By Lucy Ashton
The Liberal Democrats have called on the government to hold a COBRA meeting to coordinate an urgent response to the IT outage causing major disruption including to airlines, railways and GP surgeries.
Liberal Democrat Cabinet Office spokesperson Christine Jardine MP said: “The government must call an urgent COBRA meeting to address the chaos being caused by these IT outages across the country.
“The public needs to be reassured that the disruption to their travel or their desperately needed GP appointments will be minimised.
“Getting critical infrastructure up and running again must be priority number one. The National Cyber Security Centre should also be working with small businesses and other organisations to help them deal with the outage.”
“This once again lays bare the need to improve our digital infrastructure and truly modernise our economy in order to prevent the incidents from happening again.”
Meanwhile, Scottish Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Willie Rennie has today filed a parliamentary motion expressing concern about reports that teachers and pupils across Scotland may lose offline access to Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint from 1 August 2024, just days before the beginning of the new school year.
Mr Rennie, pictured right, said: “The last thing schools need as they head back for the new year is to lose access to crucial tools for learning.
“There seems to be a real void in the Scottish Government’s response. They had ample warning but seem to have sat on their hands. Meanwhile school staff, pupils and parents have been left in the dark.
“Schools have faced unprecedented disruption in recent years, from Covid and the exam marking scandal to industrial disputes and classroom violence. They could do without another expense and another upheaval.
“The Scottish Government must work in conjunction with local authorities and education authorities, to urgently take the necessary steps to rectify this nationwide, before the new school year commences so that school staff and pupils can always access the digital tools that they need without any disruption or obstacles to teaching and learning. I hope MSPs from across the parliament can get behind my motion.”
It’s a wonder Willie Rennie is not saying this global IT outage is because of the SNP government in Scotland.
But honestly have you ever heard as much bottom of the barrel scraping for a headline as you hear from the Liberal Democrats.