Mr Blair has decided to fast track David Blunkett's national ID card system to try and distract people from the immigration fiasco that has prompted Home Office (in charge of immigration) minister Beverly Hughes' resignation.

John Lettice at the Register has a nice dissection of this as a complete sham. His concluding paragraphs are absolutely damning:



" Now, here is the problem as best as can be established at the moment. The
size of the backlog of immigration cases (both asylum and general) has been a
major issue for the current government, and Hughes (who reported to David
Blunkett at the Home Office) was presiding over the acceleration of the
processing of applications. It appears that in at least some areas this
acceleration process resulted in the systematic rubber-stamping of
applications. Cases from Bulgaria and Rumania have been cited where forged
documents were approved, and where pro forma business plans were sold to
applicants fraudulently applying under a programme designed to bring in
self-sustaining business startups. Allegedly, the UK authorities were alerted to
these fraudulent applications and to their rubber stamping, and Hughes herself
had the matter drawn to her attention last year by one of her own ministers.

So friends, what do we have here? If we had ID cards, what would have been
happening? At the same time as Blunkett's Home Office has been thumping
the ID card tub on the basis of its efficacy against crime, terrorism and illegal
immigration, that very same Home Office has known as a matter of record
(this is not, we accept, the same as actually knowing or even noticing) that it's
been granting immigrant status to people who are not going to perform in
accordance with what it says on the tin they just bought. Granted they're a lot
more likely to be one-legged Bulgarian plumbers who don't know anything
about plumbing than terrorists, but still... Their application rubber-stamped,
under the future system they would then have been issued with ID cards, and
would have happily acquired a perfectly legitimate UK identity on the basis of
whatever it was they'd chosen to fill in. Moral: the Home Office might be best
advised to sort out the loopholes and system failures it already has before
introducing new ones to fix. "