ID Cards

Now my stomach is sick

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , , , , , , ,

YOU MOTHERFUCKING, HYPOCRITICAL, SHITEHAWK, CHANCER CUNT!

Former Home Secretary David Blunkett says the government should scrap plans to introduce ID cards for all in favour of mandatory biometric passports.

Speaking at InfoSec 2009, a security conference held in London, the MP for Sheffield Brightside said biometric passports could do the job.

He said he had put the idea to the current Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.

It is something of a u-turn for the MP who first mooted the idea of ID cards when he was Home Secretary in 2001.

Wave goodbye, the spineless, pathetic fucking lot of you.

Now I know there’s no way I can right those wrongs

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On Sunday 2 September 1990 Melvyn Bragg finally confirmed he’d permanently lost the plot by devoting a South Bank Show Special to George Michael in celebration of the release the next day of Yog’s second solo album Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1.

Nearly two decades on, that album is remarkable mainly for its mediocrity. The singles tanked – in turn reaching numbers 6, 23, 28, 31 and 45 in the UK, in no small part thanks to Precious’s oh-so-artistic decision not to appear in his own videos – after which Bubble promptly lobbed his toys from his pram where his record company was concerned, all but retiring from the studio for six years until Virgin bought out his deal with Sony.

The best tracks on the album remain a Stevie Wonder cover (They Won’t Go When I Go) and a single with an annoyingly-infectious chorus that performed much better on the charts when Robbie Williams covered it six years later (Freedom ’90).

For much of the album Michael bangs on about the awful state of the world and, in particular, just how unbelievably horrific it is to be a multi-millionaire, multi-award winning singer and songwriter with never-ending access to all the drugs and groupies you can eat.

The sentiment is about as easy for the average punter to swallow as was Bono whining a couple of years earlier about how he Still Hadn’t Found What He Was Looking For. (Perhaps the diminutive Dubliner simply couldn’t see it hidden behind all those enormous piles of his cash.)

Yog won’t even let that particular bone go on the album’s closing track, Waiting (Reprise). The difference here, however, is that this slowed-down, stripped-back version of the album’s torpid third single, Waiting For The Day, contains the best lyric and most soulful vocal of Michael’s career.

It being the one track from the album remaining on my My Top Rated playlist, Waiting (Reprise) has always held something of a fascination for me, echoing as it does an interview I read with ABC’s Martin Fry from around the same time saying that even on the night he celebrated The Lexicon Of Love album reaching number one he felt empty, realising that his ultimate musical achievement was leaving him hopelessly unfulfilled.

(It came as little surprise that Bubble chose Waiting (Reprise) to open his recent 25 Live tour; it not only builds to a crescendo of “Here I am!”, but that final note is still comfortably within Michael’s increasingly limited range.)

The feeling when listening to Michael soulfully crying Waiting (Reprise) is that the singer genuinely doesn’t know the answer to the artfully-constructed, if self-pitying, question: “You look for your dreams in Heaven, but what the Hell are you supposed to do when they come true?”

Having achieved everything he thought he wanted and everything he strove for years to attain, it made him fucking miserable. A story old as time – having been awarded the ultimate prize, the prizewinner simply didn’t know what to do with it.

George’s answer was to smoke so much weed that he became a Flowerpot Man. While I can certainly see the attractions of that, it’s not a route I can necessarily condone for today’s equivalent, the Right Honourable James Gordon Brown MP.

It took the poor miserablist 14 years from election as a Member of Parliament to enter government. It then took a further decade before he could make the short walk from 11 Downing Street to the neighbouring abode. While he was – broadly speaking – a solid enough Chancellor, he never even tried to hide just how badly he wanted the Premiership or how little he felt Tony Blair deserved the crown.

Rightly or wrongly (and I never saw too much evidence to substantiate the claim) Brown was perceived as all gravitas and sincerity to Blair’s Chancerite philosophy of smiling vacuously and talking bollocks like a Hughie Green for the 90s. The feeling was that after Brown had done Waiting For That Day, he would herald a new dawn, a serious antidote to the complete and utter fluff of the Blair era.

As he finally stood outside Number 10 in June 2007, the nation wanted to believe that it was going to get its credibility back. As we had in May 1997, so we demonstrated – at first – a willingness to believe that things were now, finally, going to get better. I, too, was prepared to go with the flow.

The shit sandwich he has served up to the British population since late September 2007 has been a rude awakening for us all. But at least he found time to pay tribute to Jade Goody, eh?

As Arrivederci would have known if he’d listened to Waiting (Reprise) more attentively, “There ain’t no point in moving on until you’ve got somewhere to go.” Yet, remarkably, the man who had been so consumed for so long with the pursuit of the Prime Ministerial office seems never to have thought about what he would do with the power once he got it.

Blown this way and that by the vicissitudes of life the poor wretch has lurched from crisis to crisis, attempting to patch up his administration with populist utterance after knee-jerk initiative. Nobody is fooled anymore – he just isn’t up to the job.

