One of the big talking points on the blogs so far has been the apparent inequity of Britain’s first-past-the-post polling system, with both Tories and Lib Dems, in equal measure, giving it the full ‘Kevin the Teenager’ treatment over the revelation that both the Beeb’s flash-based ‘Swingometer‘ and ‘Seat Calculator‘ show that even on an equal share of the vote with either party, Labour still wins, and usually by a more than handsome margin.

Posts like this one, from Tim Hicks abound - even Boris has been at it, likening the electoral system in the UK to that of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, and thereby demonstrating amongst other things that math’s really isn’t his strong suit.

It’s perhaps understandable that supporters of opposition parties will start complaining when a calculation based on Labour and the Tories getting an equal 35% of the popular vote with the Lib Dems on 25% and others picking up the final 5% appears to give Labour a 66 seat majority over all-comers but does that necessarily mean that the electoral system is entirely at fault or, as Boris argues, hopelessly gerrymandered in Labour’s favour.

The answer, quite simply is no.

The problem here is not the system itself, but a combination of what happened back at the 2001 election coupled with an apparent misunderstanding as to how the seat calculator actually works out the number of seats for each party from the percentages put into it - in simple terms the results kicked out by the seat calculator, in particular, are not based on an even spread of the popular vote but are calculated relative to the results of the 2001 election in which Labour did well, extremely well.

The results produced by the seat calculator are not based on the raw percentage vote input into the calculation as most, including Boris, appear to be assuming, but on a calculation of the change in the vote relative to 2001 indicated by the figures used in the calculation. In other words, the opposition parties appear to need rack up a massive lead over Labour in the popular vote just to get as far as hung parliament for no other reason than the fact that they were solidly trounced last time around. Had 2001 been a much closer election, with Labour gaining a much smaller majority, the gap that opposition parties would need to close would be that much smaller - a lead of 2-3% might result in a Tory win instead of the 10% lead that it would appear the Tories currently need for a majority.

There are other factors that need to be taken into account, not least regional variations in vote and, particularly, the total meltdown of Toryism North of Hadrian’s wall which, even with boundary changes reducing the overall number of Parliamentary seats in Scotland, still puts the Tories with a starting deficit of 30-40 seats against Labour - a deficit that has nothing at all to do with boundaries and everything to do with the Scot’s have long memories, especially when it comes to being treated as the guinea pigs for the Poll Tax.

The difference between Labour’s vote at the last election and the combined share of the two main opposition parties - 9% - yielded a majority of 160. Back in 1983, the two main opposition parties of the time, Labour and the Alliance - polled just over 13% more than the Tories and lost by 144 seats. Neither result really proves that the system is gerrymandered in the favour of either of the ‘big two’ merely that the critical point, the fulcrum if you like, of the British electoral system is a popular vote around or over 40% and around a 10% lead over second place - using those figures as base for your calculation, any one of the three main parties can pick up the win if they can meet both conditions.

Another day, another lawsuit.

Now Gorgeous George is at it, joining a Birmingham-based Kashmiri separatist party and a Liberal Democrat councillor (guess who) who’s so irritating that senior members of Sandwell’s Lib Dems are desperate to see him become an MP in order to get him out of the way somewhere where he won’t be continually embarrassing them, in bringing legal challenges to the present system of postal voting.

Talk about keeping strange company or what!

Discretion forbids me from pointing out certain material flaws in Hemming’s case, which hits the courts on Thursday - however I will be privately posting a prediction as to certain outcomes in his proceedings, ahead of time, to be revealed after his case has been heard.

In the meantime, I think its worth highlighting, once again, the little problem that Hemming’s going to have with is his own party - as picked up by Saturday’s Times - which shows the Lib Dems joining with Labour and the Tories in blocking tighter rules on postal voting which would have prevented the ‘farming’ of votes by political parties which John is now challenging through the courts.

Interestingly, while both Labour and the Tories are collating postal vote applications using a centralised party processing centres, the Lib Dems appear to be using local party officers for this purpose, which presumably would mean that the intermediary handling of Lib Dem generated postal applications is taking place at the same offices in Yardley at which Birmingham’s Lib Dems and, ironically, John Hemming, are based.

I wonder what John has to say to that? Can it really be the case that at the same time as he is pursuing changes to the postal voting system through the courts, his own party offices are farming postal applications for the Lib Dems in precisely the manner which John is seeking have declared unlawful?

I wonder… is there something you’re not telling us here, John?

Like it or not, the introduction of identity cards in the UK is inevitable. It will happen irrespective of which political party holds the reign of power and to think otherwise is to take on the mantle of King Canute and try to hold back the tide.

That’s not a statement I enjoy making in the least, Labour’s policy on the introduction of ID cards is one I could happily live without, but I can’t pretend that I don’t understand either the real reasons why the government is pursuing their introduction, or why future governments will do the same regardless of who’s in power.

