Bureaucratic Oversupply
According to Jacqui Smith, people simply cannot wait to get ID cards.
In a speech to the Social Market Foundation Ms Smith said cards would be issued on a voluntary basis to young people from 2010 and for everyone else from 2012.
She added: “But I believe there is a demand, now, for cards - and as I go round the country I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don’t want to wait that long.
Notwithstanding that forming government policy on the basis of anecdotes is patently absurd, who are these people? Is she really suggesting that students want to spend £90 on a redundant piece of plastic when in some universities their loans don’t even cover accommodation charges? Are young people really going to be that keen to lobby the government for a card that will stop them from lying about their age in pubs? Who on earth, in the current economic climate, wants to shell out the cost of the weekly shopping for a small family to buy a piece of plastic when a driving license is a perfectly useful and cheaper alternative?
Who is going to be asking that the government spend millions of pounds on the scheme, when we don’t even have enough money to pay for cancer treatment drugs?
It would be wrong to accuse one of the holders of the Great Offices of State of lying. It would be unparliamentary, nihilistic and far more corrosive to our political culture than ministerial deceit. We know there is a demand for these cards, but perhaps she ought to be a little more honest about who it is who is making the demands.
We know that these cards are unnecessary. Passports and driving licences are perfectly capable of proving one’s identity in all normal walks of life. In all others, the ability to forge the national ID card will mean that firms and the government will soon revert to the previous system of multiple proofs of ID. So who regularly approaches the Home Secretary and asks for ID cards like a small child, claiming that they can’t wait three years?
If you’ve watched Yes Minister!, the answer ought to be obvious. Whenever the Home Secretary travels round the country she is going to be doing so with an entourage of civil servants and special advisers. The only people who are going to benefit from a national identity database and card are the civil servants themselves, provided with yet another white elephant to make their budgets look more impressive, and yet another grandiose scheme to try and regulate and categorise the infinite complexities of human existence. The endless problems these systems will create will give them fun for many years to come. If Ms. Smith is not lying or being unrepresentative, then the best guess is that it is her civil servants who are nagging her for the database.
If you think this is fantasy, then please visit Dizzy’s blog, where he has caught a civil servant has feeding the government arguments in favour of an equivalent database for children. Ask yourself this: if the government are the ones who came up with the policy, why do they need to ask the civil service what the arguments in favour of it are? Are the ministers really making government policy, or are they just marching to the tune of the mandarins, mindlessly promoting their latest white elephant?
Sir Humphrey would be proud.
Sphere: Related Content
