The Times has published a set of sample questions that migrants will be asked on applying for British citizenship; together with the offical answers to the questions.

Of course, the thing about really being British is that the actual answers will differ markedly from those the government thinks we should give, as shown below:

1) Where are Geordie, Cockney, and Scouse spoken?

In TV soap operas.

2) What are MPs?

People who only remember that we live in a democracy every 4 or 5 years when a general election is called and their jobs are on the line.

3) What is the Church of England and who is its head?

A complete waste of time which should be abolished.

Oh, that’s the answer to both parts of the question, by the way.

4) What is the Queen’s official role and what ceremonial duties does she have?

The Queen’s official role is to entice obese American tourists to come to London so they can be gouged by London’s tourist attractions.

The Queen’s ceremonial duties are to to entice obese American tourists to come to London so they can be gouged by London’s street vendors.

5) Do many children live in single parent families or step-families?

Not according to the people who run City Academies.

6) Which two telephone numbers can be used to dial the emergency services?

112, 123, 555, 999.

If you’ve been binge drinking, any of them - unless you’ve already vandalised the phone box.

7) Which of these courts uses a jury system?

Magistrates’ Court, Crown Court, Youth Court or County Court.

If the Home Office had its way, none of them.

Your employer can dismiss you for joining a trade union. True or false?

It all depends whether your employer is owned by Wal-Mart.

9) Which of these statements is correct?

A single television licence covers all televisions in a home.

Neither. According to the TV Licencing Agency a television licence is required as long their computer says you’re still breathing.

Now when do I get my passport.

The question ‘Blogging: What is it good for’ has reared up again. prompted by this post over at the Sharpener, by Third Avenue, which has drawn very interesting, different and in many was equally valid responses by Jamie K at Blood & Treasure and Martin Stabe.

Two main questions seem to emerge from this mini debate - does [readership] size matter and should bloggers, especially political bloggers, aspire to some sort of noble purpose or are we just engaged in a hyper-extended pub conversation - in which case whose round is it?

I’ll take the question of size first - no I don’t believe it does matter in the UK. Guido makes a good point in responding to Third Avenue by noting that you can have some small impact if your blog makes the mainstream media’s ‘watch list’, although I’d go a little further and argue that there’s a core of maybe 100-150 UK blogs where a mention and a link may get you noticed by MSM. It helps not only to have good material but to be thought a good judge of material, Tim Worstall’s weekly Brit Blog round-up being a case in point.

Guido’s right to point, in addition, to the importance of the ’signal to noise’ ratio in blogging. In this I think the smaller British blog scene does rather well by comparison to our US cousins. Navigating the uncharted waters of the US blog scene requires that you sift a lot more gravel to turn up the nuggets of gold; Britain now has an establish core of very good blogs; Chicken Yoghurt, Stmubling and Mumbling, Bloggerheads, Europhobia, Slugger O’Toole and many others, which provide an entry point from whose blog rolls you’ll rarely get a bum steer.

I think comparisons with the US are best avoided. Bloggers operate in the UK in very different legal and cultural conditions to the US, conditions which give the British scene a character all of its own - we may still be able to learn a few things from our counterparts over the big pond but otherwise we need to value the culture we have and not spend our time casting envious glances at our one-time colonial cousins. In particular, the British scene has a highly individualistic and libertarian streak to it, one all sides of the political divide, which resists comparison with the more partisan scene in the US. The core elements of British blogging rarely manage to stick with ‘my country, right or wrong’ except in extremis; let alone ‘my political party, right or wrong’ - open scepticism is much more the order of day as befits a nations whose greatest philosopher was, arguably, David Hume.

I like both Jamie’s take on blogging:

“So if we’re talking about the purpose of blogging, I’d propose the following. It demonstrates that writing can be a viable mass leisure time activity. Yes, kids. Writing is fun. Why don’t you do it too? This, in itself, is a public good irrespective of blogging’s relationship to the professional media.”

And the suggestions highlighted by Martin - the court of appeal for news judgement and the transformation of news media from a lecture to a seminar - yet neither truly takes us much close to the holy grail of political blogging, a state in which bloggers begin to assert some small degree of political influence. This has, I think, much to do with the overall nature of politics in UK over the last 25 years, where six of the last seven governments have been elected with majorities of a size where even parliament struggles to assert much in the way of influence over the Executive, let alone us humble online correspondents.

That may change to some small extent if the next general election results in a government with only a small working majority, say 20-30, or even a hung parliament. If and when politicians, once again, have to start working to put their policies over on the basis of genuine reasoned argument rather than being able to rely on the ability of party whips to keep the recalcitrant on message all the time, then the indepdence of thought and rational scepticism of the British blog scene may well come into its own as a counterpoint to the current incestuous relationship between parliament and press.

Still this leaves us without a clear sense of purpose - of what, in its political context, blogging might actually be for and what it might, in the right circumstances achieve.

I think the key to finding such a purpose lies in looking critically at the relationship between politics and politicians and mainstream media, at the nexus point where to the meet. Identify the flaws and fault-lines in that relationship and we have a potential agenda and ethos which might just live up to our aspirations of noble purpose.

Fortunately, this is piece of work already done for us by, of all people, the late Robin Cook. Read his diary of his last two years on the front bench as Leader of the House - published as ‘The Point of Departure’ and comes, fairly early on, to a quite pointed and incisive commentary, over three or four pages, of the nature of the relationship between politics and press; one which neither stints in apportioning blame to either side for the denuded nature of modern political reporting and yet which offers tantalising hints of a new agenda to which bloggers may be well suited.

Cook is merciless in his assessment of the politician/press relationship, noting that:

“Between us we have created a style of poltical discourse which is aggressive and overpersonalised and which has become a barrier between us and our joint public”.

Politicians, he charges ‘are in danger of seriously boring our voters’ through the incessant repetition of vapid sound bites and single-line messages, adding that:

“It is a depressing feature of single-line politics that the hardest hitting message is more likely to be negative about the threat of your opponent than about the promise of your own policies”.

His second major criticism of politicians is their lack of originality, the obsession in all parties with staying on message and endless repeating the officially sanctioned and approved party line.

It’s a assessment I doubt any of us could fault - anyone with a genuine interest in politics, a passion for it even, can not have failed to have found themselves almost screaming in frustration at the TV set while watching Question Time as some faceless government drone endlessly repeats the same answer over and over again, regardless of the question they’ve been asked.

Who amongst us does not breath a sigh of relief on reading the TV listing to find that Tony Benn, Clare Short or Boris Johnson will be making an appearance on the show that week or settle into gloom and despondency on finding that the panel is comprised exclusively of members who are known for their rigid adherence to the party line. Cook is clear in ascribing this to very nature of the British people, a society he describes as ‘defiantly individualist’ and one which ‘respects honesty, self-expression and originality’.

Would any of us disagree with his assessment? I certainly wouldn’t.

Cook is equally scathing in his criticism of the press. If politicians are obsessed with staying on message it because, as he puts it, ‘they are dealing which is no longer capable of handling an original idea but knows how to report a personality conflict’.

In this he has a point. A healthy democratic society should value differences of opinion, reward originality and foster debate, instead the press treat such things as signs of ‘damaging’ divisions and splits; and both main parties have learned all too well in the last 25 years that the consequence of a divided party is electoral defeat.

Cooks points also to the press’s single minded pursuit of negative stories - bad news makes for better headlines. As evidence he provides a quite astonishing statistic; in 1974 the ratio of negative to positive media stories was around 3:1, today it averages 18:1. When one thinks back to 1974; to the three-day week, oil crisis, power cuts, Vietnam, etc. the press had far more cause for negative reporting, having far more negative thing to report on. Cook’s point is well made when he says:

“The danger is that if we constantly present the political process as resulting in unremiting failure we will stifle any faith that democracy can produce solutions”

Cook offers two further telling criticisms of the press.

The first is their remorseless demand for novelty, for always requiring a new story, a new initiative - is it any surprise we get government by press release in such a culture. Cook pointedly illustrates his view by noting a briefing he gave in 2001, before that year’s general election, to the political editor of a major [and unnamed] broadsheet who, on being told that the big objectives for the next term would be full employment and fewer children living in poverty, asked ‘What’s new about this?”.

Serious politics does not throw up new trinkets for the media to play with every day - real systemic change takes time and serious policies which deliver real benefits may do so only quietly and over a long period time. The public may not even notice a government’s best work and greatest successes as such things are rarely the stuff of good headlines.