Perhaps the first thing to do is dispose of the myth that this is all about protecting the British public from the evils of terrorism and, in particular, foreign terrorism. It isn’t, although in the current sociopolitical climate terrorism makes for an all too convincing pretext for their introduction.

Its unlikely in the extreme that the introduction of ID cards alone will ever serve to prevent a terrorist atrocity in the mainland UK - not that there’s been one in the eight years since the Labour government came to power. ID cards won’t prevent terrorists, or anyone else for that matter from, entering the UK illegally if they’re determined enough to get in. The mere fact that British mainland has just over 11,000 miles of coastline as a border to defend should be sufficient to demonstrate the futility of arguing that ID cards could prevent a determined terrorist from entering the country illegally regardless of how much money and how many police you throw at the issue of border security.

ID cards will be equally ineffective when it comes to preventing would-be terrorists from entering the country legally, after all its not as if they’re going to put ‘international terrorist’ in the box marked ‘occupation’ on their passport or visa application, is it? ID cards may make it substantially more difficult to obtain a false identity in the UK but when it comes to foreign nationals the checks that be carried out are only as good as the safeguards which exist in an individual entrant’s country of origin and the simple fact is that in most countries, especially across the developing world, such safeguards are minimal to non-existent and often easily circumvented by the simple expedient of bunging the right amount of cash to the right people in order to obtain a false identity on what are otherwise legitimate papers.

Nor, indeed, would ID cards serve to prevent the possibility of indigenous terrorism. The simple fact of being able to verify the identity of the UK citizen does not, of itself, preclude the possibility that they may turn out to be a native version of Theodore Kaczynski - AKA the Unabomber - or a Timothy McVeigh. Again, knowing who someone is, even with the degree of accuracy that ID cards holding biometric data might offer, tell us nothing whatsoever about who they really are or what the might, potentially do.

So if the argument that ID cards are a prophylactic against terrorism is a non-starter, why the push to introduce them and, more to the point, why is their introduction an inevitability given the widespread unease they generate?

To answer that, you have to ask yourself who really benefits from the introduction of ID cards?

The Government? Of course, why pursue such a policy otherwise? But the idea that the current government sees sufficient merit in the introduction of ID cards to force the proposals through in the face of serious opposition in the House of Commons is not enough, on its own, to justify the assertion that any government, of any political persuasion, will ultimately take the step of pushing through their introduction regardless of their professed support for or opposition to the proposals that are currently on the table and awaiting resurrection after May 5th.

The Police? Absolutely.

There can be no possible doubt that the Police stand to be the big winners when it comes to the introduction of ID cards, although its not the cards themselves but the biometric data they’ll contain which makes them so attractive to the ‘Old Bill’.

Forensic evidence is the holy grail of detective work. People are unreliable, they make mistakes, misinterpret situations and, most of all, they lie in order to avoid the consequences of their actions. Science, the kind of empirical science which deals in hard fact rather than interpretation; fingerprints, DNA records, now that’s reliable, the kind of evidence that breaks open cases and secures convictions. The problem with fingerprints, DNA samples and other identification evidence from crime scenes is that they’re only as good as your ability to make comparisons with information that you already have, it’s fine for catching up with repeat offenders, people who’ve been through the system and have previous ‘form’ but of little value when someone new turns up on the ‘criminal scene’.

With that in mind, ask yourself what senior Police Officer would turn his/her back on the current proposals for ID cards containing biometric data, proposals which would offer the Police the prospect of a single central identity database containing the fingerprints, at least, of every single individual in the UK? Not only will the Police jump at the chance of obtaining such a complete set of identity records but you can bet that someone, somewhere in the Police is already trying to figure out if there’s any possibly way they could construct an argument which would allow them to add a DNA profile to the biometric data held on ID cards in order to allow them to get hold of that too.

Then there’s the various public sector agencies that deal directly with taxpayer’s money. Not just the Inland Revenue itself, but also the Benefits Agency and local Council’s who administer Housing and Council Tax Benefits - all systems in which the ‘enemy’ is fraud.

Here its not just a question of preventing fraud arising from identity theft and false claims but also of having the means to tie together, reliably, the records that are held by each of these agencies. With an ID card comes a system in which each citizen of the UK will be assigned a single identification number, a number which will replace everything from your Nation Insurance number to the number on your NHS medical card right through to the serial numbers on your passport and driver’s licence - one number which can be used to tie together and cross-reference information about you from any number of government and public-sector owned information systems.

