"The latest stage in the long slow death of the UK ID scheme"

Like snowdrops after rain, no announcement of the latest ID cards disaster is complete without the inevitable kicking from John Lettice at the Register.  Really, you can't underestimate the contribution made by bright, independent journalists and investigators towards buggering up Blunkett's masterplan.  They have a pretty exemplary record of being right about things months or years and several million quid before the Government comes clean.  However, before I read that, here are some first impressions.

The latest sitrep on ID is a detectable increase in farce.  We're getting the abandonment of ID cards per se, in that UK citizens won't now get them foisted with the next passport.  This shouldn't fool anyone, the point was never the plastic, but the database, and this actually saves them a few quid, although the cost to you, mug Britisher, won't be coming down.

The database, as we know from previous farcical updates, is no longer Blunkett's dream of a pure gold standard new system but a bodge of existing ones across several departments, which is being spuns as a prudent and secure way of implementing the system, rather than a total abnegation of the original plan that enshrines dirty data at the heart of the scheme.  Nice to know we've got beyond spin, Gordon.

Finally, along with this comes the wheeling out the decomposing corpse of the original anti-terror justification (that even Charles Clarke refused to use even with the original 'gold plated' all-new database).  Apparently, since terrorists all use multiple identities, limiting them to one legal one means they can't build bombs any more.  Yeah, ok.  Never trust a government scheme that relies on an act of magic at any stage in its logic.

As Justin points out, the choice of three groups to be guinea pigs; foreigners, students and baggage handlers, is pretty obviously a way of reducing the negative media impact.  No dear old grannies picked up by the fuzz, no angry Mr. Middle England complaining about Little Hitlers barking "Papers, please", just foreigners, whom everyone hates anyway, students (lazy sponging bastards) and baggage handlers, who are obviously all criminals.

[To digress a moment, is it just me, or is the implied suggestion that the identity of anyone working airside in the UK is suspect until 2009 but this isn't a problem slightly worrying?  How bad is the existing ID system at airports if the Home Office thinks it can do a better job?  If, as I suspect, it isn't really a problem because there's already tight security around anyone employed in that environment, what the hell's the point of foisting another one on them?  What if the two systems mismatch (which they will, storing the same data in two places always leads to this).  I can answer that one, the airport operator will believe the system it controls and there'll be an almighty row]

So, to recap, a scheme whereby fingerprints, iris scans and facial images would be captured for everyone renewing a passport or coming into the country from this year, in return getting an ID card has magically transformed into one where you give your fingerprints if renewing a passport from 2012 (or possibly 2017) apart from a very small number of people, plus all the non-EU immigrants.  The Irish, of course, are able to walk through this one very much as usual, which is fine by me.  So are 350 million other EU citizens and anyone in Britain who doesn't want a passport or can't buy a fake one, so evidently some thought and effort needs to be put in by the Home Office to piss us off sufficiently badly.  Remember Blunkett saying it was pointless unless we all had one?

I suspect what's really underlying this is Gordon's desperate bid to cut public spending allied with a realisation of the real cost of it all - all of it smells of cost cutting, which will do wonders for the scheme's quality and security and probably explains why the IT firms are jumping overboard.  It's going the right way, but it's not dead yet.