(Not, I should add in all fairness, that there is anybody else in either of the two main parties that inspire anything remotely approaching confidence that they could do appreciably better, with the sole possible exception of professional Tory leadership election loser Kenneth Clarke.)

The man who claimed he went into politics to help the poor is the man who as Chancellor and Prime Minister has overseen a situation whereby people earning as little as £6,400 a year now pay income tax. The minimum wage is £5.73 an hour: you therefore only have to work for 21 hours a week at minimum wage to pay income tax. More than two millions of Britain’s poorest taxpayers face marginal tax rates in excess of 60%, a situation that will only become worse when VAT shoots up to 20%, as it surely now must at the end of this year. Keir Hardie’s fairly glowing with pride.

While the introduction of the 50% income tax band on the highest-earning 1% of the population is welcome and grabs some easy headlines, it does nothing for those most in need and raises (in terms of the stratospheric debt mountain we must now scale as a nation) sod all in revenue.

The man who built his reputation as a fiscal colossus on three pillars – deregulated wholesale financial services markets; open-to-all consumer finance; and a domestic property bubble – now oversees a financial services sector in tatters, with neither banks lending nor individuals borrowing, and a ruined housing market which still has far further to fall than the 20% already lost over the past year.

The ever-reliable Vince Cable was right this week to point out that it’s more than a little sickening to see Brown and Darling shoring up the same mortgage-backed securities that got us into this mess with public money that doesn’t exist, legitimising bribery to try to get consumers to buy foreign cars, and hiring the same former investment bankers who fucked us all over to try to convince foreign lenders to buy the country’s debt – particularly when the administration still clings to discredited white elephants such as the ID card scheme, the nationwide NHS IT project, a replacement for Trident, and so on.

We couldn’t afford follies like these before the ship hit the iceberg: there is now no excuse at all for Captain Darling having stood up (albeit briefly – Wednesday’s was the second shortest Budget speech since 1945: precisely the sort of leadership we need when everything’s going to so swimmingly…) and failing to kick them firmly into touch.

Today’s Bloomberg pen portrait of the Downfall-like scene apparently playing out behind that black, shiny door in SW1 is heartbreaking and hilarious in equal measure. There’s no doubt in my mind that Arrivederci is a fundamentally decent enough bloke who has been dealt a bum hand – the staplers, computer printers and mobile phones he’s launching around Downing Street are simply a manifestation of the frustration that must be steadily eating through his soul. But it’s not good enough.

George’s last, most heartfelt question in Waiting (Reprise) is: “is it too late to try again?”

Sadly, Gordon, it’s now much too late for anything but goodbyes and – to Labour’s eternal shame – another decade of Tory government.

That’s how the light gets in

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , , , ,

Nice.

What could Arrivederci’s Army possibly want or need to suppress, what with this being such an eminently sensible idea, executed so well, by such competent and clever people?

The government has been ordered to publish two reviews into the ID cards scheme after a four-year battle.

“Gateway” reviews are carried out on government projects by independent assessors who look at their progress and likely success.

The government has been fighting Freedom of Information attempts to get the reviews into the controversial scheme published.

It argues that confidentiality is essential to the reviews’ process.

But in a judgement published on Friday, the Information Tribunal – which hears appeals against FOI rulings – ordered both reports be disclosed within 28 days.

The Times they are a-changin’

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On Saturday I was dispirited to read on the front page of Times Online a small article by David Leppard headlined ‘Sneak’ plan for mandatory ID cards.

Being the saddo I am I wanted to look at the bill to which the article referred, so I just did a search for the article using the Times Online website’s own search facility.

No sign of it under searches for ‘ID cards’, ‘identity cards’ or ‘David Leppard’.

Yet it’s still there (via Google News) or if you know the direct URL, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5162669.ece

How curious.

Surely The Thunderer isn’t censoring itself, having inadvertently drawn attention to a matter on which the Tories remain curiously silent when not openly schizophrenic…?

Anyway, one more time in full for those with a tendency towards depression:

‘Sneak’ plan for mandatory ID cards
David Leppard

Ministers have been accused of trying to introduce compulsory identity cards through the back door, despite promises that people will not have to carry them.

Lawyers at Liberty, the civil liberties group, say that little noticed clauses in the draft immigration and citizenship bill introduce new powers to make people produce identity documents or face arrest. The bill is expected to be in the Queen’s speech next month.

At issue is a clause in the bill which says that anyone who is to be examined by an immigration officer “must produce a valid identity document if required to do so”. Failure to produce an identity card or otherwise prove identity will become a criminal offence. At present, producing a passport counts as proof of identity.

It had been thought the clauses applied only to people entering the UK at ports.

But Liberty says a separate clause in the bill extends powers of examination to new categories of people. They include anyone in the UK — whether a British citizen or not — who has ever left the country.

Isabella Sankey, Liberty’s policy officer, said: “Immigration law is being used as a cloak to introduce measures that would effectively compel us all to carry ID cards. Under these paranoid proposals if you have ever set foot outside the UK you could be required, at any time, to prove your identity and nationality.”

