'In the coming days, as we take further concrete steps to resolve these issues and make amends for the damage they have caused, you will hear more from us.'
To me this sounds like he wants to carry on bribing people, sweetening people.
But, more important than Murdoch is the following:-
The whole National Health Patient Record business has been the strangest thing to encounter in IT. I thought this years ago (6-7 years or so) when it was at its inception phase and I have been proven right. Large IT commissioning is a total disaster in this regard. Luckily this company (Graphnet whom I am evaluating quickly) have found a way to operate with the wreckage, and, hopefully, no large supplier will come back and bite out their business. This is all to do with the failings of Whitehall really. The issue can be expressed like this.
Really Murdoch and his cozy relationship to government was just an obvious symptom of the way in which government has been willingly wooed by big business. Plurality in the media should, theoretically, be matched by 'plurality' in bidding for and awarding of contracts across Whitehall. A project that started at about (an already inflated) £4 billion that is several years late and incomplete at £12 billion does not take advantage of market mechanisms to fulfillment. But software is peculiarly amenable to being split up and broken down into smaller chunks.
Politicians, and Whitehall, will be glad for the diversion, but the truth is that there has been far more collusion and, in some fashion, corruption behind closed doors in the merry spending spree of the last few years. This has been a tripartite collusion between industry, government and the press (including the BBC) where the later two have caved in to intense lobbying on behalf of the former. There is a far wider, and deeper, corrupt field that needs to be exposed, but that all the media, and all the Governmental committees etc. have failed to do.
At its most stark this is a transfer of wealth from individuals, especially young individuals, to pensions, who are the investors in large businesses.
But more like a land grab than anything to do with a nominal notion of fairness or a rational assessment of national interest.
That is the choice:- Leave such things to market mechanisms without any form of oversight - that means government continues to bumble along, the press continue to refrain from bothering their readership with the stories - or insist that there should be the contrary, oversight, plurality of supply and, I think, what comes from this, encouragement of real innovation.