https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/16/health-secretary-scotland-fights-calls-resign-11000-ipad-to-holyrood-roaming-bill
SNP’s Michael Matheson, health secretary of Scotland, apologises after initially charging bill to Holyrood
For me, and as a Scot, we all make mistakes. I get that. If he had paid all £11k himself I wouldn't care.
But charging it as expenses and then refusing to explain it, should be grounds of immediate dismissal. If you're happy to claim it from the public, you need to be transparent when they have questions. Even from the likes of Jackie Baillie and Douglas Ross.
But it shouldn't come to that. Anybody with integrity would apologise and resign for failing to meet the expected standards of the position they hold, and the standards they should hold themselves to. The problem isn't the kids watching your iPad (why they're using official tech for watching football or why you get to use your own tech for government business is another discussion). The problem is the lies, deceit and self entitlement of not having to explain yourself.
Politicians of today, of all flavours, lack integrity, trustworthiness, basic moral standards and self awareness.
The lesson here, again, is actions have consequences.
The SNP started out as a party with good intentions and a passion for a cause (whether you agree with it or not). They have been in power for too long and have taken the power for granted, and become complacent. They now, sadly, have become the pigs in 'Animal Farm'.
Brilliantly written. My whole take is much simpler.
This is batshit insane. Nobody should ever be allowed to use byod for government use or use gov tech for personal use at all. It should be a law.
Three strikes and you're out. Anybody can make a mistake, but you're way past a simple parenting mistake here.
The SNP started out as a party with good intentions and a passion for a cause (whether you agree with it or not)
That's questionable. They were originally a reaction to bigger government after WWII. The Scottish big fish didn't like swimming in a bigger pond so they decided to try to get their smaller pond back. That's why Labour ended up dominant in Scotland for so long, the SNP split the Tory vote and ended up gifting Labour nearly all the seats under FPTP.
The SNP 'left' is a relatively new thing, and arose as a reaction to New Labour being utter cunts and the lucky circumstance of the solidly social democratic Sturgeon being a protegee of the much more right-wing but successful opportunist, Salmond.
Now that Sturgeon has gone, the splits are out in the open. But they were always, fundamentally, Tory snouts looking for a trough.
So in the UK every mobile operator has to offer a spend cap. I roam a lot (and pay £10 a month for free roaming to the US and EU) so I set a £10 cap. It took seconds and I will never get a surprise bill. This was beyond careless.
They should offer a use cap. I don't give a fuck about getting what I pay for, I just have a problem when they refuse to implement a facile safeguard on top of the legislationwhere you can ask to be forcably cutoff or subtract it from next month's "allotment". Jesus
Because it’s a government device, and account, they may not have that ability. The government could set the cap, I’m sure, but then if you really do need the data and have to call IT….
Yeah. A smidge under 4 GB and it's was a five figure cost? That is complete bullshit. We all know the actual costs are miniscule. It's mad price gouging because most people don't need to roam and thus they can can prey on it. It shouldn't be possible to get anywhere close to that kinda bill without multiple explicit approvals where the costs are clearly communicated (I can't tell if they were).
"He failed to properly disclose", that's one way of saying that he bareface lied.
Its OK though he's going to pay some of it himself so that the tax payer only has to cough up £8k.
He should be forced to pay it all and sacked.
Why wasn't there security on the device? My works devices are password protected and it's a disciplinary offence if I share passwords or give unauthorized access.
If he gave them the login creds, then he should be penalised .
If he logged in and gave the device to non parliamentary staff, he should also be penalised.
He got caught because it cost money, which is the lesser offence. Cyber security should be more robust for ministers than it is for most companies, but seemingly not.
The amount of times I've told clients to change their SIM or not take their work phone abroad only to be ignored like usual, and get called on their return saying "what the hell!?" We notified them, but just like all MSPs (managed service providers) CEOs or important members will just ignore us or criticise our advice. Now he wants to blame his family who shouldn't even have access as you mentioned. If it's his mistake, he allowed it to happen with warning, and he gave this to a family member unsecured, surely he should be held entirely accountable?
Nope. Politicians breaking all the rules we would get sacked for in an instant at work, or even arrested.
Great standards for us lowly law abiding poor folk. An 11k phone bill would kill me; I guess my taxes will pay for his mistake then. I'm so confused how he doesn't feel like he needs to pay that? I can't figure out how in the fucking world what I'd need to say or do or think to avoid being responsible for that?
It's surely simple for him to figure out. Goes to show how warped morals are being protected here.
Wow another parent who doesn't parent what their kids do online. And then blames corpos for it, and even tries to get the UK taxpayer to pay for it. Sure roaming charges are ridiculous, but I don't even really ever travel and I know that.
I mean that's pretty excessive. I'm in the US and I get 5GB of high speed data in Morocco and unlimited throttled, and it's only $25 for another 5GB. 11k for 3.8GB is ridiculous.
Is that the cost after you order some extra plan from provider or it would be the price without you doing anything? Asking because my provider charges 0.05 eur per 1MB when roaming without me doing anything, but you can get a plan for 13 eur per 1GB. So it would be 190 eur VS 49.40 eur.
Slightly surprised USA roaming cost is lower either way, I thought you had high cost for limited data domestically when compared to Europe.