The Home Office disputed Liberty’s reading of the bill. A spokesman said: “The bill does not contain legislation that will require UK citizens to be issued with compulsory ID cards. It clearly states that valid identity documents must be produced on request to maintain effective immigration control.”

Launch of the ID cards scheme begins next week when marriage visa holders and non-European Union students will be the first recipients.

Airside workers at some airports will then be issued with cards — a move opposed by pilots’ unions and related groups.

The cards were proposed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America. Opponents say they are expensive, unnecessary and infringe on human rights.

Cards will carry a picture and security chip containing biometric data.

Id, ego and super-ego

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The surest sign that things are going tits up big time is when the usual bootfilling suspects run for the hills and frantically distance themselves from the imminent wreck.

Here’s a story that somehow (hmm…) didn’t make it into The Guardian or The Independent or The Times or The Daily Telegraph or onto the BBC:

Two prominent companies have pulled out of the procurement process for the controversial multi-billion pound identity card programme amid growing concerns that the government is planning to delay the roll-out of the project.

The Financial Times has learnt that the IT services company Accenture and the defence company BAE Systems have decided not to pursue contracts linked to the biometric identity card system, with IT experts warning that some suppliers are growing increasingly frustrated with the government’s indecision.

The Home Office said last night that the move by the two companies was the result of a “competitive dialogue process” with potential suppliers ahead of the announcement of a short-list of companies who later this spring will be invited to tender for contracts.

“We believe we are still on track for a framework agreement, a contract which creates a list of pre-qualified suppliers, along with a set of agreed contractual terms,” the Home Office said.

Accenture said a “mixture of political and commercial reasons” had led to its decision not to bid. BAE Systems was unavailable for comment last night.

According to the Home Office, Fujitsu Services, CSC, EDS, IBM, Steria and Thales are still interested in the identity card project.

The companies said that while the government may delay some parts of it, such as the issue of biometric cards to UK citizens, there would still be scope for other work in the near term, such as constructing the database to house the identity data.

The Home Office’s Identity and Passport Service, which is running the scheme, aims to have a list of five prime suppliers in place by May. However, the Home Office confirmed on Tuesday that the government was considering a delay in the main roll-out of ID cards to British citizens.

Leaked Home Office documents show a revised strategy in which the issuing of significant volumes of ID cards alongside a new generation of passports will begin in 2012, two years later than previously planned.

Last night the Home Office confirmed a further leak suggesting that smaller volumes of ID cards should first be issued from 2010 onwards to young people to “assist” them in opening up their first bank accounts as well as to individuals employed in “positions of trust”, such as teachers and social workers.

The British Bankers’ Association said that it had not been involved in any discussion on the use of ID cards by young people.

“This has come like a bolt from the blue,” it said.

Meanwhile, Damian Green, shadow immigration minister, said last night that the leaked documents showed that the government was engaged in an “outrageous plan” which was “staggering from shambles to shambles”.

Mr Green said: “They are trying to introduce ID cards by stealth by making them necessary if you want to work for the government, take out a student loan or open a student bank account.

“This is blackmail and a desperate attempt to bolster a failing policy.”

Now why Harry Potter,  Simon Kelner, James Harding and Will Lewis couldn’t find space in their organs for this story – not even in their late editions – remains a mystery (I gave up on BBC News some time ago) but Ministerial hats off to Lionel Barber at the FT – the only British newspaper to run the story – and the Minister’s favourite IT website The Register for picking it up.

Accenture, interestingly, have form in this regard.  Despite making a mint out of this Labour government left, right and centre, it ran screaming from the NHS’s half-baked Connecting For Health computer system just over a year ago when it became clear that neither the Department of Health nor the NHS had the first clue what it was trying to do (bar spunk billions of taxpayers’ money up a rope).

El Reg suggests something similar is happening with the ID cards scheme:

Overheard from supplier which recently withdrew from the National Identity Scheme procurement:
“Our biggest bugbear was that they [the Identity and Passport Service] still haven’t decided what it is they really want. They don’t know whether they want something that is all about security, or whether they want something that is all about customers/citizens. The two require different solutions. There’s just too much confusion still in play.”

If it looks like a turd and smells like a turd, it’s probably a turd.

Only New Labour would spend billions of pounds trying to polish it.

Fuck me senseless, I sound like Littlejohn.

I would, though, point out that the real right-wing cunts (like Michael Howard) – ie those who, unlike Posh Boy Dave, don’t change position when it’s politically expedient to do so – are and always have been in favour of ID cards.

PBD today claims that he opposes ID cards and will scrap them if elected.

However, PBD was curiously absent from the division lobbies when the first, abandoned Identity Cards Bill had its main votes in the Commons before the 2005 General Election, when he was a member of the Shadow Cabinet that officially supported ID cards.

