Today’s Guardian has an impassioned piece by Henry Porter on why ID Cards are such a bad idea and are part of a fundamental change in our relationship with the State. Read it.
The Sunday Times had a big report at the weekend about how internally, nobody at Whitehall believes the system will work. “I conclude that we are setting ourselves up to fail” says one official. It’s a report really worth reading, particularly the emails that have been leaked – they’re hilarious (or would be, if the whole thing wasn’t so serious).
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Read Silicon.com’s thoughts on ID Cards – and they’re basically the friend of many of the companies that would stand to earn millions or even billions from such a scheme. Yet they know full-well that even without civil liberties issues intervening, the scheme simply won’t work.
Today the BBC’s reporting that the Home Office is now admitting that the timetable that’s been set might be a little optimistic:
“We set a timetable for when ID cards would be introduced and that might change.
“That is dependent on the review that the home secretary is carrying out.”
That’s basically a way for them to begin graciously backing down. John Reid’s enquiry is bound to show fairly quickly that this scheme is bad in so many ways that the government would be mad to proceed with it. Yet the Act is due to become law soon. So who knows?
[Update] I note that Henry Porter wrote a similar article in The Independent a couple of weeks ago, and as of this moment, it’s not behind their paywall.
Oh, and be careful what you say when you’re walking through the random metal detectors that are appearing at various stations now. It seems you can be fined just for taking a dislike to them! I’m looking forward to the police spending more time in our playgrounds watching out for swearing.