacent team, so I knew the people involved. We were a database support team (a load of DBAs) so very occasionally we advised on basic database issues, but SAP has it's own support methods and we stayed well clear if at all possible. 

Here we still haven't recovered from an attempted rebuild of the civil service payroll software, which has been through several time and cost overruns over the years and still doesn't work right, with some going unpaid for months because FUBAR.

is there a sort of Keynesian argument that having to spend a shitload of money on doing this sort of thing will provide quite a few people with jobs and so on? I dunno, it's a bit tenuous! Just trying to eke out any kind of positive. 

Sounds like the kind of lash-up that in a world of crystalline perfection should be audited, and a new system built from the ground up.

Like HS2 and other capital projects. I think of them as the equivalent of follies in the eighteenth century: consciously or not providing redistribution of wealth during fallow times, whilst not undermining patronage or the value of labour.

  Yeah right.

Actually, it is (or was) regularly audited, ISO Certification and all that, but because it's so massive the actual audit could only be done on bite-sized pieces. The issues for rebuilding are as numerous as a big numbery thing and I'm not sure what kind of appetite HMRC has for mega-rebuilds. They got a nasty bite from flirting with Hadoop a while back.

@Milko, I'm sure a good Keynesian argument could be made. Problem is we (maybe) leave the EU in a few weeks and at best we get a transition of less than 2 years at which point the systems must chug along as sweetly as they do now. If there's no deal and no transition then Shit Creek is low on paddles.

@DSSMITHHFX, I'm not in the least bit surprised. Public projects like this have a history of never learning from the previous fuck-up. They almost always aim to select the best (=cheapest) bids but simultaneously fail to spot that there's a reason those bids are the cheapest. Also, senior managers in the public service are notoriously fond of shiny things when they buy IT. If they can see a shiny icon (on the shiny new laptop that comes with the project) and clicking the icon makes shiny things happen, then they invariably pony up the funding even if it's a million miles from what the business needs.
 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system

Original estimate & launch date: $310 million, 2015

Current estimate: $2.2 billion, still not working.

Lots of finger-pointing, no accountability.

Interesting summary on wikipedia - and probably, when it comes to causes, some truth in all of them. I have to say that IBM has been one of the better companies I've worked with. OK, they're money-making bastards like all the rest, but generally, and at a personal level, they do seem to aim at ethical behaviour. 

The "Quality" view, in all its depressing incarnations, is that it's cheaper to do it right first time. That was actually Phil Crosby's mantra. DIRFT. OK, in the real world that's no more than the benefit of hindsight, but when we're looking at public spending project disasters it does at least pay some dividends to look at the early stages. And yep! Nearly an 800% overspend, because correcting errors is bloody expensive.

I can't tell you how much I hate quality management in all its forms. Unless I just did.

> My guess would be that they are doing almost nothing because these systems are almost incomprehensibly huge and complex with inter-dependencies that are probably not even known in detail, parts dating back to the 1980s, 3rd party elements (e.g. SAP, IBM, BMC, etc etc) that are black boxes and so on. Any modelling of alternatives in anything other than the broadest most superficial ways would be a) very difficult b) very time consuming and c) most important, very expensive.

Sounds like the perfect opportunity to offshore it to the cheapest team of underskilled front-end developers they can find, who will proceed to build it in whatever the current five favourite JavaScript frameworks are. :P

Hah! How dare you hint at the truth. Of course, one of these sad truths beginning to come home to some of our captains of finance is that the IT churning machine of Mumbai isn't Bombay any more and that just because you can get something wacked out at a bargain price in some shitty ERP shell, doesn't mean it'll be you who creams off the profit.

The other little nuisance is that it's hard to offshore anything that smells as though it might dish the dirt on UK tax liability. Imagine the annoyance if details of Jacob R M's tax affairs leaked out because his data found its way abroad. So we bring the buggers over here under various schemes. See how those damn natives love a decent wage - I mean it's still cheaper than paying our locals. But then there are complaints about that. I mean, how's an honest exploiter supposed to earn a living?

Third time lucky... not.

Not a fucking clue what happens now.

Ideally a general election, but can't actually see Labour winning that in the current climate. Mess.

Even a second referendum would probably result in a Leave vote again.

Current polls have stay ahead.