PBD only voted substantively against ID cards for the first time in the House of Commons at 9.59pm on 18 October 2005, at third reading stage.  Coincidentally, that was the day of the first round of votes by Tory MPs to elect a new leader.

Having assumed the mantle of Tory leader, PBD’s Tories only officially came out against ID cards on 18 January 2006.

Deputy Sheriff said to me, “Tell me what you come here for, boy.”

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , , , , ,

It seems Jackie Ashley has finally woken up to the fact that we’re doomed – doomed, I tell you.

I’m not complaining, like.  But why today?  Why now?  Was she (along with the rest of Harry Potter’s pals) not awake over the past two years while this whitest of white elephants in the corner was going through Parliament and billions of our money was being spunked up a rope?

With the national database for ID cards looming, just how much do you trust the government to keep your identity details safe?

Last year… the child benefit records for a mere 25 million people, including dates of birth, national insurance numbers and bank and building society details, were lost by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC)…

You might think: well, a one-off, any organisation makes the odd mistake.  As it happens, the HMRC had lost details of 15,000 people when they were sent to Standard Life the previous month [and] an HMRC laptop was lost with the details of 400 Isa holders on it…  And there were other similar incidents, going back at least to 2005. Indeed, according to parliamentary answers HMRC had in the previous year been responsible for a modest 2,111 data-protection breaches.

Then in December it was revealed that more computer discs had gone missing, this time in transit between local authorities and the Department for Work and Pensions…  This time the number of personal details involved was unclear, but it was large.  One council, Kirklees, lost CDs with 45,000 names of people claiming housing benefit.  At about the same time, nine English NHS trusts admitted losing the records of hundreds of thousands of patients.

Next up, learner drivers. Ruth Kelly, the transport secretary, had to admit that the records of 3 million people who had sat driving tests from September 2004 to April 2007 had been lost from a hard disc in Iowa. Like the child benefit discs, the details had not been properly encrypted and, again, a “total error in procedure” was blamed.

This year has begun in the same vein. On Friday, hundreds of documents containing details of benefit claims, photocopies of passports and mortgage payments were found dumped at a roundabout near Exeter airport. And on the same day we learned about the loss of a Ministry of Defence laptop containing passport, national insurance and banking details of 600,000 people who had expressed some interest in joining the Royal Navy, Marines or RAF…

[S]urely, after one ear-splitting, headline-grabbing warning after another, from different departments, month after month, there might be a bigger lesson here, one that goes beyond tightening this procedure or that, one rather larger in scope than internal inquiries or even prosecutions, can deal with?

Remember that this year the full national identity register, the essential core of a compulsory ID card scheme, will get properly started: from now, anyone aged over 16 applying for a passport has all their details, fingerprints, face or eye scans included, added to the register.

[A]lthough for the next two years people can opt out of having the cards, from 2010 anyone renewing or getting a passport will be included.  The cards, and thus your involvement in the national identity register (which will be stored on three government databases) don’t become compulsory until after the next election – if Labour wins it.  And nobody has told us if carrying the things will be compulsory too – though plenty of the arguments in favour of them fall if you don’t have to carry them.

Legally, this is all done and dusted.  After five defeats in the Lords the parliamentary process is over, the scheme is taking shape, big IT contracts have been signed and the computer industry have been snarling at the Tories and Lib-Dems for threatening to ditch it.  Ministers still think they are on to a winner.

Well, it seems to me that after the events of the past few months, they are wrong and that any voter who notices the news already knows what will happen.  We know that millions of sensitive details will be lost.  We know that material of huge use to criminals will be sent in the post, stolen, mislaid, dropped in car parks, will fall off the back of lorries and will be sent by accident to radio talkshow hosts.  We know this because whatever the system, whatever the rules, from Tyne and Wear to Iowa City, they are operated by humans.  And people get bored, tired, drunk, have bad days, think they’re about to be fired, are greedy and, in general, make mistakes.

The government is going to introduce a single system for all our identities.  And I promise, you can’t trust it.  First, it will leak like a battered old bucket.  Oh yes, there will be ministerial statements.  Apologies.  Inquiries.  Expensive new IT consultants will be brought in.  Tough and unbreakable procedures will arrive.  And still it will leak like a battered old bucket – except that it will be the most expensive battered old bucket in the history of the world, and we will keep pouring in money to the IT industry in the years to come.

Second, it will be riddled with errors.  Great-grannies will be jumped on by armed police at Newcastle airport because of an administrative or human error.  Identities will be confused.  And third, whatever promises there are about keeping some things, health things, or criminal record things, off one database, these walls will be breached.  There is always an emergency, a special case, on the way.

This is a fantasy of control…  The national identity register will make us less safe, not more so.  However late the hour, it should be scrapped.

Pursued by a bear

By BigBrother in All posts 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

I paraphrase, but bear with me.

Mike Ingham (BBC Football Correspondent): Steve, you said yesterday there would be no excuses if we didn’t qualify.  Do you have any excuses?

Steve McLaren (soon-to-be former England football coach): No excuses.  I apologise to the fans – we let them down; we didn’t play well enough.

