Home Secretary, David Blunkett, is recruiting a PR team to promote compulsory national identity cards and yet the legislation on ID cards has not been passed.

Regular readers will know about my opposition to compulsory national ID cards and I find this latest misuse of taxpayers money really irritating. A reminder of why I oppose them -

1. The lack of a clear specification as to what problem the ID cards are addressing, though the list of problems it is hoped they will solve is constantly growing (terrorism, benefit fraud, immigration etc.)

2. The fundamental inability of the proposed deployment of this ID card scheme to solve any of the problems alluded to by David Blunkett and his supporters on the issue.

3. The huge range of practical problems the scheme will create e.g. what happens if you lose your card, or someone gets a card in your name, or the system breaks down, or the database has errors etc. etc

4. The huge complexity of the system and the emergent properties it will likely spawn, like the big incentive for ID theft (since the cards will be so valuable)

5. The spending of billions of pounds on unproven and often unreliable biometric technology to solve a list of vaguely specified problems in an unspecified way.

And that's before you even start on some of the civil liberties issues that many commentators have argued about.