Moving On

It's rather difficult to move on when one story dominates the headlines for days. There's nothing worse than a speech for Monday being leaked on Sunday as it gives it far more coverage than what it should have got. Yes, Old Michael Howard is out today to finally give the speech on "travellers" that the world is desperate to hear.

By Wednesday this will be quiet again as Howard moves on to his next set of scapegoats who he can blame for the destruction of British society.

Meanwhile, some news has emerged that is being buried under the mass hysteria of the nation, orchestrated by our friends at the Mail, Express and the Sun.

Yes, it's that old ID cards thing again. Turns out Tony is going to try and slip this one through the Lords this week under all this kerfuffle. How timely then that the London School of Economics comes out with a report that blows the gaffe on this latest Nu Lab piece of garbage. "Too risky" they call it.

It's muted criticism. It doesn't go as far as I would have liked to so it would be more embarrasing for the government, but still, it is nice to see a piece of academic work claiming that all is not well with ID cards. The arguments against are well rehearsed, so I won't go through them here.

All government experiments with national databases tend to fail. They tend to fail with or without private help, so that doesn't seem to be a factor, but at the very least if it's public then it stops the private sector making obscene profits from an utter catastrophe. Our friends at Crapita, classic government contract winner, who run the Criminal Records Bureau, make lots of money from an organisation that doesn't know its arse from its elbow. There are plenty of other examples of failed national databases... Child Support Agency, Inland Revenue Tax Credit systems and the Police National Computer (funny how their name is just a singular) is horrendously incomplete thanks to failure to communicate between police forces.

ID cards will soon join that list, thanks to Tony's majority. The Bill will probably die because of the election, but we must do our best to ensure it doesn't resurface after it.

The best way to do that?

Slash that majority down to size.