MI: What went wrong tonight?

SM: It’s too early to talk about that.

MI: Why did you feel the need to change the formation and team tonight?

SM: It’s too early to say.  I’m still trying to work out where it all went wrong.

MI: Will you be resigning?

SM: No.  But it’s too early to talk about that.  It’s too soon after the game to talk about my future.

MI: But do you take responsibility for failing to qualify:

SM: Yes, I take responsibility.  But I’m not resigning.  Besides, it’s too early to talk about my future.

MI: Would you like to stay in the job if you are given the opportunity to do so?

SM: Who said anything about leaving the job?  Anyway, it’s too early to talk about that.

MI: Would you like a cuddle now you realise just how woefully out of your depth you’ve been for the past 18 months?

SM: It’s too early to talk about that.

Now with the honourable exception of the Paul Gray, the recently departed head of HM Revenue & Customs, how bad does something have to be in 21st century Britain before someone admits that the buck stops with them?

The Child Benefit CD Fiasco™ is so catastrophic that the Tory front bench hasn’t even called on a Minister to resign.  Career politicians such as Posh Boy Dave and Posh Boy George apparently recognise that this one is so utterly fucked up beyond all recognition that, well, it could just as easily have happened to them – and if an Eton and Oxbridge education teaches you anything it’s to show your opponent a small degree of compassion. 

So let’s not put on the steel toe-capped boots for this kicking.  This is actually serious.  This is the sort of thing that would have seen honourable men and women fall on their sword pre-Thatcherism.  And honour went out of British politics circa 1979 (Lord Carrington excepted).

So let’s, in fact, genuflect before That Bloody Woman yet again, shall we?

Ignorant people sleep in their beds
Like the doped white mice in the college labs
And nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all.
The needle returns to the start of the song
And we all sing along like before.

Fuck off, cunt, and close the door behind you

By BigBrother in All posts 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , ,

And so, for the last time, we go to sleep with Tony Blair as our Prime Minister.

Between them, Andrew Rawnsley’s and Michael Cockerill’s recent films – for Channel 4 and BBC2 respectively – have provided the definitive account of the last decade.  Perhaps surprisingly, Paddy Ashdown provided the most fitting summary of the Blair premiership.  He said Blair has been a good Prime Minister but, had he taken his chances, he could have been a great Prime Minister – and that is his tragedy.

If you had said ten years ago that Blair’s administrations would perform competently enough, domestically and economically, to be re-elected twice and that he would – in the process – have achieved a (seemingly) permanent peace settlement in Northern Ireland, everyone would have expected Mr. Tony would be riding off into a rose-tinted sunset set fair for a well-deserved retirement on the red leather benches of the House of Lords and the highly-paid American lecture circuit.

If you had said ten years ago that the same man declaring that his administrations would be “whiter than white” and that he was a “pretty straight kind of guy” who “would never do anything to harm the country or anything improper” would stand down in 2007 as: (a) the first sitting Prime Minister to have been questioned by the police as part of a criminal investigation regarding the alleged selling of honours; (b) having lost along the way such close allies as Peter Mandelson and David Blunkett – twice apiece! – to scandals implicating financial or administrative impropriety; (c) having leant on his Attorney General to change his advice on the legality of invading a sovereign state for the sole purpose of regime change; (d) having had to convince his wife to apologise publically for involving a convicted con man in the family’s private financial dealings; (e) having led the most reactionary government of the modern era, introducing measure after measure to erode our civil rights; and (f) having overseen the dropping of corruption charges against British Aerospace on the grounds that it might damage the nation’s relationship with the anti-democratic Saudi Arabian regime… they’d have carried you away in a straitjacket.

A decade’s a fuck of a long time in politics and Blair’s imminent appointment as The Quartet’s envoy to the Middle East is a sick fucking joke.  Go and fill your boots, you warmongerer: let’s hope senility gets you like it has Thatcher – then you’ll find out just how important those people are who wipe people’s backsides for £5 an hour.

The Minister’s favourite (extant) band Crowded House have just declared, live on BBC Radio 2, “That [song] was for Tony Blair: good riddance!”  I can’t echo the sentiment enough: indeed, “may his trousers fall down as he bows to the Queen and the Crown.”

While the Minister will not go on a 48-hour bender as he did the weekend after Thatcher was unceremoniously dumped, he will be marking Bliar’s passing tomorrow evening with a close friend and some large Scotches, so we’re planning to miss out Wednesday and come up smiling on Thursday…  A toute a l’heure.

I feel the hand of history on our shoulder

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I suppose I can’t let the day pass without comment on the fact that Mr. Tony Blair has finally confirmed that we will actually see the back of him before the end of June, though I must concede I am struggling to know what to say except that the manner of his departure was befitting of his premiership – overhyped; stage managed to within an inch of its life; overflowing with hypocrisy and bad acting; and cynically timed to divert attention from bad news.

