Guy Herbert (London, NO2ID): Of interest to Our Kingdom readers in the latest rolling announcement about the ID scheme is the novel constitutional principle in play: officials at a Home Office agency decide the policy (which is precisely as we showed it to be in the documents we leaked a few weeks back), ministers than read it off idiot boards to the press - with the PM apparently unaware of the content of his flagship policy even in January, according to his interview with the Observer.
They plainly don't understand what they are doing, Jacqui Smith's conception of the information to be collected and maintained - for life - on all ID card holders, being embarrassingly at variance with the Identity Cards Act she whipped through in 2006. This announcement makes no difference whatsoever to the substance of the National Identity Management Scheme. The core remains a centralisation of government files on us all through a single reference database. Today's announcment is just a marketing exercise - an attempt to slice up the population and gobble up first those who can be forced through their jobs, or conned because of their youth.
The original method of forcing cohorts of passport holders into the database has been put back a little - perhaps because they can't figure out how to do the fingerprinting, perhaps because the Renew for Freedom campaign has showed how it can be undermined. Otherwise the Home Office shambles on. It has its eyes on being the master department and its IT consultants slaver over being pig-in-the-middle of your every civil transaction. What do they care how long it takes, as long as it is impossible to go backwards?