Right from the start you can forget about benefit fraud other than by doing a bit of ‘cash in hand’ work on the side. There’s no prospect of working for any employer who puts you through the books and claiming benefits at the same time when you live in world in which the Inland Revenue’s computers talk to those of the Benefits Agency and Local Authories and can automatically trace and flag up ‘discrepancies’ such as PAYE contributions which overlap benefit payments…

And don’t forget that when it comes to questions of hard cash there are others for whom such a system will be equally attractive for broadly similar reasons - think in terms of the banks and building societies, insurance companies, finance companies and credit reference agencies, all of whom have a clear, vested interested in anything which will allow them to verify your identity with what they will believe to be 100% certainty and all of whom are capable of putting up a powerful lobby in the corridors of Whitehall.

Election fraud? Again you can forget it. How can you enter fraudulent votes - other than by intimidation or by tricking individual voters - when ballot papers are ’signed’ with a fingerprint which can be checked against the central register.

What about the NHS? Again, with £30 Billion going in to computerising the NHS and, in particular, medical records, are they going to say no? Not when you offer them the means to accurately and immediately identify someone who’s just been brought into A&E unconscious and, from there, gain immediate access to their full medical records - information which could make the difference between their making a trip to the recovery ward or the morgue.

What of private industry? Is it such a reach to envisage that one day, in the not too distant future, your ID card will be your means of access to the office? And if that can happen, then why not apply the same principle to your own home? Or perhaps your car? The current generation of car security relies on the use of electronic keys without which your car cannot be started, let alone stolen - unless someone steals your keys of course. Again, it doesn’t take much of an imagination to figure out that one day your car might not merely want to verify your identity before letting you in but also verify whether you’re insured to drive it before letting you start the engine.

Science Fiction? Absolutely not.

The technology exists today which would make most of these things possible and, as technology does, it will only get better at doing these things, and more, over time. One the main reasons I can write all this down now and speculate on the possibilities is not just that I read a fair bit of SF but because I was having conversations about the inevitability of many of these things with Information and IT professionals from various parts of public sector four years ago long before ID cards were ever mooted publicly by government - and at that time we all agreed that the only barriers to the development of such an all-encompassing information system were the questions of identity and of having a single ID number across all systems, barriers which compulsory ID cards would remove at a stroke.

…

Reading back everything I’ve just written, the one thing that’s immediately apparent is whether I’m for or against the development of this ‘Brave New World’ of information and identity and the truth is that I’m really not sure…

The reference to Huxley is deliberate, a reminder to myself if to no one else that the benefits of technology have their price and that the key question here is just how much of price we may be prepared to pay and, more importantly, how much is too much?

There are some who, on reading this, will no doubt be thinking:

‘Well what’s so very wrong with that? If its going to reduce crime, prevent people from defrauding the taxpayer, ensure better treatment at the sharp end of emergency medicine and reduce my car insurance, well then it can’t come soon enough.’

Other will find themselves barely able to suppress a cold shiver as they consider the potential for the misuse and abuse of such a system by the ‘powers that be’ and, inevitably, thoughts of Winston Smith and how he came to love Big Brother will creep in and heighten their already finely tuned sense of unease…

…except that Orwell’s masterpiece was never really about the technology but about people, which is why it remains timeless and as powerful a warning of the dangers of totalitarianism as it was when written in 1948.

The real debate here is not about what the technology can do but about whether we should do it all and if so, how we balance out the potential benefits that could spring from the introduction of ID cards - and there are some - against our rights, freedoms and liberties as citizens and as human beings.

Science and technology doesn’t scare me. Never have. Never will. Skynet is a long, long way from reality and there is no Matrix and no human energy farms.

People do, however, not least in their unerring ability to find themselves led blindly in making choices without ever truly considering the consequences of their actions. What worries me most about the government’s efforts to introduce ID cards is not what they’re doing or even why they’re doing it - in that I’m lucky in that I understand the deeper issues - but how they’re doing it and easy manner in which the public’s anxieties about terrorism are being used as a means to deflect attention away from the real issues and the real debate. Worse still, however, is the uneasy feeling I can’t quite shake that even those in government charged with steering through the introduction of ID cards may be no better off in understanding their full implications than most of the rest of us.

ID cards will be introduced - its a simple matter of when and not if as some, not least the current opposition parties, would have you believe. They are coming not because the present government considers them to be a good idea but because there are other powerful sociopolitical forces at work here, the respective machineries of state, finance and industry, all of whom have overriding interests in the creation of an ‘identity society’…

…and far less cause than any government or political party for concern over abstractions and ephemera such liberty, freedom and human rights - and in this their single greatest ally is not the politician who’ll drive through the laws or the scientists, technicians and programmers who’ll construct and develop the information systems but us…

… that’s right, us. The people. The blind, unquestioning, mass of humanity who’ll blunder headlong into a brave new world just so long as they’re drip fed the right kind of fear and the right kind of political soma in equal measure.

Now that is the scary part in all this.