In an act of media absurdity Chris Morris would struggle to top, ITV1 interrupted its morning schedule to announce the “breaking news” (sic) that Blair had left Downing Street and was en route to an RAF airfield to fly to deliver his address to a grateful nation from his constituency.

Our brave news broadcasters hired helicopters to film Blair’s motorcade driving from an airfield in Teeside to the Sedgefield Labour Club – and took ordinary programming off the air in order to air that vital footage. Get your priorities right, Michael Grade: some of us were trying to watch The Jeremy Kyle Show and This Morning, dammit!

As Blair strode to the podium to begin overemoting, the Bank of England announced that it was increasing the base interest rate for the fourth time in six months to a six-year high. Pure coincidence, I’m sure.

And while every rentaquote MP and political commentator with a mortgage to pay was rushing from microphone to camera this afternoon (and oh, how we missed the late Robin Cook today), a Home Office announcement – delayed by a month – revealed that the cost of Blair’s vainglorious ID card scheme has risen by a further £400,000,000 in the past six months alone.  The total scheme is now estimated to be costing taxpayers £5,310,000,000, or £88.50 for every man, woman and child in the nation. Oh, and then we all have to pay a further £93 actually to get a card. Bargain.

The speech itself was oddly nondescript. I’m just not sure how many more of these final farewells I can cope with. It’s like watching the hammiest actor in the world performing a death scene, falling to the boards in slow motion and twitching, jerking, moaning and groaning while rolling around the stage to delay for another second or two his last input to the production.

Blair gets some sympathy from me insofar as The Left (if such a thing exists anymore) is comprised of idealistic dreamers who tend to view anything short of Blake’s Jerusalem as failure. No Socialist or Social Democrat politician can ever deliver everything that their base demands. So there was SOME truth in Blair’s claim today that expectations in 1997 were too high. But there is MORE truth his earlier admission that he should have made bigger changes, earlier. HE missed the opportunity and, in so doing, HE disappointed and disenchanted a generation of electors.

Any Prime Minister of the past 40 years would have given their right arms to have delivered the sort of settlement in Northern Ireland that played out last Tuesday. While the likes of Major, Trimble, Hume, Mallon and even Thatcher have to take some of the credit for laying the foundations, Blair’s personal achievement of getting Paisley, Adams and McGuinness to work alongside each other is genuinely impressive and – we hope – a new start for the people of the island of Ireland.

There is much else of which Blair can be proud – the minimum wage, civil partnerships, the Human Rights Act, the Freedom of Information Act, genuinely massive investment in the National Health Service, devolution. Britain has had a remarkably stable economy for a full decade, even if there are now signs that the wheels are coming loose.

Of course, it would be nice if the minimum wage could buy more than a can of baked beans, if Blair hadn’t tried to rig so many devolution and Mayoralty votes, if his own government didn’t undermine and badmouth the Human Rights Act and try to wriggle out of its FoI obligations, and if one of his many Health Secretaries hadn’t dismantled internal markets in the NHS before another of his many Health Secretaries re-established internal markets in the NHS, throwing away so much of that investment. But, to a certain extent, many of these and other criticisms arise from ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’.

More seriously, Blair’s administrations have assaulted civil liberties every which way and played fast and loose too often with legality and their obligations to abide by the law. They spun and spun until it became a habit and lies blurred into the truth.  Our jails are overflowing (tough on the causes of crime, eh?).  The poor are poorer, in relative terms, than they were a decade ago.  Public transport is a shambles.  Our hospitals are filthy and our classrooms are crumbling – except for those shiny but malfunctioning buildings constructed under PFI deals for which we will pay more and pay longer than we would have under any public effort.I’ll give credit – begrudgingly – where it’s due: the society of the United Kingdom is, overall, a better place in which to live on 10 May 2007 than it was on 1 May 1997 for most of its citizens. It is not, however, the place it could have been if Tony Blair had made the most of the opportunity handed to him on a plate in 1997 and I contend that, if anything, the Kingdom is less United than it was when he entered 10 Downing Street.

Everything, of course, pales into insignificance when positioned against the colossal failure that is Iraq: whatever good Tony Blair did, the 100,000+ cadavers that litter the Middle East and the ghosts of Harrowdown Hill, Aldgate, Edgware Road, Russell Square and Tavistock Square represent his true legacy.

It’s about trust, Stupid, and this country hasn’t trusted its Prime Minister for three or four years.  The last year in particular has been, frankly, embarrassing: he should have gone long ago.

Blair is not solely responsible for the lack of trust between the electorate and the executive, but he has a lot to do with it.  While on holiday last week, I watched the DVD of the first series of The Thick Of It. If Yes, (Prime) Minister summed up the way government ‘worked’ in the late 70s and early 80s, then The Thick Of It sums up the way Blair’s government ‘worked’ – in a frenzy of panic over the presentation of fluff. What a shabby taste to leave in the electorate’s mouth.