Cook’s third point is one well illustrated by this week’s reporting of disagreements on how far to extend the government’s proposed ban on smoking in public places - itself and illustration of his first point about how what could and should be thought a healthy occurance in a vibrant democracy is sold as a ’split’ - the media’s obsession with personalities over policies. Looking at the reports of this issue one cannot help but notice that the policy issue at the heart of this story; a ban on smoking in pulbic places; was entirely incidental to the ‘real issue’ as the press saw it, that of which members of the cabinet lined up on each side of the debate. The fact that John Reid disagreed with Patricia Hewitt was seen by the press as more important that the question of what it was they were disagreeing about.

It is, therefore, any wonder that on so many issues; drugs, prostitution, immigration, etc. it is nigh on impossible to have a reasoned and adult debate; one led by consideration of policy options and the evidence for and against differing approaches to the issue rather than the screaming headlines and knee-jerk whining of the Mail, Express and Sun.

Cook’s incisive assessment of the nature and pitfalls of the prevailing relationship between politicians and the press offers not only insight but clear indications of a role that political bloggers could play and one which would fit with aspirations of having a more noble sense of purpose for our activities.

That’s not to suggest flaws in either Jamie’s or Martin’s arguments. One cannot disagree with Jamie’s argument that we should do it [blogging] just for the enjoyment of sitting down and writing; and both ideas highlighted by Martin would clearly fit into an approach to political blogging which sought to address Robin Cook’s arguments.

Putting it all together brings me to two main conclusions.

First, there are things that, over above the simple enjoyment of writing, we can legitimately aspired to as political bloggers.

It’s doubtful at this stage that we can exert any direct influence over the political and democratic process in the UK. Dreams of changing the world through blogging are rather premature, although things may change in future should we enter a period where governments are much less secure in their parliamentary majorities and more inclined, therefore, to consider alternate viewpoints and make compromises which reflect a broader range of opinions that at present. Nevertheless bloggers can, taking on board Robin Cook’s critique, exert an influence over the direction and tone of political discourse in the UK and offer a counterpoint to the existing politician/press relationship.

Over time it may be possible to build relationships with the political elite in which original thinking on their part is rewarded rather than attacked for being off-message; where it comes to be understood that the UK blog scene offers an arena where serious politics can be debated in a mature, rational and adult manner.

Equally it seems possible to build relationships with the press which are predicated on the idea of turning lectures into seminars. While the MSM are certainly not going to walk away from their existing role in framing the debate that doesn’t preclude them from recognising that its on the UK’s political blogs that the debate is actually taking place. Quality is factor in this relationship on both sides of the equation; the press, as Guido observes, will only follow and relate to blogs which offer content of a quality which will interest and stimulate their readership. By the same token bloggers will only relate positively to those sections of the press whose sytle and tone reflect their own aspirations to be taken [semi-] seriously - few currently bloggers would, I think, happily include references to being ‘recommended’ by the Sun or the Daily Star on their blogs.

True, that puts this relationship firmly at the quality end of the newspaper market but then that is as it should be if we are to address Robin Cook’s critique of the existing nexus between politicians and the press; if getting serious political debate on the agenda is difficult in dealing with the Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Independent, what possible hope is there of achieving the same with the Mail, Express and Sun? Why should we even bother with the down-market tabloids whose staple diet is the very sensationalism we’re wanting to avoid. There is, I think, no snobbery in pitching our wares to the top end of the market given the nature of what passes for news reporting at the bottom end.

For the time being, at least, framing the debate does mean developing relationships with the mainstream press; the very least we should be seeking is the kind of recognition which gets us ‘mentioned in dispatches’ or, better still, that sees journalists directing readers to the UK blog scene to add depth to their reporting and highlight aternative viewpoints on a particular story. Over time this relationship may then evolve into something more of a two-way street in which stories which start on the blog scene migrate their way to the mainstream just as, current, stories broken by the press spawn debate and discussion on our side of this relationship.

My second conclusion follows neatly on from my first and is based on my experience of blogging since beginning to write in earnest earlier this year; and that is that some of what I’ve identified as possibilities above are already beginning to happen.

The press has started to dip its toe into the waters of the UK Blog scene, albeit tentatively and with some degree of ambivalence - and all, with one notable exception, any reliance of US style blogswarms to make the media sit up and take notice. This has not been without its problems; one or two journalists haven’t quite got their head round the idea that copyright works out here on the Internet pretty much the same as it does everywhere else, but on at least three separate issues; electoral reform, ID cards and the public response to terrorist attacks on London, its been bloggers and online campaign groups which have propelled the debate and pushed the overall agenda forward. If bloggers have been good at nothing else in this last year then its been in ignoring the government’s attempts to close down debate on certain issues and keep the political discourse going; and this is something the MSM has started to recognise, albeit sometimes grudgingly.

Although I doubt we’ll ever reach the point where political blogging becomes so influential that is begins to shape the media’s agenda or, more ambitious still, government policy, I can conceive of a situation arinsing in future where, under a government less secure in its majority and less wedded to managerialism and, therefore, more sceptical of the pronouncements of policy wonks and civil service advisors, that bloggers may come to represent alternative strands of thinking that govenrment’s may come to regard as too useful to disregard - particularly if we can take Robin Cook’s commentary to heart.

Mention the name of Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean and most people will respond; who?

If you’re a little more clued in you may have noticed that she has just been appointed by Blair as his special representative in talks for “memoranda of understanding”. In her hands lies the responsibility for negotiating deals with several countries in the Arab world that are suspected or known to practice torture which will see them make a paper commitment not to torture anyone we deport to their shores in future.

The list of countries here is about as unedifying as it gets. We already have such memoranda with Libya and Jordan and are seeking further agreements with other countries; Algeria we know is one of them and its suspected that the other will include Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates.

On the back of that list alone, scepticism as to whether these agreements will mean anything is entire understandable.

However, that’s not why I’m writing about her - its not what she’s about to do, shabby though that is, that occupies my thoughts, but something she did last Decemeber - December 13th 2004 to be exact, when as a Foreign Office Minister she made a misleading and untrue statenent to the House of Lords.

That, as parliament watchers will know, is a very serious allegation - it’s certainly one I wouldn’t be making had I not the evidence to back it up.

Before we get to her statement and the evidence that it was misleading, let’s look first at what the Ministerial Code of Conduct has to say on the subject of misleading the House.

“It is of paramount importance that Ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity. Ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation to the Prime Minister;”

Now, before I go on, I’m not alleging that Baroness Symons has deliberately or knowingly misled the House of Lords - I simply do not know whether the untruthful statement made is one of her own crafting or the product of a briefing received from her Civil Service advisors; that is ultimately a matter for the House of Lords to decide, but what I do know is that she did mislead the House of Lords and that at no time has she offered the House the correction required by the Ministerial Code - she may, to this point in time, genuinely be unaware of her error.

I’ve written, only recently, of the appaling treatment meted out to the former inhabitant of the Chagos Islands by the British government; its a story that has interested and appalled me since first reading it in Tim Slessor’s ‘Lying in State’.

The statement made by Baroness Symons in which she mislead the House relates directly to this sorry episode in our history, coming as it did in response to a question from Lord Beaumont of Whitley who asked the government simply:

“Whether they will reconsider their decision to prevent the British people of the Chagos Islands returning to their original homes.”

In answering this question, Baroness Symons made the following comments:

The expulsion of the people from these islands took place in the late 1960s and, as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, is aware, the Government have already paid compensation to the Chagossians. There were two payments, which altogether amounted at the time to almost £5 million. In today’s value that amounts to some £14.5 million. At that time, the Chagossians’ own lawyers advised them that that represented a fair and reasonable settlement. It is important to remember that when the noble Lord implies—as he managed to do in his Question—that we have somehow behaved dishonourably.

I can correct one minor factual error straight away - the expulsion took place in 1971, under the Conservative government of Edward Heath, and not the 1960’s; although the policy and decisions leading to their expulsions were formulated by the previous Labour government of Harold Wilson. This is of no particular consequence as Baroness Symons’s temporal error at least places the primary responsibility for this matter with the right government.

Where we move, here, for genuine error to clear untruth is in the matter of the payments made to the Chagossians and the advice they allegedly received from their own solicitors.

