The following just sent to my MP, Jean Corston.
Dear Jean,
cc Sam,
I'm disappointed to have heard nothing -- not even acknowledgement of receipt -- of my communication earlier this year regarding University tuition fees, being as they are another attempt by our decision makers to fulfill the wishes of comfortably off Middle England to offload their responsibilities onto future generations and take a payment holiday. The Vice Chancellor the University of Bristol, known for being in favour of the fees, at least asked his press secretary (or some such) to send me the text of a letter to the Times. A letter which failed entirely to address main point, but at least I know that my own was received.
That, however, is not the subject of this missive. Here I return to the old ID card chestnut. It seems that our good friend Mr. Blunkett (I have a friend who likes to refer to him as "Security Blunkett", a tag which I do wish I had thought of myself) has made some headway with this idiotic notion of voluntary -- no, compulsory, entitlement -- no, sorry, I'll get this right eventually, Identity cards.
This headway is made partly on the back of a simple, bald, lie. The lie that sixty-odd percent of respondents to the consultation were in favour fo the scheme, when in reality seventy-odd percent were against. I don't have the time to go over the sordid details; you know as well as I do that the responses received through the stand.org.uk were bona-fide individual responses to a public consultation. STAND had a very simple role in the process: they notified interested parties of the existence of the consultation (I haven't got time to sit around scouring .gov.uk, I rely on others to do it for me), and they provided a mechanism by which it is easy to express your views to your MP (since many apparently will not accept email, a level of technical wizardy is required to achieve this). In the light of this Mr. Blunkett and his department's moves can only be seen as an attack on openness and on the process of democratic government. Perhaps he should consider instituting a rule that consultation submissions will only be accepted if received by, for example, carrier pigeon?
To make matters worse, this move is despite earlier assurances (now, I understand, denied) that submissions received through STAND's technical apparatus *would* be accepted.
The headway was also made despite Mr. Blunkett appearing on the Today programme and voluntarily demonstrating his woefully inadequate grasp of the technicalities. To declare in public and in such dogmatic manner that *any* technical mechanism for establishing identity is *completely* immune to forgery is absurd. Only an "expert" who is trying to sell you something would argue otherwise. The more valuable (the less likely it is to be questioned) the identity it establishes, the more money will be released by the criminal world to circumvent it. It *will* be forged.
I could go on here to draw attention to how many successful major IT projects the government has been involved with, and extrapolate some rough probabilities of serious mistaken identity problems arising as a result of IT/procedural errors combining with the supposedly absolute reliability of the ID card. I could ask again for the main question to be answered as to just *how* this card will give the benefits it is claimed that it will. I will restrain myself from discussing at length the absurdity of the notion that the political desirability of a project (even if it wasn't as debatable as it is in this case) can *ever* override the practical issues. I won't even write a whole paragraph about how ridiculous it is to charge everyone in the country for the privilege of personal freedoms removed, and to provide the police and government officials with a new and exciting means of harassing asylum seekers and, inevitably, those who make the mistake of being a member of an ethnic minority.
"You look different. Prove you're one of us."
I won't do any of that. I will however ask that you:
1) Formally address my objection to the casual dumping for reasons of political expediency of individial submissions to a consultation process.
2) Draw this complaint to the attention of Mr. Blunkett and his team.
Yours,
Hamish Harvey
Update (27/11/2003): Sam Dowling, Jean Corston's researcher, got back quickly with an apology for the lack of response to my last email. She also points out that Jean was the only MP to conduct any form of local consultation on ID cards, including holding a meeting in Bristol "to enable local people to raise their concerns directly with the Home Office Minister responsible for the policy." So I've asked how one comes to hear about these things. The obvious answer is by expressing your concern (and therefore intetrest) rather earlier than I did, since my first communication with Jean on the subject (indeed on any subject) was not exactly timely.
Comments