I couldn’t vote in the 1997 General Election as I was living and working abroad, but I was in the UK on the day of the vote and I travelled a couple of hundred miles around the country during 2 May 1997 and saw for myself the real hope and genuine goodwill that the new government had. It DID feel as though a new day had dawned; people WERE smiling on the trains.

I have never thought Blair – from his very earliest Shadow Cabinet days – was anything other than all fur coat and no knickers, but I shared that hope and goodwill. I therefore say with genuine regret that I feel there won’t be too many people (apart from the sadly deluded Alan Milburns and Tessa Jowells of this world) who will go to sleep tonight feeling anything other than that – on balance – he outstayed his welcome and he really rather ballsed it up.

Things Can Only Get Better? I rather hope A Change Is Gonna Come.

A Prime Minister writes…

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , , , , , , ,

Well jigger my jockstrap, but what’s this that’s just plopped into my Inbox from ’10 Downing Street’?

The petition calling for the Government to abandon plans for a National ID Scheme attracted almost 28,000 signatures – one of the largest responses since this e-petition service was set up. So I thought I would reply personally to those who signed up, to explain why the Government believes National ID cards, and the National Identity Register needed to make them effective, will help make Britain a safer place.

Reply personally, eh? But of course. (I bet he spent literally seconds instructing a wonk to write the reply.)

The petition disputes the idea that ID cards will help reduce crime or terrorism. While I certainly accept that ID cards will not prevent all terrorist outrages or crime, I believe they will make an important contribution to making our borders more secure, countering fraud, and tackling international crime and terrorism. More importantly, this is also what our security services – who have the task of protecting this country – believe.

Would they be the same “security services” who insisted Iraq had WMD and that a Brazilian plumber was a terrorist who should be shot repeatedly in the head at point blank range, by any chance?

So I would like to explain why I think it would be foolish to ignore the opportunity to use biometrics such as fingerprints to secure our identities. I would also like to discuss some of the claims about costs – particularly the way the cost of an ID card is often inflated by including in estimates the cost of a biometric passport which, it seems certain, all those who want to travel abroad will soon need.

In contrast to these exaggerated figures, the real benefits for our country and its citizens from ID cards and the National Identity Register, which will contain less information on individuals than the data collected by the average store card, should be delivered for a cost of around £3 a year over its ten-year life.

It’s hard to believe that Mr. Tony, a lawyer, can apparently fail to differentiate between a Nectar card (taken out, carried and used voluntarily for self-gain) and a compulsory ID card. It’s a quid pro quo: I’m happy that Sainsbury’s get to know which type of tomatoes I prefer if it means I get free cinema tickets or a discount off my shopping.

But first, it’s important to set out why we need to do more to secure our identities and how I believe ID cards will help. We live in a world in which people, money and information are more mobile than ever before. Terrorists and international criminal gangs increasingly exploit this to move undetected across borders and to disappear within countries. Terrorists routinely use multiple identities – up to 50 at a time. Indeed this is an essential part of the way they operate and is specifically taught at Al-Qaeda training camps. One in four criminals also uses a false identity. ID cards which contain biometric recognition details and which are linked to a National Identity Register will make this much more difficult.

So terrorists routinely use multiple identities: as I recall, all the New York, Madrid and London bombers used their own names and we still didn’t manage to stop them. But the introduction of ID cards will apparently make the use of multiple identities much more difficult. How exactly? Constant repetition of certain words does not make them true – a bit like “Iraq” and “WMD”. Your average terrorist does not expose himself to a government any more than he has to – the whole point is not to draw attention to himself: how will ID cards change that? If the ID card is only to be used to access public services, then it will have no effect in proving ID in the public sector that runs more and more formerly public services. But if the ID card is to be used in the private sector (eg by banks and airlines to prove identity), either (a) the government is going to have to kit banks and airlines out with biometric scanners, or (b) banks and airlines will do no more with ID cards than they do now with a passport or driving licence – ie look at it and perhaps copy it but, without the means to verify it, no more – you show them a document and, absent any evident signs of tampering, they accept that it’s genuine. If (a) is true, the ID card has a far wider reach than has been publicised to date and its costs will be astronomical. If (b) is true, it’s a massively pointless exercise.

Secure identities will also help us counter the fast-growing problem of identity fraud. This already costs £1.7 billion annually. There is no doubt that building yourself a new and false identity is all too easy at the moment. Forging an ID card and matching biometric record will be much harder.

First, I’ve spent the past five years working for banks with a combined customer base of 15 million Britons: in that time I’ve come across two genuine cases of identity theft and another dozen or so suspicions that ultimately proved groundless. It exists but let’s put it in its corrective perspective.

Second, “forging a matching biometric record” is not necessary unless you wish to access a service that necessitates a biometric scan. The country can’t afford the expense associated with kitting out every GP’s surgery, A&E admissions desk, school classroom, university lecture theatre and Post Office with biometric scanning equipment and the public won’t tolerate the time they’ll spend in queues while each person is scanned and approved by such notoriously unreliable equipment. And what happens if the scanner goes on the blink? Will A&E turn away my wife if she falls and breaks her arm just because the hospital can’t verify that her iris print matches what’s on a central database?

