The Sunday Times discusses leaked e-mails from within the Home Office regarding the ID cards Act, that flagship of Blair’s surveillance state:
TONY BLAIR’S flagship identity cards scheme is set to fail and may not be introduced for a generation, according to leaked Whitehall e-mails from the senior officials responsible for the multi-billion-pound project. The problems are so serious that ministers have been forced to draw up plans for a scaled-down “face-saving” version to meet their pledge of phasing in the cards from 2008. However, civil servants say there is no evidence that even this compromise is “remotely feasible” and accuse ministers of “ignoring reality” by pressing ahead.
The expression; “I told you so” springs to mind here. Certainly I told my MP who then cheerfully ignored everything I said and went through the “aye” lobby. This has been driven not by practicality but the desire to subvert and control – social engineering and the suppression of freedom of thought and expression. The all-knowing all-pervading state may, at a whim, decide that you are a non person should you step out of line. That is the only logical reasoning behind the national identity register and its iniquitous audit trail. The e-mails themselves make interesting reading:
Also even if everything went perfectly (which it will not) it is very debatable (given performance of Govt ICT projects) whether whatever TNIR turns out to be (and that is a worry in itself) can be procured, delivered, tested and rolled out in just over two years and whether the resources exist within Govt and industry to run two overlapping procurements. What benchmark in the Home Office do we have that suggests that this is even remotely feasible?
I conclude that we are setting ourselves up to fail.
Indeed. And they do it with my blessing. I trust that they crash and burn in the most spectacular manner possible and take their obnoxious political masters with them. I will be pulling up a chair with a glass of coke and a box of popcorn. I will thoroughly enjoy every excruciating moment that they suffer. I will revel in every embarrassing U-turn as they wriggle to save face. These egregious people deserve all that is coming their way. Bring it on, the more, the merrier.
It was a Mr Blair who wanted the ‘early variant’ card. Not my idea…
Ouch! Now there’s someone who is positioning himself for the future fallout. And why not? Blair deserves all he gets. The man is a menace who betrayed the rule of law and freedom of speech. A man who has sought unparallelled powers for his executive at the expense of those he is supposed to serve. If every political career ends in failure, I hope that Blair’s is suitably messy and catastrophic, a nuclear detonation that vapourises him to eternity and beyond, never to return. But, pause for a moment. Who above all else wanted this awful scheme? Why is it that just about every home secretary, whatever their political persuasion, eventually touted identity cards as a panacea for just about everything from illegal immigration to genital warts*?
It wouldn’t be the civil servants in the home office whispering poison in their ears would it? Well if so, there’s some serious positioning and finger pointing going on here. “’Tweren’t me, guv, honest. It was ’im. look, yes, ’im. He made me do it, honest.” If politicians are unpleasant, venal power seekers, they are ably assisted by the civil servants who make their monstrous dreams into flesh. Civil servants are as culpable as politicians.
It would seem that the reality of the inevitable negative publicity is sinking in.
They need to understand this, because a botched introduction of a descoped early variant ID Card backed by TNIR, if it is subject to a media feeding frenzy (queues outside passport offices! and more recently IND) – which it might well be close to a general election, could put back the introduction of ID Cards for a generation and won’t do much for IPS credibility nor for the Govt’s election chances either (latter not our problem but might play with ministers).
Descoped (back pedalling) means that the flawed system being foisted on us will now be a cheap and nasty face-saving exercise. Am I surprised? Not one jot. As for IPS credibility, I wasn’t aware that they had any. And as for government election chances, well, the more these stories hit the news the better. This nasty shower have shown themselves unfit to govern. That the civil service is talking about this scheme (in the format proposed) being put back a generation is excellent news. It could be better, though. Put back forever would be the ideal solution. We don’t need it, we never did.
Keep it up, chaps. More email leaks and more Humphrey Appleby-like shenanigans on the pages of the newspapers can only be a good thing. In the meantime, I renewed my passport early to avoid this thing before the next election. Looks like I needn’t have bothered. Oh, well, better safe than sorry.
*I made up the bit about genital warts.
Hang on a sec. Don’t they have a manifesto committment to introduce the original scheme? It’s what they said when they were whipping the sheep through the lobbies. Who’s accountable for that?
The whole thing is a concoction of deceit and wishful thinking. I hope those involved get the rewards they so richly deserve …
That’s why I’m indulging in a moment of unashamed Schadenfreude.
I while back when you lot persuaded me that the current ID scheme was impractical I said that ‘if that was the case, then the government would have to backtrack’. Which seems to be what is happening.