There were two payments made in lieu of the expulsion of the Chagossians from their homes. The first, a sum of £650,000, was paid in 1973. This money, as Slessor notes, was not paid to the Chagossians themselves, but rather to the government of Mauritius where they were unceremonously dumped on the dockside with no one to meet them nor explain why they had been removed from their homes or what would happen to the next.

There were, at that time, around 1,500 Chagossians removed from the islands - Britain’s ‘generous’ settlement was, therefore, a little of £400 per head.

A second payment was offered, initially in 1979, of £1.25 million. In the intervening years, parliamentary questions from Tam Dalyell and others and a long feature articles in the Sunday Times in 1975, entitled ‘The Islanders that Britian Sold’ had ensured that questions about the conduct of the British governement toward the Chagossians had not, as the Foreign Office must surely have hoped, dropped entirely off the political radar.

This offer was upped, by 1983, to £4 million, still by no means a geneous figure had we been dealing with only the original 1,500 Chaggosians expelled some 12 years earlier without considering that, a populations so, that the actual number of people of direct Chagossian descent had increased over time - today, there are around 4,500 Chagossians when one factors in the descendents of those originally expelled from the islands.

It is in Tim Slessor’s account of the 1979 offer in which we find the evidence that Symons mislead the house in her statement:

Something must have pricked (just a little) the conscience of the Foreign Office, because in 1979 it tried another ‘full and final settlement’. This time the amount was £1.25 million. But there was a condition: each Ilois [Chagossian] had to sign a binding agreement to renounce any claim ever to eturn to the Chagos Islands. Some of the most destitute families signed without appreciating what they were doing [many were illiterate]. One imagines that it was a case of ‘if you want some money, then sign here’. But when other Ilois realised what was happening, they sent the English lawyer charged with the arrangements back to London - with a flea in his ear. Strangely, it was a law firm started by this same lawyer, Bernard Sheridan, which later became the legal champion of the Ilois.

Note the critical discrepancy between Symons’s statement and Slessor’s account - back in 1979, the Chagossians were indeed advised to accept the government’s compensation offer by the lawyer who is, today, the head of the law firm which has, since the mid-late 1980’s, represented their interests in taking British government to court (although it is a lawyer named Richard Gifford and not Bernard Sheridan, himself, who has actually represented them during this period) - however, at the time they were advised by Bernard Sheridan in relation to this offer, Sheridan was not acting for the Chagossians but for the British government.

All rather different from Baroness Symons contention that “the Chagossians’ own lawyers advised them that that represented a fair and reasonable settlement”.

Baroness Symons is no longer a Foreign Office minister; the duty to represent the Foreign Office in the House of Lords now rest with the FO’s Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Triesman, while Symons scours the Arab world cutting deals with repressive, undemocratic regimes.

Nevertheless, having demonstrated that Baroness Symons’s statement to the House of Lords on 13th December 2004 is, I think, clearly and unequivocally misleading in identifying the solicitor who advised the Chagossians on the government’s compensation offer as being their own solicitor when they were, in fact, acting for the government at that time, I think it only right and proper that I invite Lord Triesman or Baroness Symons (doesn’t matter which) to do as ther Ministerial Code of Conduct demands, correct this misleading statement and offer the House the obligatory and extremely humble apology that such occasions call for.

As for the matter of Symons remark that:

“It is important to remember that when the noble Lord implies—as he managed to do in his Question—that we have somehow behaved dishonourably.”

I would invite anyone to read my earlier piece on this subject and follow the links in it - you should then gain a full picture of exactly how successive British governments have treated the Chagossians over the last 30 years to the extent that, today, only a fool or a liar could possibly claim that we have behaved ‘honourably’ in this matter.

I suppose a blogswarm on this is out of the question? It would be appreciated.

UPDATE:

Disillusioned Kid has news that the Chagossian’s challenge to the Orders in Council banning them from ever returning to their home is set to go to a judicial review on December 6th.

Neil’s back with another vain attempt to sell us an ID card or two, so…

1. ID cards are good in principle. NO2ID have no objections in principle to a ID card scheme, indeed they admit there are potential benefits to an ID scheme. Maybe they should change their name to ‘NO to the govt’s current proposals for ID’ to reflect their position more accurately.

There are potential benefits to having a secure system of verifying identity, no of which outweigh the detailed and precise objections raised regarding the Identity Cards Bill and the the specific proposals being brought forward by government.

Neil, we are long past the point of debating the principles of ID cards. There is a Bill before parliament which has completed all it stages in the House of Commons and which awaits only its final stage; a third reading debate in the Lords, before passing into law – unless of course the Lords either rejects the Bill outright or holds out for amendments that the government refuse to accept, in which case the Bill goes back to square one in the Commons but with the Parliament Act as backup should the Commons wish to impose its will on the Lords.

No amount of debate or argument on the principles of ID cards, at this stage, will change the fact that is a poorly drafted piece of legislation, one which changes at a stroke the very nature of the relationship between the citizen and the state, which provides for 61 separate powers for the Home Secretary to amend the scheme by secondary legislation. Nor will it change the fact that the government has failed, in the face of detailed, specific and verifiable objections to its proposals, to offer any response other than ‘we don’t accept your argument’.

I appreciate your efforts to put detailed counter arguments to those of us who have argued forcefully against this bill but don’t you think this is something that the government should have been doing? And don’t you also think that their failure to debate the issues with us and make any effort at all to respond to criticisms and concerns with detailed, reasoned argument says something about the government’s real case for ID cards; i.e. that they don’t have one.

How, in what is supposed to be a democratic society, is it acceptable for a government to hold a position where, in the face of detailed, logical and reasoned and, for the most part, expert argument in opposition to a proposal their sole response is to say:

“We’re right. You’re wrong. Fuck you!â€?

2. ID cards work in practise. Sweden has a compulsory NIR which brings many benefits. NO2ID oppose a compulsory NIR but cannot answer the question; if it works in Sweden, why not here?

Apples and Oranges, Neil. Apples and Oranges.

In part the article itself provides an answer to the question of ‘why not here’:

“The long history of registration has made it a part of the cultural heritage. Churches and the old church registers are for instance often the first place to visit for people looking for details about their ancestors. A vast amount of information is usually found. Today, the identity records are administered and kept by the tax authority.

This explains why an instrument that (from a British, or indeed an American perspective) could be perceived as a compulsion is in Sweden at least seen as a person’s natural right. There is an important contractual, even democratic, element here: some data (like tax returns) has to be provided to state authorities, but citizens also expect the state to automatically provide them with the different types of benefits due to them – including many that are sent automatically and not even applied for.�

The bare comparison of Britain and Sweden you are making ignores 1400 years of British history; the entire evolution of the British nation state, its constitution and its legal an judicial system – everything from Anglo-Saxon law, which even William the Conqueror had to swear to uphold in his coronation oath, through Magna Carta; the Peasants Revolt; The Reformation and Dissolution of the Monasteries, The English Civil War, The Act of Union, the Glorious Revolution, English Bill of Rights and Act of Settlement, the Great Reform Bill of 1823, The Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Trade Union movement, The British Empire, Women’s Suffrage and, damn it, the founding of the Labour Party as the first mass political movement to represent the interests of the ordinary working man.

Everything that we are, every principle and idea that makes Britain what it is is vested in this comparison, in this question of ‘why not here’?

Yes, twenty-one of the twenty-five current EU member states have ID cards, and in every single case you will find if you look at their history that this is the direct result of either the Napoleonic Civil Code, which forms the basis of civil law in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and even Italy, or of periods of authoritarian rule, either Fascist (Spain, Greece) or Communist (the former Eastern-bloc accession countries).

At the most basic and visceral level the reason why what works in Sweden will not work here is because of a single basic fact – we are NOT Swedish.

If look at what the Swedish system does and how it works, the first thing that becomes obvious is that the Swedish ‘personnummer’ is not just an ID card number, it serves also as their equivalent of our own NHS Medical Card Number and National Insurance Number – it has a clear purpose beyond simply verifying identity. It has a purpose that Swedes accept and even value - this is not true here. If it were then thre government would not be trying scare us into accepting it with talk of terrorism and ID theft.

Moreover – and crucially – there is this:

“There is an important exception: data protected by the privacy law. Personal details regarding a person’s character, state of mental and physical health, family circumstances, economy and ability to work are protected from the public eye and only available to relevant authorities and the individual himself. The privacy law protects any information that can be damaging to the person concerned if it were to be circulated.�

That, a specific privacy law, is something we entirely lack in this country, we rely instead on common law principles and conventions – the privilege of the doctor-patient or lawyer-client relationship – any of which can be removed at a stroke by a government with a mind to do it and big enough Commons majority to back them up.