I also believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice. They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register. Another benefit from biometric technology will be to improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders.

No, idiot. If you think I’ve committed a crime and want to fingerprint me, arrest me. Don’t infringe my civil liberties by lumping me in with thieves and killers: what are you going to do – check my fingerprint record every time a burglar or car thief leaves behind a print? And how will that work (properly) unless and until every person in the country has been fingerprinted? Surely the very last people to register for an ID card will be those criminals whose fingerprints are not yet in the system?

The National Identity Register will also help improve protection for the vulnerable, enabling more effective and quicker checks on those seeking to work, for example, with children. It should make it much more difficult, as has happened tragically in the past, for people to slip through the net.

More effective and quicker checks on those seeking to work with children? HOW? Don’t assert – prove. The Home Office has proven utterly incapable of managing the existing system for checking those working with children: how will they suddenly become better simply because an ID card has been introduced? And, again, it’s pointless unless and until holding an ID card becomes compulsory and everybody is on the register.

Proper identity management and ID cards also have an important role to play in preventing illegal immigration and illegal working. The effectiveness on the new biometric technology is, in fact, already being seen. In trials using this technology on visa applications at just nine overseas posts, our officials have already uncovered 1,400 people trying illegally to get back into the UK.

A fair point. If, that is, you believe that most illegal immigrants try to enter the UK through official channels and not (for example) by clinging to the undercarriage of an HGV on a cross-Channel ferry.

Nor is Britain alone in believing that biometrics offer a massive opportunity to secure our identities. Firms across the world are already using fingerprint or iris recognition for their staff. France, Italy and Spain are among other European countries already planning to add biometrics to their ID cards.

Hmm. Yeah. Welcome to the Netherlands.

Over 50 countries across the world are developing biometric passports, and all EU countries are proposing to include fingerprint biometrics on their passports. The introduction in 2006 of British e-passports incorporating facial image biometrics has meant that British passport holders can continue to visit the United States without a visa. What the National Identity Scheme does is take this opportunity to ensure we maximise the benefits to the UK.

Fuck that. I deliberately renewed my passport last year when it still had eight years to run precisely to avoid “facial image biometrics”. I’ll fill in the visa application next time I go to the States, thanks.

These then are the ways I believe ID cards can help cut crime and terrorism. I recognise that these arguments will not convince those who oppose a National Identity Scheme on civil liberty grounds.

Well, they’re freaky lefty weirdos, so I wouldn’t worry about them, mate.

They will, I hope, be reassured by the strict safeguards now in place on the data held on the register and the right for each individual to check it. But I hope it might make those who believe ID cards will be ineffective reconsider their opposition.

Mr. Tony, I am not reassured. And you have said nothing to make me reconsider.

If national ID cards do help us counter crime and terrorism, it is, of course, the law-abiding majority who will benefit and whose own liberties will be protected. This helps explain why, according to the recent authoritative Social Attitudes survey, the majority of people favour compulsory ID cards.

The majority of people favour capital punishment. Are they right? Come to think of it, the majority of people want Mr. Tony Blair to leave office. I’m suddenly more persuaded by the democracy argument…

I am also convinced that there will also be other positive benefits. A national ID card system, for example, will prevent the need, as now, to take a whole range of documents to establish our identity.

Er, won’t that make identity theft MORE viable, then, if the chancers only have to nick one document instead of “a whole range”?

Over time, they will also help improve access to services.

The petition also talks about cost. It is true that individuals will have to pay a fee to meet the cost of their ID card in the same way, for example, as they now do for their passports. But I simply don’t recognise most claims of the cost of ID cards. In many cases, these estimates deliberately exaggerate the cost of ID cards by adding in the cost of biometric passports. This is both unfair and inaccurate.

Not everybody has a passport. I know you find that impossible to believe, Mr. Tony, but not everybody can afford a passport and foreign holidays.  Besides, a passport is a document you assume voluntarily if you wish to travel abroad. My grandmother has managed quite well without a passport for more than 80 years and she thinks she’ll manage equally well without an ID card for the remainder of her life.

As I have said, it is clear that if we want to travel abroad, we will soon have no choice but to have a biometric passport.

I won’t travel abroad, then. Seriously. Or, if I do, I’ll apply voluntarily for the documentation I need to emigrate to a country that remembers what civil liberties are.

We estimate that the cost of biometric passports will account for 70% of the cost of the combined passports/id cards. The additional cost of the ID cards is expected to be less than £30 or £3 a year for their 10-year lifespan. Our aim is to ensure we also make the most of the benefits these biometric advances bring within our borders and in our everyday lives.

“We estimate”, “is expected to be”, “our aim”: do you spot what he did there?

Yours sincerely,

Tony Blair

“Sincerely” and “Tony Blair” in juxtaposition. As I said, constant repetition of certain words does not make them true.

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