Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead… Oh, No She Isn’t…

Last week, I commented about the imminent and well deserved demise of the government’s identity card scheme. In it, I suggested that there may well be a resurrection.

Expect to see shards of the broken project slip into other arenas of government policy.

Today sees David Miliband talking about carbon rationing:

David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, yesterday backed the idea of carbon rationing for all, based on smart credit cards that record an individual’s energy use.

Mr Miliband’s endorsement of personal carbon allowances goes far beyond the contents of last week’s Energy Review, which spoke of dealing with growing household carbon emissions through an overall carbon trading scheme run by the energy suppliers.

Making each individual’s carbon emissions – the principal component in man-made climate change – their own responsibility goes a step further than that.

Ah, well, looks like my reputation as an all-seeing oracle remains undented… Carbon rationing is the latest in a long line of environmental scare tactics that will – should it be made to work – be used to control the population. As the chaps at Samizdata point out:

Make no mistake, this is not about environmentalist voodoo science, it is about controlling people and this is the tool they are going to use.

 And to do this, they will need to track peoples’ carbon use. They will need a massive database and smart cards. Where the devil have I heard this before? What is it about these people who learn nothing from their mistakes? If the NIR is an elephant growing whiter by the second, what makes Miliband think that a similar (exactly the same) scheme for monitoring carbon use going to suddenly turn grey? And, crucially, what is it about government ministers that makes them blind to their own inability to design, create and manage IT projects?

However, the scheme would require more snooping about what we use energy for – through smart meters.

They just can’t help themselves, can they? Once a fascist, always a fascist, I guess. Lop off one of the heads of the Hydra and she promptly grows a new one. Freedom from these people and their eternal attempts to impose state control on our everyday lives is equally eternal vigilance. The ID cards scheme may be dying on its feet; that doesn’t mean that it has gone away, nor have the control freaks who devised it.