We have no written constitution and no constitutional bill of rights – the Human Rights Act is not a constitutional law as it cannot, in all but the most extreme circumstances, prevent an unconstitutional law from being placed on the statute books or strike down such a law on principle; only when that law is used to violate an individual’s rights does it come into play. The right that we have a citizens are, for the most part, those we have wrested from the iron grip of the state by force – Magna Carta, Civil War – won as concessions from the state in the face of the threat of civil unrest or secured through occasional contributions from liberal-minded reformist parliamentarians like Wilberforce. Our rights are secured, therefore, on nothing more solid or secure than our ability as citizens to hold them to ourselves; personal privacy in the face of an authoritarian state is maintained only by withholding and securing personal information from the state and by our ability to maintain, as citizens, the right to withhold such information; a right the government is trying, now, to take away from us.

Neil, you have argued time and again that principled objections to ID cards don’t, in your opinion, stand up to scrutiny. Yet I doubt you’ve ever really considered the principles that are actually at stake here – those that I have set out above.

Do you understand now why we are fighting so hard to keep this Bill from becoming law on principle? Or is your misplaced faith in modernity, like Blair’s, so absolute that you also fail to heed the words of George Santayana:

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.�

3. All opinion polls that ask the neutral question; ‘Do you want ID cards or not?’, have more in favour than against. Of course if you feed them negative statements about the cost and technology and tell them none of the benefits, you will lower the number in favour, but that hardly makes it an unbiased survey, does it?

We seem to have a curious inversion of the Pedant-General’s commentary going on here.

P-G’s article cites two opinion polls – a MORI poll conducted for the government in April 2004 which shows 80% in favour of ID cards and a YouGov poll from July 2005 with shows only 45% in favour, with 42% against – a mere 3% differential.

As P-G also ably demonstrates, of the two polls, the one which was conducted using an unbiased questionnaire and research methodology was the YouGov poll which showed the least support for ID cards. The MORI used questions which were framed on the core premise that the introduction of ID cards was inevitable and would happen, irrespective of the views of those being surveyed.

Or, to put it another way, MORI asked the question:

Will you support ID cards WHEN they are introduced?

YouGov asked:

Are you in favour of, or opposed to, the introduction of a system of national identity cards in Britain?

P-G does a fine job of dealing with the ‘validity’ of the government’s claims to have popular support for their proposals, so I don’t propose to repeat his argument in full as he misses only one point in his analysis.

As any committed psephologist knows there are two things that must be cited in publishing the outcome of an opinion poll; the results of the poll itself (obviously) and the poll’s statistical margin for error; given and +/- figure.

Typically on a poll the size of that carried out by YouGov, which is of a size not dissimilar to opinion polls on voting intention conducted in the run in to an election, the statistical margin for error is around +/- 3% - for any given percentage figure the actual figure were it extrapolated to the whole population could be anything from 3% lower to 3% higher.

If we apply this to YouGov’s results, the actual level of support for ID cards could be anything from 42-48%, while the percentage against could lie somewhere in the range of 39-45% - one cannot, therefore, claim definitively that public support for ID cards is greater than opposition to them as, allowing for the margin of error, the actual differential between the two figures could run anywhere from a 9% differential in favour of ID cards to a 3% differential against.

There is another, more fundamental point when it comes to these figures, one which arises from the very nature of democracy as it functions within a civilised society.

In any democratic society, there is point where opposition to a particular policy or law grows to the extent that that policy or law become unworkable; either because a substantial section of the population simply cease to observe the law/policy and disregards it provisions or because interests of balancing the will of the majority with the need to consider and protect the rights of minorities in order to maintain social order come to take precedence over crude measurements of democratic will.

Representative democracy does not strictly observe the principle that ‘the majority will is always right’ – that, as Plato notes in ‘Republic’ leads only to the ‘tyranny of the majority’ – and is principle which remains very much an active part of British parliamentary democracy; the majority of Britain’s major social reforms; on abortion, abolition of the death penalty, full equality before the law for the gay community, have come about from this very principle and from the use of private member’s bill’s and the practice of permitting MPs a free vote on such matters.

The tipping point at which opposition to a particular law, policy or measure renders it unworkable and its implementation undemocratic is much lower than the 51% opposition required for an absolute majority against – the precise figure required will vary depending on the issue at stake and proximity to a general election; in the court of ‘public opinion’ one requires only minority opposition large enough and motivated to remove a government from power at the next election to win the day.

The last great example of this was, of course, the poll tax. It would not be true to say that opposition to the poll tax ran at 51% of the electorate or that 51% of the population refused to pay – also personally I never did pay a single penny of it. But when it came to the crunch with the Thatcher government there were enough of us out there to make it clear that both the tax itself, and ultimately the leader responsible for its introduction, had become such a liability to the Tory party that its survival as a government necessitated the removal of both.

(And on a personal note, one of the great joys of reading Robin Cook’s ‘The Point of Departure’ is that he has finally answered a question that has been bugging me since the day of Thatcher’s political demise – are politicians on leaving high office issued with a P45 like everyone else?

The answer, as Cook relates in his book, is yes!

Somewhere deep inside there is something inescapably satisfying to finally know, for a fact, that Thatcher did get a P45 – if only someone could have sent her a B1 as well!)

After that I think it unnecessary to comment further on Neil’s claim that “All opinion polls that ask the neutral question; ‘Do you want ID cards or not?’, have more in favour than against.â€? other than to wonder whether he’s getting his material from Alistair Campbell.

4. ID cards will not become compulsory until 2013. Before this date the system will have been running for 5 years, any problems will be ironed out. There will also be a general election before this date, so the public will have plenty of time to voice their objections if they are not happy.

Ah, yes, technology and democracy, where shall I begin?

“…the system will have been running for 5 years, any problems will be ironed outâ€? - there is no guarantee of this at all. There are already several instances of large-scale public sector IT projects where problems have not been ironed out in the space of five years and, in some cases, were never ironed out at all resulting in the system being scrapped without ever coming into full use.

Given the current state of the technology on which this system relies, particularly in terms of biometrics, there remains a long way to go before the industry will be able to provide a system that is robust and reliable enough to do the job properly. By simple inference, if we buy into this technology now, before it is ready, then we, as taxpayers, will be paying considerable sums of money to those vendors with whom the government takes out contracts just to pay for the additional research and development required to deliver a fully working system.

There is nothing in the government’s current proposals to suggest such costs have been factored into calculations, although KPMG’s recommendation that the Home Office revisit its assumptions on ‘contingencies’ strongly suggests that any such costs indicated in existing budget proposals are almost certainly going to be inadequate.

Five years is also a hell of a long time in terms of IT and technology development cycles – if it takes five years to get the system right following it introduction then by the time they actually get it working it will already be near obsolete – and again we have, at this stage, no way of knowing whether and to what extent the governments claims as to the costs of the system accurately allow the costs of upgrading the technical systems on which it relies – although, again, suspicion falls back on KPMG’s comments about revisiting the numbers on contingencies as suggesting that existing estimates may well be inadequate.

And, of course, we have the government’s track record on IT procurement to rely on as evidence of their ability to deliver on time and on budget.

“There will also be a general election before this date, so the public will have plenty of time to voice their objections if they are not happy.�

So, Neil. Do you seriously believe that were there to be a change of government at the next general election, the Tories – the only opposition party which could take power – for all their parliamentary opposition to the present Bill, will actually repeal this legislation outright and dismantle the entire system that Labour will have, by then, put in place?

No. Me neither – so your point here is a complete non-argument.

5. In 2003, 101,000 people had their identity stolen in the UK, this has risen from just 20,000 in 1999, a 500% increase over 4 years. It is one of the fastest growing crimes. It is undeniable (even opponents agree) that ID cards and a NIR will make it much more difficult to have a false identity.

Really, Neil, you should know better by now that to cite a source like CIFAS, which has an clear and obvious vested interest in the ID cards bill, as ‘evidence’ in support of your argument…

…particularly when in making their case they cite government’s already discredited claims about the costs of identity fraud (£1.3 billion) that are actually debunked by the article from Spyblog cited in your very next point.

