I had hoped, with the change of government here, we might finally have someone with half a brain in charge of the home office. Nope. Strong believer in ID cards.

This is an interesting one. They’ve already coughed to £5.4 billion, the LSE estimated £10 billion and the Daily Mail (not a comic I take much notice of, to be fair) recons it may top £20 billion. I am glad that we now use the US version of a billion in this country, in the UK it used to mean a million million, rather than a thousand million. So at least that’s all right.

For some reason, after 9/11 and 7/7, the politicians decided that we all needed an ID card to “fight terrorism”. How? All of the individuals that perpetrated these crimes had valid ID. In the case of the deluded boys on 7/7 most were British citizens. How does a piece of plastic with some much-vaunted biometric nonsense on it make the slightest bit of difference? I’ve never heard an answer to this question that has anything coherent to say.

The only way it makes sense is to have something like an internal passport, like they did in Soviet Russia. You can’t travel anywhere without first clearing it with an official and there are checks and legal sanctions everywhere to make sure that you don’t break the rules. This would indeed help to fight terror, because the individuals tagged as not white or really British but we can’t execute them yet could be kept together in one place and be allowed to starve to death with dignity. Of course, once you have done this it’s really easy if you want to introduce prison camps and hurry the process up a bit.

I doubt they’re that sophisticated. In reality it’s another government database in lieu of attempting to engage the disaffected and actually taking responsibility for anything. A complete waste of money and talent. The politicians have to be seen to be doing something, and throwing billions of pounds down the toilet on some technological pipe dream fits the bill admirably. I think I might see if I can go to my MP’s surgery and see if he understands this nonsense. I certainly did’t vote for it.

Have a look here for more info. The database state is on its way, and it’ll be really crap. Can you imagine what it’ll be like? Have you ever worked on a large implementation of say, SAP or Oracle? Can you imagine how useless the system will be? Shiny though, very shiny, and biiiig. Oh yes. Very expensive. And broken. People will be denied health care because it says they are’t real people, jobs, bank accounts, all sorts of vital things. These idiots can’t even put in a medium sized system to manage something as trivial as passports. It scares me. I’m thinking of converting my spare cash to betel nuts.

Sigh. 

By the way, have a look here for a common-sense take on the attacks in the UK (‘al-Qaeda’ puts on big shoes, red nose, takes custard pie) over the last few days. We were attacked by incompetents who thought setting themselves on fire might somehow make the rest of us really scared. But of course it serves the securocrats. These clowns would all have had valid ID as well. Ha.