Those of us who remember the Thatcher years will recall that famous speech; The lady’s not for turning. This summed up the modern politician – the sheer arrogance and self righteousness that blinds them to the flaws in their policies. We are seeing something similar with Identity Cards. Despite negative press from the Guardian, The New Statesman, The Daily Mirror, The Sun and even the BBC among others, the Home Office is set to continue with its plans for ID cards and a National Identity Register.
I’ve already commented in depth about the privacy issues the audit trail will cause so there’s no need to tread old ground. However, I’ve not made much comment about cost. Now, at last the media is waking up to the spiralling costs of this scheme. The London School of Economics is suggesting that the government has significantly underestimated the cost. Indeed, with the cost of the technology and the need to renew in the event of changes of circumstance, the cost has risen from an initial £75 through £85, and £93 to an estimated £300. The Home Office dismisses this. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? But who are we to believe?
Government – and I use the term in its loosest possible sense here – is notoriously lax when it comes to budgeting other peoples’ money. Quite apart from high profile IT disasters such as the passport fiasco, you only have to look at devolved government and the Scottish Parliament or more locally to me, the Bath Spa overspend to see that the evidence points firmly at the LSE being right and the politicians being wrong. Unlike business where the bottom line is make a profit or go under, government doesn’t need to worry, so taxpayers’ money is frittered away on expensive projects that do not appear to have been properly costed and where there is little effective fiscal control.
So we have a juggernaut of enormous dimensions hurtling towards a disaster – if it follows the Australian model, it could bring the government down – and yet the government resolutely stands firm. It is in the manifesto, so they will do it. Even if the evidence is overwhelmingly telling them that they are wrong and they’ve never let a little thing like a manifesto promise worry them before.
Why? U-turn if you want to? Is that why? The macho, arrogant attitude of the Thatcher era? It takes a braver person to admit that they were wrong and change policy than to carry on regardless with a bad policy. It is just that politicians just haven’t yet learned that lesson.
There is another possible reason. Something raised by a poster over at the No2ID forum. That of mass surveillance. Why else would the US administration be so interested? After all, they have made an industry of poking around in the affairs of other countries of late. Yet it all sounds so conspiracy theorist, so unreal, so “Smiley’s People”. The poster quoted Sherlock Holmes:
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Having eliminated all of the stated aims of ID cards and looked at the nature of the NIR, mass surveillance is the only rational explanation left, even if it does sound improbable. And that is a prize worth the risk of disaster.
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