CIFAS’s members will not only be the biggest users of ID verification services but, once they get hold of National Identity Registration Numbers will also be the owners of by far the largest Private Sector identity-linked personal information databases – once they have the NIRN they will go into overdrive seeking to suck up every last shred of personal data they can possibly get their hands on, after all, their entire business model is based on exactly such practices.

CIFAS will, inevitably, form the hub of a Private Sector database state to mirror the Public Sector one that this Bill will create for the government and, as such, one has to consider their ‘evidence’ as hopelessly biased.

You also misinterpret CIFAS’s figures – they cite 101,000 cases of identity fraud in 2003, not 101,000 people – the figure given for people affected by such fraud is given lower down as 43,000 – you forget that a single ID fraud can generate multiple cases.

As for making ownership of a false identity more difficult – yes that may well be true, but that does not make it impossible.

ID cards, far from deterring efforts to obtain a false identity will actually make such efforts all the more attractive, particularly to terrorist organisations and organised crime. To generate a convincing false identity, at present, requires the acquisition of several documents from different sources, increasing the risk to the criminal/terrorist, that their attempts to obtain a false ID will be detected.

ID cards, if the system is cracked – and it will be, provide the ‘Gold Standard’ for ID fraud, the one that every criminal will want to achieve.

Just look at the history of ‘copy protection’ on software, music and now films. Billions have been poured into the development of systems designed to prevent theft of intellectual property, the respective industries have tried everything; software, hardware, Internet-based product activation, encryption, spoiler signals – nothing has worked. The combined efforts of Microsoft, Sony, AOL Time-Warner and no end of specialist, experts and R & D labs have failed entirely over a period of more than 20 years to produce a single secure system which can prevent the unauthorised duplication and distribution of a computer program, piece of music or film. What makes you think that government will succeed where everyone else has failed?

Now think of it this way – suppose you are, once ID cards are introduced, a victim of ID fraud. Suppose a criminal does manage to crack the system and use your supposedly secure identity to clean out you bank account or acquire thousands of pounds in credit, loans or fraudulently purchased goods?

How, then, are you going to prove that none of this was down to you, that your identity was, in fact stolen?

Think about it? If that happens to you then you’re fucked aren’t you? Who is going to believe you when you say ‘It wasn’t me?’.

More to the point, even if it turns out the system is insecure, will the government and its users even admit to it, knowing that without absolute confidence that the system is secure, public confidence in it will evaporate overnight.

Let me give you a clue as to what’s likely to happen in that scenario…

M-A-T-R-I-X C-H-U-R-C-H-I-L-L

6. Even opponents of ID cards admit identity fraud cost (latest figure 2002) at least £150 million a year (they also admit this is likely to be an underestimate). The annual running costs of ID cards will be £85 million. So this alone, means ID cards pay for themselves, without all the other benefits in streamlining efficiency, controlling immigration, stopping electoral fraud, proof of age and general convenience. When we consider how fast identity crime is growing, it becomes apparent how important ID cards will be. At the present rate of growth, 1.1 million people in the UK could be affected by identity theft by 2008 when ID cards will be introduced.

Again, you quote figures from unverifiable government sources. If the government is so sure of its numbers then why not let the LSE look them over?

7. Biometrics can be encrypted or distorted in such a way that they are almost totally secure and also changeable in the unlikely event of theft by hackers. As this article on ‘bio payment’ in the US explains;

“Representatives from Pay By Touch and BioPay said when it comes to security, users of biometric payment services can relax because both companies don’t store pictures of fingerprints. Instead, tiny measurements unique to each finger are recorded as an algorithm. If a hacker breaks into the system, all he or she would find is a number rather than a usable image of a fingerprint, they said.”

And ‘Pay by Touch’ and ‘BioPay’ are what, precisely?

Vendors who sell payment systems which use biometric technology.

Of course they’re going to say how wonderful its all going to be, they make their profits from selling the fucking things. Y’know, Mandy Rice-Davis and all that; “Well he would say that, wouldn’t heâ€?

For fuck’s sake Neil, if the government announced plans to repeal the Law of Gravity would you jump out of a plane without a fucking parachute?

——

Links to everything referenced are in Neil’s original piece otherwise…

If the old joke; “Q. How do you know when a politician is lying? A. His lips are movingâ€?, has not quite (yet?) become an axiom of modern political culture, it is certainly a truism that when a politician or public servant starts resorting to euphemisms then something is not all that it appears to be; even if one of the quirks of the British parliamentary system, an outright prohibition on referring to any member of parliament as a ‘liar’ while in the House of Commons chamber, actually makes the creative use of euphemisms obligatory for MPs.

Justin, over at Chicken Yoghurt, has very recently taken Dame Elizabeth Mannigham-Buller. Head of MI5, to task over yet another delightful new euphemism; “detainee reporting�.

It’s easy to laugh at the sheer absurdity of such euphemisms, even when they conceal a darker truth, as Justin notes is his article. Sometimes its the sheer farce of the linguistic entanglement that a ill-chosen euphemism forces on the speaker makes its humourous, as with Donald Rumsfeld’s now classic statement during a US Department of Defence news briefing:

“As we know, There are known knowns, there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don’t know we don’t know.â€?

Translation: “We don’t know everythingâ€?

Actually the more I read that statement the more it reminds me of Neil the Hippy’s description of the joys of gardening in the BBC series ‘The Young Onesâ€?:

“First we sow the seeds, nature grows the seeds then we eat the seeds�

Not sure why, it just does.

At other times its the black humour we find in certain euphemisms that makes us laugh, albeit knowingly and in a manner which shows we know what the speaker really means.

So we know that ‘friendly fire’ translates as ‘getting shot in the back by US Apache helicopter gunship’; and ‘collateral damage’ really means ‘Oh fuck! You’re serious? That was a fucking children’s hospital we just bombed!’ just as we know that when a politician starts talking about ‘investing’ in something what he really means is ‘I’m going to be spending your money’.

Nevertheless, Justin hits the nail precisely on the head when he describes the term ‘detainee reporting’ as “a nice ambiguous, modern phrase that lets the likes of Manningham-Buller sleep at night.â€? For that is not only what it is but also nicely defines its purpose as well.

My two semesters of studying sociology at university – I dropped at the end of the first year the subject to concentrate on psychology and politics – left me with few vivid memories, aided immeasurably by the failure of the university in question; which was at that time a mere polytechnic, to succeed in recruiting any more than one lecturer with the ability to make the subject seem interests at a time.

This venerable position as the only interesting sociology lecturer in the university; which – admittedly – put the sociology department one up on the colleagues who taught economics, turned out to be the Professor of Sociology himself; a man who during his academic career and alighted upon two particular specialist field of study; “The Holocaustâ€? and “Thatcher’s Britainâ€? (you can make your own connections there).

His two lectures on the subject of the Holocaust were, by some distance, the most interesting (and best attended) lectures on the whole course; and was during one of these that he related, quite casually, the story of the interrogation, prior to the Nuremberg trials, of Albert Speer; Hitler’s chief architect, minister for armaments and the man whose organisation abilities made the chilling efficiency with which the Nazi’s pursued their goal of exterminating Europe’s Jews, Gypsys, etc – even if Speer’s personal contribution was only even proven to be the development and organisation of Nazi forced labour camps and not a direct involvement in ‘The Final Solution’ (another euphemism) itself.

What came over most strongly, and remarkably, about Speer was not merely that he was one of the few senior Nazis not to have been sentenced to a short visit to the hangman’s noose but that, while under interrogation, he both complained bitterly that he never received the same degree of recognition and praise from Hitler that was lavished on others within the Nazi regime; not because of his fervent belief in the Nazi cause but simply because he felt he did a damn job and should be rewarded for his efficient management of the forced labour camps and the production of munitions. Speer even seemed unaware of what was actually going on at certain of these camps, despite almost certainly having access to the full facts of Nazi policy towards Jews and others thought ‘undesirable’ in the new world order of the ‘Master Race’; none of this ever really registered, he just did his and did it well and that, to Speer, as all that mattered.

Reading that back to myself, there are other obvious parallels I could draw here on consideration of the extent to which ‘managerialism’ clearly influenced Speer’s view of his own role in the Holocaust; but again I leave it to you to find your own modern comparators.

