The government is pushing ahead with its highly controversial ID card scheme, under the pretence that it would help the State “prevent those here illegally from benefiting from the privileges of Britain”.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith claims that “human trafficking, organised immigration crime, illegal working and benefit fraud” will be tackled by the cards.
Who could possibly argue with that?
Well me, for starters. Can someone point out to me an expensive and large-scale IT-based project that this government has actually carried out successfully? New Labour seems obsessed with proving that governments are incapable of rolling out such schemes. Even the ones they trumpet early on, such as Tax Credits, turn out to be a colossal mess in reality. They’re simply incompetent when it comes to organising large IT projects. And don’t even get me started on their commitment to data security. Jeeesh.
Now don’t get me wrong, Labour has many well-intentioned and smart people. They even have people who are relatively tech-savvy - Tom Watson for one. But the organisational and managerial skill required to deliver on these sorts of projects is non-existent. They bring in an army of costly consultants when one decent project manager would do. Nothing like this ever goes to plan unless it’s directed by someone with a clear idea of what they’re doing.
Then there’s the cost - which we know, regardless of countless promises to the contrary, will spiral and spiral out of control. Again, the consultants get involved and contractors, who won the job promising the world, start asking for more cash. Budgets, we’ve learned from bitter experience, are meaningless in large-scale IT projects.
Last, but certainly not least, we have this government’s proclivity to lean on our civil liberties. An ID Card scheme will increase the ability of the government to control us. And as we saw with the terrorism laws, the authorities have a track in abusing new powers.
Of course Labour, being the conniving ratbags they are, have said that the cards will be rolled out to non-EU students and people with marriage visas, but this just a way to shore up the support of the authoritarian right. ID Cards, in reality, will do little to address the problems the Home Secretary outlines, as I explained in November ‘06 ::
The argument for ID cards is however, almost utterly without substance. Our already porous boarders would not be plugged by documentation. Only manpower can do that.
I know the EU is probably leaning on Number 10 to push ahead with cards (ID Cards have been commonplace in Europe for years - but then so have communists), but the whole thing is destined to be yet another embarrassing debacle for this government.
Why can’t they see it?
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