Bad IDea

Every time I see Jacqui Smith, my first reaction is that she looks as if she should be working on a till at Superdrug. I have to pinch myself hard to remind myself that she is in fact not only a dangerous fascist who wants to deprive most if not all of us of our civil liberties, but also, even worse, she has somehow currently contrived to become Home Secretary.

The latest proposals for the government's ID card scheme have been published this week and from them it would seem, at least if the media reports are accurate, that we could be fined up to £1000 for failing to update our ID card details. This is on top of the existing costs, of course, which will already be heavy.

The supposed justification for ID cards is that they will make us all feel safer by somehow deterring terrorism. Their real purpose, of course, is to extend government control of the individual and to add another plank to the raft of anti-libertarian measures that the government has been building under the pretext of anti-terrorism since 2001 (and, in this country, 7/7) provided them with a convenient excuse.

Quite how the news that transsexuals will be able to have two cards, one for their male and one for their female identities, makes the system more secure, is lost on me. I can imagine Al Quaeda are even now queueing up in the lingerie department of Marks and Sparks and looking at the Bravissimo web site. And homeless people will be able to have a card which gives their address as being the place where they might usually be found. Nothing wrong with that - homeless people are often stigmatised by officialdom because they don't have an "address" as such, but it does rather make a mockery of the security argument.

How long before a terrorist with the ID of "Ms Bina Laden, Underneath the Railway Arches, Acton" manages to perpetrate some form of atrocity, I wonder.

This of course presupposes that terrorists will be bothered by ID or the lack of it anyway. I can't see some nutjob religious fanatic saying "Damn, I was going to fly a hijacked plane into Canary Wharf today but now I've gone and left my ID at home".

Just supposing though, (let's go into fantasy mode here) that the government had a point. Let's ignore for the moment that for the last 900 years or so, it's been the government that had to justify its doings to the individual, and that the concept of ID cards reverses that relationship at a stroke. Let's ignore the fact that the government could store any nefarious information about us that it likes on the chip, and we would not know. Let's ignore the cost, both the cost to the individual, and the cost of the whole thing, coming out of a falling tax revenue that could actually be spent on better policing. Just suppose the government has a point. For the sake of argument.

How secure would ID cards be? To get one, presumably you would have to provide some form of existing, secondary ID. So in fact, already, it's only as secure as the existing system, and you don't have to drill down very far before you get to "proofs" of ID such as recent utility bills and Blockbuster membership cards. Plus, the government has a marvellous reputation for cocking up IT projects. Not just the hapless fools who lose memory sticks in car parks and send unencrypted CDs by second class post, but at a larger level. The history of government large-scale IT procurement (think NHS) is littered with overruns of schedule and budget, and systems that then collapse under the strain because they were designed by committee and never properly specified in the first place.

Plus, don't underestimate the government's capacity for getting things wrong. Just plain wrong. At the moment, if one bit of information about you is wrong, it can be annoying, but not crucial. Just imagine spending hours on the phone to a call centre in Sunderland trying to convince them that your details, as shared across all government departments (assuming that bit works) are wrong.

Doubt has also been cast over whether the biometrics will work, and it looks like there have already been IT compromises on that score.

So, given that it's costly, probably won't work, and almost certainly will have no deterrent effect on terrorism, why is the government so keen to press on into the valley of death in the face of all logic and reason.

This brings us back to Jacqui Smith, the exemplar of New Labour. It is because they want to control us. They want to know where we are, what we are doing, who we are talking to. They want to film us every time we leave the house, they want to record our car number plates, they want to store and read all our emails and phone calls. Because they fear us. They know that they have no legitimate reason for doing this, and they seek to control us to make it harder for people to ask awkward questions. Questions like "why are we putting so much effort into treating the symptoms of terrorism when it would be easier to treat the diseas, by getting out of Iraq?" If you ask questions like that, you might just find yourself banged up for 42 days without the option.

They want to be able to go on fishing expeditions. They want to be able, once they have put this raft of legislation in place, to extend it to the likes of animal rights activists, and ultimately, anyone who disagrees with them or looks a bit funny. They won't be happy, ultimately, until everyone has a bar code tattooed on their forehead, and the coastline of Britain is ringed with barbed wire dotted with machine gun towers. Only then will the freedoms our fathers fought for in 1940 be safe! Har har.

One of the more heartening aspects of the BNP membership being leaked on the internet last week, is that there are apparently only 10,000 of the buggers. Mind you, their vote has been going up at elections because, like Hitler before them, they are past masters at invoking scapegoats and appealing to fear and greed. But still, only 10,000 members.

Pause, though, and think, what living in Britain would be like if one day there was a combination of New Labour's profoundly anti-libertarian legislation and a BNP government. Don't say it couldn't happen, they thought that in 1930s Germany. Once all this stuff gets on the statute book, it will be there for ANY future government to use, and those who say "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" should ponder long and hard on this fact, and on the well-known poem by Pastor Niemoller.