My real point is that, exactly as Justin suggests, euphemisms such as ‘detainee reports’ and ‘extraordinary rendition’ genuinely do serve the purpose of allowing the likes of Elizabeth Manningham-Buller and her subordinates to sleep soundly at night, they serve a very specific psychological purpose which extends far beyond their value in terms of political expediency and public perception.

Over time euphemisms will tend to develop a life and a power all of there very own and assume their own internal veracity and sense of reality, Just as a lie told often enough may become the truth so a euphemism used often enough may come to develop its own sense of meaning that users perceive to be real – the knowingness of understanding that detainee reports may have been obtained through torture gradually diminishes with time until the individual using the terms comes to genuinely believe that detainee reports are exactly what the phrase itself suggests and nothing more; that in reality there is no obfuscated secondary meaning, that the euphemisms is not a euphemisms but a expression of actual truth.

I don’t doubt that, if not now then in the not-to-distant future, there will be many within the security services and the legal system who will see the term ‘detainee report’ and think nothing of it; they will take such things entirely at face value and in the genuinely held belief that the term relates to nothing more sinister the very same kind of evidence that is procured every day by British police officers conducting standard interrogations in full accordance with the provisions of UK law. Suggestions that such reports may possibly contain information obtained under torture would then engender a reaction ranging anywhere from shock to utter outrage – how dare anyone suggest such a thing, they are only detainee reports not the chronicles of the Spanish Inquisition.

One can see such a process explained here, by the American Psychological Association, in the context of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib – note the reference to Stephen Millgram’s use of the euphemisms ‘teachers’ and ‘learners’ in his classic study of the impact of authority on human behaviour.

Only when one understands the true power of euphemisms, particularly when coupled to the bureaucratic mindset of a state functionary – like Albert Speer – and how readily one man’s euphemism can become another’s absolute truth can one really appreciate how easily the joke falls flat when one considers the real nature of detainee reports.

After the strenuous effort of laying into Blair in my last piece I’m rather too tired to go for mcuh more in the way of spittle-flecked invective, deserved as it is by the government’s education white paper other than to note that I would have rather in not be printed in its glossy format but on something rather softer and more absorbant - at least then I could find a use for it.

So, you’ll have to do with a few links instead as there’s much good stuff to be found at the moment by Bob Piper, Militant Pine Martin and Rhetorically Speaking.

Meanwhile Ekklesia notes that amongst the expected early takers for running trust schools are:

“the Church of England, the Microsoft Corporation, the Open University and the Peabody Trust. Jewish and Muslim groups are also looking at the plans.”

while

“The Christian group the United Learning Trust, which is already the largest single sponsor of schools in the academy programme, has confirmed that it is in talks with one local authority about taking on eight or nine state schools.”

An interesting point to note about this trust, and its parent trust the United Church Schools Trust is that where the parent trusts charitable objects are scrupulously neutral:

“To provide in England and Wales, by the establishment and maintenance of schools, a liberal, practical, and general education for children and adults of all ages and both sexes and otherwise to promote the establishment and maintenance of schools conducted, or to be conducted, by any charitable institution”

Those of the United Learning Trust, which operates City Academies, contain specific provisions for the delivery of ‘religious instruction in the doctrine and duties of Christianity’.

It’s also worth noting the staggering sums of money - by typical charity standards - being funnelled into these two trusts.

UCST’s annual income has doubled (and then some) since 1997, from around £17 million to over £39 million, while ULT, which run 6 City Academies, has gone from went from an income of £4 million in its first year (2002/3) to £41 million in its second year (2003/4) - there’s definitely gold in them thar’ academies.

One has to wonder if proposals to set up a Marxist City Academy would be met with quite the same degree of enthusiasm by Blair and his god-bothering upper middle class mates.

The Antonio Gramsci City Academy - specialising in cultural studies - has quite a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

The sure and certain knowledge of your own impending mortality affects people in different ways. For some the surety of knowing that they have started on their final slow walk into the arms of the Reaper sets them to quiet contemplation and a conscious effort to make peach with the world. For others, suddenly the meaning of Carpe Diem becomes all too clear; time is a racin’ and they have so much to do and so little time if they are to rest, at the last, fulfilled.

This is, I think, what Frank Herbert was alluding to when he wrote; “To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.�

We must all, at times, reflect on notions of mortality; such thoughts are brought not merely by the prospect of physical death but by the ‘little deaths’ we undergo periodically in life; those times of seeming apocalyptic upheaval that we enter knowing that things will never be quite the same again.

So, surely, must it be with Anthony Lynton Blair having entered his third term of office as Prime Minister in full foreknowledge of the length of his allotted [political] span.

For all that we know, too well, the slogans and the spin; ‘things can only get better’, ‘education, education, education’ and ‘Labour is at its best when it is at its most radical’; an objective assessment of his eight years in office and the achievements of that period must surely show that reality has fallen well short of party rhetoric.

We have certainly done well with our careful stewardship of the economy, building on the stability inherited from Ken Clarke who, uniquely amongst modern Tory chancellors, put the interests of country and the economy before short-term political expediency and laid the foundations for the flattening of the boom-bust economic cycle from which the country has benefited over the last eight years – one cannot however, claim, as politicians inevitably do, that we have ‘broken’ this cycle; the fundamental instabilities of capitalism that Marx correctly [ even in the estimation of right-wing economists] identified have not gone away forever, we have simply become more successful in managing them and mitigating their negative effects – and we have reaped the rewards of this; channelling more money that ever before into the key public services, education and health.

And then…

Well, perhaps this description – by the BBC - of Blair’s speech to this year’s Labour Conference best sums up the reality of of our achievements over eight years in government.

“He also spent a large section of his speech reminding delegates of the great advances they had already made, albeit that they were often “quiet advances” - like laws on domestic violence, paid holiday for all and free museum entry - that decided the “character and culture” of a nation.â€?

It is, by any measure, an intriguing summation of eight years of power and of the Blair legacy to-date; a catalogue of modest successes and achievement which, when stripped of their rhetoric and spin, sound more the stuff of a Chief Executive’s speech to shareholders at an Annual General Meeting than that of a political leader to party members.

Where, one might ask, are the big ideas? Where are the grand themes, the vision, the broad sweeps of ideological change?

Nowhere.

For all his public pretensions of radicalism; for all the rhetoric about change and modernity, to date Blair has delivered nothing so radical as even Harold Wilson’s one landmark achievement – the creation of the Open University – let alone touched upon the radicalism of the Attlee government of 1945-51. Blair has promised much in eight years yet when it comes to the one genuinely radical idea with which he entered government in 1997 - electoral reform and reform of the House of Lords – he has delivered almost nothing. The removal of a few hereditary peers is all he has to show for his rhetoric about reform where it matters most, in the democratic (or not, in the case of the House of Lord) institutions of government itself.

This, for me at least, is the central paradox which drives the Blair premiership and one well characterised by Robin Cook in first couple of chapters of ‘The Point of Departure’ when he describes Blair as lacking the deep roots in the party of other and as being concerned only with outcome and not process.

On the domestic stage this has led to a considerable degree of timidity in the face of popular opposition; one thinks immediately of the drawn out backsliding on Labour’s manifesto commitment to a ban on hunting with hounds. Conversely, on the international stage we have seen Blair go against public opposition on a similar, if not greater, scale to the opposition to the fox-hunting ban in his decision to support the US in the invasion of Iraq. Here we have two situations in which there has been marked, large-scale, opposition to government plans yet differing reactions to that opposition from Blair himself. The one discernible difference between the two issues, if Cook’s characterisation of Blair is accurate – and I have no reason to think it isn’t – would appear to be Blair’s perception of the likely outcome of each of these policies. On fox-hunting Blair was persuaded by arguments about the likely impact of a ban on rural life and the rural economy; on Iraq he was persuaded of the benefits of the removal of Saddam Hussain; and having formulated his perception of what constituted the ‘best’ outcome in each situation, he took his decision – unmoved so it seems by arguments of principle.

This apparent facet of Blair’s character, for all his outward self-confidence, seems to hint at a core of insecurity in his make-up. Blair, as has been said so often over the last eight years, is a winner; but more than that he seems driven by the need to be a winner and to be seen to be a winner, to be the kind of person whom victory is everything and second place is nowhere at all. No doubt this is something exacerbated by his relationship with his own party, particularly the rank and file membership whose roots in the party [and in socialism] run deep in a way that one suspects Blair could barely comprehend, let alone emulate.

