Burying bad news

So, Tony Blair’s resigning as Prime Minister and the Government is busy publishing its bad news so that it won’t be noticed in the furore. Among these little details is the tidbit that ID cards will cost over £2bn more. Yes, since the ID cards were proposed in 2004, the Government’s own projected costs have risen from £3bn to £5.5bn. These figures should, by law, have been published a month ago, but the Government delayed, hoping to conceal them behind the long-foreshadowed resignation news.

Gordon Brown (generally accepted as the the next leader of the Labour Party and hence the next Prime Minister) is already being advised to drop the party’s commitment to the cards. It’s reckoned that he needs to do some serious work if Labour is to win the next election, and ditching expensive and pointless schemes like ID cards would be a good first step. If we must spend this money, let’s spend it on something more useful.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 09:51am on 11 May 2007
Category: General, Links, Politics

I dread to think who will ‘get in’ if Labour lose the next election. I had to laugh my socks off yesterday when the Conservatives’ official response to Tony Blair’s impeccably-staged resignation announcement appeared to be Cameron’s appearance on his Webcam. He seemed like ‘some idiot on the street who thought he could do better…’ It really is time for the Tory’s to dispand now – there is no room for ‘conservatism’ in modern society. I’m a new-labourite who wants to see some rigorous opposition to New Labour Party (or ANY party in power). There is none and has not been since ’97. I fear, though, that Clueless Cameron and his cronies will get in simply because people are fed up with the current administration.

On the subject of id cards: I’m sure there is an intellectual argument against id cards, but I can’t really see it, to be honest. I wouldn’t object to having one, if I thought that it would save us from a single terrorist attack.

Ruth ()
10:43pm on 11 May 2007

Ruth,
Without wanting to get too deeply into the arguments against ID cards :-)

there are four basic strands.
(1) They fundamentally shift the social contract from the classic British independence model (the Government stays out of our lives except where necessary) to a far more authoritarian, Continental model in which we only have liberty where the Government decides we do. (I suspect that this is the one you don’t see.)
(2) The Government cannot seem to make its mind up what they’re for – and no suggestion they’ve yet made as to their purpose makes much sense. For example, the Madrid bombers all carried Spanish ID cards, so they certainly don’t seem to stop terrorism. How can we justify spending at leat £5bn and probably more like £20bn on a huge system with a purpose that no one can decide on?
(3) The Government’s record in implementing big IT systems is deplorable. And yet the ID scheme will be the world’s biggest, including several completely untried technologies. The potential for disaster is huge and all too likely to come to pass.
(4) Such a centralised system is open to huge abuse. You often hear, “the innocent have nothing to fear”, but that’s only true if
(a) no one deliberately abuses the system by, for example, faking your records or hacks in to steal them, like the stalking ex-boyfriend who finds out where his abused ex-girlfriend is hiding, and
(b) no one ever makes a mistake – once the ID system becomes the accepted system of proving one’s identity, what do we do when mistakes are made (as they inevitably will be)? Especially with the putative reliance on biometrics, a system that relies on making millions of checks every week will guarantee tens of thousands of false positive and negative results (people being falsely identified as terrorists, or falsely refused their own identity).

pax et bonum

[John] () (URL)
09:41am on 12 May 2007