Via the NO2ID Newsblog, this:
Government lawyers this week began a legal battle to prevent the publication of confidential reports into the feasibility of the £5.4bn ID cards programme.
The Office of Government Commerce, a Treasury agency, is pitting itself against the information commissioner in a five-day hearing that will determine whether it has the right to withhold the reports from public scrutiny.
Hang on a minute… this evil, pernicious government wants us to bare our very souls, to provide every detail of our lives that ministers see fit to extract from us, but is prepared to go to court to maintain a cloak of secrecy over the very scheme itself…
That this action is deeply repugnant, is contemptuous of the public whom the government is supposed to serve, is typical of the arrant control freakery and sinister behaviour I have come to expect from the Blair government comes as no great surprise – although the sheer effrontery does cause a sharp intake of breath.
Not that I’m cynical or anything… Oh, very well, I am cynical, but that’s because I have become so used to the feeding frenzy at the trough of the public purse that is the core activity in the palace of Westminster, that I no longer believe anything a politician says without verifiable independent evidence to support it and expect these sleazeballs to behave badly. But even this takes the biscuit. After all, it begs the obvious riposte:
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
What, I wonder, is hmg so fearful of that it wishes to hide it from those it is charged with serving? Even they can’t be that stupid, can they? Seems that they can…