Blair may be the most successful Labour Prime Minister is the history of the party but he will never command the respect and, dare I say it, love of party members in the manner of his political antecedents. When his time has come and gone, how will he be remembered by party members?

As the man who led Labour to victory three times? Of course.

But no one will speak his name with the reverence with which we speak of Keir Hardie. No one will talk of his achievements as we do of Attlee; or quote his speeches as we do Nye Bevan’s; or speak of him with the affection and respect commanded by Michael Foot and John Smith.

Will we remember him for his intellect and drive as we do Tony Benn? As a great parliamentarian like Robin Cook, or a man of unquestioned personal integrity like Tam Dalyell?

No. One cannot even say he was entertaining in the manner of Dennis Skinner.

Blair will be remembered as a winner, as a man who was effective and efficient in the manner of George Graham’s Arsenal side; manager of a team whose success you could be proud of but without ever liking the way they played the game. As a leader Blair lacks either the kind of personal or ideological connection with the party required to genuinely command its respect – members may speak well of his election victories but never from the heart and never with genuine affection and, as such, his legacy may well be that he comes to be seen as a creature of his time and a necessary evil, a cuckoo in Labour’s nest who was never quite ‘one of us’.

It’s ironic but understandable, therefore, that Blair’s third term finds him finally making a conscious effort to match rhetoric with action and begin to realise his long-stated aspirations of pursuing a radical agenda. Suddenly, and with political mortality firmly on the horizon, Blair has rediscovered radicalism and appears to have found the will to follow through with his agenda for change. One cannot help but think these two things intimately connected.

Blair and his supporters in government now talk of choice, of the marketisation of those public services that have been a central facet of government policy over the last eight years, education and heath. We are to have more choice as consumers of these services; more private finance initiatives, more foundation hospitals, more city academies, more of our public services delivered by the private sector, or by the voluntary sector or transferred into quasi-charitable trusts and now an education system built entirely of independent state-funded schools, schools that will live or die on the sword-point of market forces. Perform well and thrive. Do badly and die.

Now the rhetoric has shifted to talk of ‘irreversible change’ and a ‘permanent revolution’ in the delivery of public services. We now have a tune to dance to by Government With Attitude and with rhetoric that’s ‘Straight Outta Trotsky’ – not that Blair will realise that - even if their policies come ‘Straight Outta Thatcher’. Who knows, perhaps it’ll all be released as a double album?

But hang on here, isn’t this all the wrong way round? Aren’t Prime Ministers and their governments supposed to be at their most radical during their first term of office and not their last, especially when swept to office on a tide of hope and with a crushing majority?

Have we missed something along the way? I think we have.

It’s easy to arrive at the mistaken belief that Blair has failed in his pre-1997 objective of modernising the state if one looks only at his change of heart on electoral reform and his failure to do more than scratch the surface of reforming the House of Lords. Yet, if one looks a little more closely then it becomes apparent that far from failing to deliver on reforming the state, Blair has actually succeeded and done so, in most respects, beyond his wildest dreams. Year after year, policy after policy, for the last eight years this government has gone quietly about making fundamental alterations to the very nature of the state and its relationship with its citizens; just not in the way any of us expected back in the days when Blair was merely a Prime Minister-in-waiting.

Over the last eight years, the government has set about systematically eroding our civil liberties and our constitutional and democratic rights in a manner which would shame a South American dictator.

The criminal justice system has been quietly bypassed by the growing use of fixed-penalty notice for minor offences; a system which is part ‘protection racket’ (it allows you to ‘pay off’ the government in order to avoid going to court) and part data-capture exercise (although in paying the fixed penalty notice you make no admission of guilt, you are still fingerprinted and required to provide the police with a DNA sample for their records); ‘Diplock Courts’ are to be reintroduced in complex fraud cases, removing from defendants their 800-year old right to trial by jury, a right founded on Magna Carta; and ‘double jeopardy’, the right to only be tried once for a criminal offence has now gone, giving the Crown Prosecution Service a new motto: “If at first you don’t succeed, trial, trial againâ€?.

Local democracy has found itself subject to what amounts to ‘death by a thousand qualngos’
(Quasi Autonomous Local Non-Governmental Organisations).

Local Authorities may be far from perfect institutions but throughout their history they have had two redeeming features; members were elected by local people and they provided local services. Getting rid of the former would be too obvious a move to get away, although the government has gone some considerable way towards curbing the authority of councillors by saddling them with the Standards Board; getting rid of the latter has sadly been all too easy.

The carrot and stick of tying central government funding, particularly regeneration funding, to the disposal of what little housing stock remained in public ownership, the transfer of services to trusts and arms-length management bodies and the proliferation of local governance structures; including partnership boards, initiatives and forums, has in all but the most robust of local political environments seriously denuded the role and authority of elected members and, in the worst cases, removed from elected democratic control the majority of local services.

It simply cannot be right that council officers, however senior in rank, are now able to respond to criticisms levelled by an elected councillor based on concerns raised by their constituents by threatening to report the councillor to the Standards Board, yet this is something I know to be happening on an all too regular basis – one local authority not too far away from where I live is notorious for this very practice.

Nor can it be right that elected representatives of the people can be reduced, in matters so fundamental to the lives of many of their constituents as education and the running of local schools, to acting as ‘champions’ and ‘mediators’ (translated: people without any real authority) on behalf of the people there represent, while businessmen are permitted to buy themselves a seat on the boards of local schools. Yet this is what the government are proposing in their Education white paper, the removal of state-funded schools from any semblance of local democratic control.

Is any wonder that as a society we are losing confidence, losing faith in the democratic process when that portion of democracy to which we could, and should, have the closest connection is being systematically deprived of any real authority.

Blair may have failed to reform fully the House of Lords but that does not mean that he has failed to make significant changes to its composition; the vast majority of hereditary peers have been stripped of their former rights, while Labour peers now make up the largest single group in the Lords, even if time, tradition and propriety has prevented Blair from granting himself the same kind of built-in majority that the Conservatives previously enjoyed. Still it remains scarcely credible that Blair might ever have genuinely been committed to full and democratic reform of the Lords, not merely in his known preference for an appointed second chamber but his failure to push even that reform through in face of a still recalcitrant house that rebelled against government legislation mores time in the first four years of Labour rule than in the entire eighteen years of Tory rule which preceded it.

Not even the sovereignty of parliament itself, that which the people fought a civil war and executed a reigning monarch to secure and protect, is safe in the hands of Tony Blair. Amongst numerous changes to the system of public inquiries made by the Inquiries Act 2005, and Act which passed on a nod and a wink from both opposition parties and which has the primary and obvious purpose of ensuring that never again will an ruling government be subjected to the embarrassment of a Hutton Inquiry or Scott Report, there is one which makes a fundamental constitutional change to our very system of government and which effects as transfer of sovereign authority from parliament tot he executive, or more specifically to an individual minister.

At the time this Act received royal assent and passed into the law, public inquiries ceased to report directly to parliament and will now report instead directly to the Minister, who will then decide on their sole and exclusive authority which portions of the inquiry report, if any, will disclosed to the House of Commons. Such inquiries are fundamental to our ability as citizens, and of parliamentarians as our representatives, to hold the government to account for its failing, incompetencies and, in the worst cases, corruptions and cover-ups, yet on the back of shady deal between the three main parties conclude mere days before the dissolution of parliament for the last general election, the government has been permitted to appoint itself as official censor of all such future reports.

For the last eight years, government has followed an all too obvious and depressing pattern of behaviour, centralising power on itself and devolving authority to its agents and functionaries and on all the but very few occasions its has pushed this agenda too far too fast; as it did in seeking to limit the right of defendants in magistrates court to choose to undergo a trial by jury in a Crown Court, this has gone almost unnoticed.

This is Blair’s unseen success in government and a key platform upon which he now feels secure enough to push for radical market-led reforms in public services, however this is by now means the key reason why Blair is, only now, pushing hard on to complete a radical programme of, particularly, public sector reform.

Notions of personal legacy and his own perception and sense of his place in history, a place likely denied to him in Labour party circles - as already noted - by his lack of deep roots within the party no doubt play a considerable part in his thinking but I strongly suspect something more basic and visceral is at work here; knowledge of his own political mortality and by extension the security and safety of knowing that he will not, personally, have to face the electorate and account for his actions and his policies to the British people.