That's a complicated question because of "grandfathering." I pay $50 per month per line for my plan, and that includes unlimited high-speed data in the US. My plan would cost $75 per month per line now for the same benefits, but there is a new cheaper plan that does not include the roaming data but it also has "deprioritized" data in the US.
That said, it's still only $35 (I was wrong about the price above, but still not terrible) to add 5GB of international data for a month, even on a plan that doesn't include any. There is never the "pay per MB at an insane rate" option.
Interesting, my plan is cheaper overall, but roaming is more expensive. My unlimited plan for new contracts is 27 eur (29.50 usd), in reality mine gets covered by company and I know that for them it costs something like 10 eur. It includes 25 GB free data in EU.
I hate to justify a corporation's prices for them, but I have to imagine building and maintaining a network that covers the better part of a country the size of the US is more expensive. The US is twice the size of the entire EU and I imagine your carrier doesn't cover the EU directly but has roaming agreements.
"...nearly 3.8Gb of data was used on 2 January, at a cost of £8,666."
shut the up fuck what? i would like to see the itemized bill. and the telecomm companies transparency reports.
they are sand bagging this guy hard, for a simple mistake that all parents fumble with, use of tech when rearing kids. should he have let them? probably not but to then Super Saiyan 3 spirit bomb his ass is a little extreme.
Learn to use phones. SMH there are a billion ways and warnings to avoid this. Boomer incompetence.
I did this once on a work trip in the early 2000s where I turned on data roaming to download an important document in a meeting and then forgot to turn it off and it downloaded a system update or something. It was like $7000 or something.
His regret speech was hilarious. He was genuinely crying.
Oh lord how am I going to get away with this 😭
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Michael Matheson, Scotland’s embattled health secretary, has apologised “unreservedly” after admitting he failed to properly disclose that his sons had largely run up an £11,000 iPad bill which he had initially charged in full to taxpayers.
In a personal statement to MSPs on Thursday, Matheson said he had referred himself for possible investigation by parliament for breaching its code of conduct, as he fought against mounting calls to resign from opposition leaders.
During first minister’s questions on Thursday, Douglas Ross, the Scottish Conservative leader, called on Matheson to quit, and came as close as parliamentary rules allowed to accuse the health secretary of lying to MSPs.
The scandal erupted last week after it emerged that he had racked up a £10,935 data bill on his parliamentary iPad during a week-long Christmas holiday in Morocco, and refused to explain why.
Matheson told MSPs he had learned from his wife the previous evening – the day the row first blew up – that his sons had used parliamentary data to watch football.
Jackie Baillie, Scottish Labour’s deputy leader, said the saga raised “serious questions” about their judgment, in part because Matheson’s attention had been diverted from tackling NHS Scotland’s numerous crises.
The original article contains 620 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Why are politicans allowed to publicly spend while privately holidaying? God I would love a fucking real holiday like that
It's his business phone, not like he expensed his hotel or something.
would you prefer politicians have zero way to be contacted by the outside world for weeks at a time?
It's not a phone. It's an iPad. And we don't know who it belongs to.
Business devices for business. Business pay for them. Personal devices for personal stuff. You pay for them.
If you rack up an £11k bill on your business device, and you are expensing it from public funds, you have to justify it to the public. If you rack up an £11k bill on your personal devices nobody cares as its your bill.
It's not rocket science.
An iPad most likely associated with his business mobile plan. Companies generally cover the roaming charge for it's employees because it means that employee is reachable if shit hits the fan while they are abroad. Mine does, and it's silly to assume it would be any different for someone holding public office.
The only difference here is he went from a country where roaming is free (or like $1/GB), to a country where it is crazy expensive, racked up a ludicrous bill on his company plan, and then hoped no one would notice
I'm going to go ahead and ignore what you wrote. It's largely incorrect and screams 'I havent read the article'. My answer would be what I wrote previously so I'd be repeating myself
Just as a heads up, we use £ in Scotland. Not $.
using his parliamentary iPad as a data hotspot,
Wow the article says the exact same thing I did, what are the odds
Just as a heads up, we use £ in Scotland. Not $.
Most people can infer fundamental meaning from conversational context, sorry that is lost on you
In most developing countries you can buy a SIM card with a decent data plan for a very low price. If you rack up a huge roaming bill in this day and age you're simply an idiot.
Or alternatively not taking the mobile operators side - being able to charge £10000 data costs to stream a couple of football matches worth of data shouldn't be allowed.
In what possible way does that price come anywhere close to the costs of the providers in servicing that data?
It's almost like there were no real consequences he would face so he didn't care.
This is what it's like to be rich, entitled and without remorse or consequence for any of your actions. They don't consider the obvious because they consider themselves above it.
In a truly developed country you would not have to do anything, roaming would be free.
You can do that anywhere. Still, roaming for data shouldn't be a thing, it's a scam. Your internet is just routed through the local telco and there's really no extra cost for that data.
Yeah eSIMS are great for this. You can buy them online and run multiple ones on your phone alongside your primary SIM.
The problem is that most Europeans got so used to EU mandated free roaming all over EU in the past decade that they probably forget how hard they will be screwed in someplace like Turkey.