Government Back-peddles on ID Cards
The great ID card retreat was sounded today. Tony McNulty is the Home Office Minister thrust into the limelight to sound the retreat bugle because Big Ears is lauding it up in Tuscany and Hazel "I'm the Boss" Blears has a catastrophic effect on good news, let alone bad. Blears was proudly off-message yesterday: having declared that she is running the Home Office in the absence of Big Ears; she then decreed that stop-and-searches conducted by the police should be to an equal number of each ethnic background. This came almost simultaneously with an announcement from the British Transport Police saying that they are using racial profiling in their stop and searches as young Asian men are more likely to be suicide bombers. Blears is currently Minister for Policing.
Big Ears: On holiday
But to the retreat. Why the sudden about-turn? Could it be that the Government scoped the idea a long time ago and decided it was a non-starter? Remember the confusion over the cost? First it was free, then around £70, then £100 or so, and last month it was reported to be up to £300, before Big Ears intervened and said that it really wouldn't be as much as all that. Then there was when: 'the end of the year', 'three years', and 'by 2010' were mentioned. And then there was what it would actually do - 'combat terrorism', 'fight identity crime', 'reduce bogus asylum seekers': all bollocks, as we know. So that's the three corners of the project management triangle that have been bungled by the government: time; cost and quality.
If it had ever got off the ground, it wouldn't have been the first government project to be a hopeless and expensive flop. In June the Prime Minister actually apologised to parliament that Gordon Brown's Treasury had made such an awful cock-up of the administration of Tax Credits. The Child Support Agency saga ended with a similar tail-between-legs scenario in parliament. Individual Learning Accounts were an embarrassing failure. The privatisation of the National Air Traffic Control System (NATCS) clearly took lessons from the Major government's privatisation of the railways. The Passport Agency is in chaos - surely a good reason in itself no to go ahead with ID cards, given that UKPS was heavily involved in the biometric trials. The National Audit Office seems to publish a monthly criticism of the MoD's Defence Procurement Programme. The paperwork for the Tube PPP cost £500m alone - paperwork! And no one is allowed to mention the NHS's new computer system which seemed steep at £1.6bn, but has risen to £6.8bn thus far… So was there ever a point to the ID Cards proposals then, you may ask?
Howard: Opportunistic
Well, yes. You may remember a particularly unspectacular election, a few months ago. With the government unpopular and paranoid, Downing Street needed an easy win. ID cards were a simple bear trap, a product of focus grouping: hype up the illiberal proposals to be the cure to crime and disorder and see which way the opposition falls and then pounce. The Tories wriggled and squirmed, uncomfortable with the statism of the concept but unwilling to give up the macho 'tough on crime' thing they had going. Howard eventually caved, and wrote an apologetic article in the right wing editorially-liberal Telegraph claiming to be the defender of liberty but these are difficult times etc… So the trap worked: faced with the choice of being either soft on crime or opportunistic, the Tories chose opportunistic. And that was the purpose of the ID card scheme - and in it's own terms it's been a roaring success.
Big Ears: On holiday
But to the retreat. Why the sudden about-turn? Could it be that the Government scoped the idea a long time ago and decided it was a non-starter? Remember the confusion over the cost? First it was free, then around £70, then £100 or so, and last month it was reported to be up to £300, before Big Ears intervened and said that it really wouldn't be as much as all that. Then there was when: 'the end of the year', 'three years', and 'by 2010' were mentioned. And then there was what it would actually do - 'combat terrorism', 'fight identity crime', 'reduce bogus asylum seekers': all bollocks, as we know. So that's the three corners of the project management triangle that have been bungled by the government: time; cost and quality.
If it had ever got off the ground, it wouldn't have been the first government project to be a hopeless and expensive flop. In June the Prime Minister actually apologised to parliament that Gordon Brown's Treasury had made such an awful cock-up of the administration of Tax Credits. The Child Support Agency saga ended with a similar tail-between-legs scenario in parliament. Individual Learning Accounts were an embarrassing failure. The privatisation of the National Air Traffic Control System (NATCS) clearly took lessons from the Major government's privatisation of the railways. The Passport Agency is in chaos - surely a good reason in itself no to go ahead with ID cards, given that UKPS was heavily involved in the biometric trials. The National Audit Office seems to publish a monthly criticism of the MoD's Defence Procurement Programme. The paperwork for the Tube PPP cost £500m alone - paperwork! And no one is allowed to mention the NHS's new computer system which seemed steep at £1.6bn, but has risen to £6.8bn thus far… So was there ever a point to the ID Cards proposals then, you may ask?
Howard: Opportunistic
Well, yes. You may remember a particularly unspectacular election, a few months ago. With the government unpopular and paranoid, Downing Street needed an easy win. ID cards were a simple bear trap, a product of focus grouping: hype up the illiberal proposals to be the cure to crime and disorder and see which way the opposition falls and then pounce. The Tories wriggled and squirmed, uncomfortable with the statism of the concept but unwilling to give up the macho 'tough on crime' thing they had going. Howard eventually caved, and wrote an apologetic article in the right wing editorially-liberal Telegraph claiming to be the defender of liberty but these are difficult times etc… So the trap worked: faced with the choice of being either soft on crime or opportunistic, the Tories chose opportunistic. And that was the purpose of the ID card scheme - and in it's own terms it's been a roaring success.