And that is, for me, the real measure of the man. I have no doubt whatsoever that the radical agenda he is now seeking to force through parliament, a Tory agenda by any objective measurement of the term, is one he has harboured since his earliest days as Labour leader, yet through two terms of office as Prime Minister he has been too timid in the face of possible opposition both within the Labour Party and amongst the wider electorate to openly play his hand.

Only now, as he approaches the end in the safe and certain knowledge that he will be gone long before the electorate next has the opportunity to hold him fully to account, only when, at last, he can enjoy in full the privilege of the harlot – power without responsibility – do we finally see his true instincts.

Some leader, huh?

One of the more popular pieces of self-referential naval-gazing that many bloggers go in for on occasion is to muse on whether anything has changed as a result of their taking up blogging; not in the sense of ‘changing the world’ - although you do encounter the occasional blogger who you strongly suspect habours such delusions of grandeur - but on a more personal level. Questions such as ‘have you learned anything new since you started blogging?’ or ‘have you changed your views on any issues because of something you’ve written/read?’ crop up pretty frequently, even if they rarely lead to more than a few idle speculations on the nature of blogging; such things being something of semi-obligatory antidote to blogger’s block and a means of keeping you hand in until you can think of something worthwhile to write.

Personally the only appreciable change in behaviour I’ve noticed since starting to blog is that I’ve got back into the habit of reading books about politics; facilitated as much by the presence, just around the corner from my workplace, of a bookshop called ‘The Works’.

If you live in or have visiting any fair-sized town in the last few years you’ll have come across just such a bookshop; one which specialises in ‘discount’ books. Perhaps the best way to think of The Works is to take the view that if Amazon is the Hollywood of book trade, bright brash and oh-so-very-modern, and Waterstones its Oxford Street then The Works is its Eastbourne, the elephant’s graveyard of literary pretensions: a departure lounge where books go to die.

However, the beauty of such a bookshop lies not in the sheer acreage of dross which adorns its selves, the once proud hardbacks whose cover stickers prodly proclaim a recommended retail price of £14.95 before forlornly noting ‘reduced to £2.99′ but in the occasional nugget of gold to be found within its walls. Visiting such a bookshop is very much akin to panning for gold, you have to sift through a lot of uninteresting gravel but every so often, just often enough to keep you interested, you turn up something of genuine interest. This is particularly true of political books, or indeed any books which operate within a niche market and which therefore lend themselves well to a future of being remaindered down to the bargain bins in such shops.

So, in the last few months, my occasional search has turned up such gems as Ron Suskind’s ‘The Price of Loyalty‘; Mark Steel’s passionate, spirited [and very funny] account of the French Revolution, ‘Vive Le Revolution‘; Paul Kingsnorth’s wonderful ‘One No, Many Yesses‘ and John Grey’s ‘Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern‘, one of the most lucid critiques of our own presumptions of modernity that I’ve ever read: more often than not in hardback editions and without ever damaging the bank balance to the tune of more than £3.99.

Of course, as you might expect, visiting such a bookshop places you eternally at the whims and vagaries of whatever stock the company happens to have picked up at the time of your visit. Not every visit is necessarily a good one; today’s most certainly was and yielded the hardback edition ‘The Point of Departure’, Robin Cook’s personal account of his two years as Leader of House of Commons from Labour’s election victory in 2001 to his resignation over the Iraq War - which includes the full text of his resignation speech - and all for the princely sum of £3.99.

Better still, a little mooching around Google revealed that The Works even has its own website the terms of which are not at all bad (£2.95 standard delivery charge regardless of the size of package and free delivery on orders over £250 and that The Point of Departure can be ordered online. With Amazon listing the paperback edition at £6.39, the canny political shopper can avail themselves of the hardback edition and still save themselves 40p, which is a good deal in anyone’s book (no pun intended).

In fact now would seem a good time to check of The Works regardless of your preferred political leanings as alongside Cook’s memoir you’ll also find an intriguing looking biography of Che Guevara, which appears to be a new hardback edition of a book previously published by Hamlyn while if your inclinations are rather more to the right of either Che or Robin Cook you’ll also find Roy Jenkins’s weighty biography of Churchill (paperback unfortunately but still a couple of quid off the Amazon price if you get in quick).

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Note: The full-on shill for Tim Worstall’s ‘2005 Blogged: Dispatches from the Blogosphere’ in which yours truly has one of his ID card diatribes included will start in earnest closer to the publication date of 18th November. Just of the basis of the small number of bloggers who I either know Tim contacted or who’s work will self-evidently feature - what would a review of the year be without Nosemonkey’s liveblog of the 7th July at Europhobia and Scott Burgess’s exposé of Dilpazier Aslam, this will be a damn good read - all the fun of an RSS feed and you can read it in the bath.

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Now you will excuse me but I have to get back to the next chapter in Robin Cook’s memoir…

Right, as it now appears that the Bird Flu virus that the press are panicking about originated in Scotland, the solution should be obvious…

Just coat all chicken in batter and deep-fry it - its as good an explanation for why its had no effect up there in 46 years as any I can think of…

24 October 2005

Lord Holme of Cheltenham
House of Lords
London
SW1A 0PW

Sir:

Re: Identity Cards Bill

I note with some considerable interest and agreement your comments regarding this bill, as reported by BBC on-line today [24 October 2005], not least of which is your assertion that:

“Contrary to the government’s assertions, the committee reaffirms that the bill fundamentally alters the relationship between citizens and the state.â€?

I write today regarding a specific matter in relation to this Bill; one which it is my hope you will consider carefully and bring to the attention of colleagues in the House of Lords as they consider amendments to this pernicious piece of legislation.

Amongst the many misleading and disingenuous statements made by the Home Secretary during the course of the Third Reading debate on this bill I would draw your attention to this particular passage:

“The Bill also sets limits on the information that can be held on the register. It will not contain information about criminal convictions, financial records or political or religious opinions. Indeed, on Report, we have just amended the Bill so that it will not be possible to add a police national computer number to the register. No one will have access to the national identity register other than those operating it. What the Bill allows is for information to be provided from the register either with the consent of the individual or without that consent in strictly limited circumstances in accordance with the law of the land.�

This may be literally true but of itself it fails to acknowledge the extent to which the Bill makes possible the creation of an overarching ‘Database State’ in which all manner of personal data may be connected together and interlinked without either the knowledge or consent of the individual and will little, other the Data Protection Act, to fall back upon in the way of safeguards.

To provide a little background to the statement above, I possess more than twenty years experience, both professional and personal, in the field of information technology and am well-versed in matters relating to the design, development and operation of computer databases. In short I understand in some considerable technical detail how databases work and what they are and are not capable of and therefore have little difficulty in accurately interpreting the provisions of this particular Bill in relation to the scope and operation of the National Identity Register. Consequently I know full well that the assurances given by the Home Secretary in regards to the extension of the National Identity Register to encompass personal data such as Police, Medical and other financial records are not worth the paper that Hansard is printed on and that his concessions in making amendments to the Identity Cards Bill in line with these assurances are no concessions at all.

This is, admittedly, a rather technical issue but one of critical importance and I trust, therefore, that you will permit me to illustrate this issue with examples which may more readily explain my concerns than would be possible with a detailed technical exposition of the issue alone.

In stating clearly and unequivocally that “it will not be possible to add a police national computer number to the register�, the Home Secretary clearly wishes to convey the impression that it will not be possible to extend the National Identity Register in such a way as to permit information held on the Police National Computer to be directly linked to the National Identity Register. This is, however, not true.

In order to link together data held in two different databases, one requires only that that data includes a common reference number, what in industry parlance is termed an ‘unique identifier’, in order to create a relationship between the data held in each of the individual databases. An example of such a unique identifier in use today is the National Insurance Number, which is used both by Revenue and Customs and by the Department of Work and Pensions to identify data appertaining, respectively, to an individual’s Tax affairs (e.g. PAYE records) and Welfare Benefits records (e.g. claims and payments). Using this single unique identifier one can locate and examine an individual’s personal records in either system and, equally, one can connect both systems together to compare said records, as already happens in investigations of suspected benefit fraud under the provisions of the Social Security Fraud Act 2001.

As should be clear from the example of the National Insurance Number, any relationship between personal data held in two (or more) database systems that is based on an unique identifier is a ‘two-way street’ - to link that information together requires only that each database make use of the same unique identifier as a common reference point.

While the Home Secretary’s statement and the amendment to the Bill to which it relates may appear, to a casual observer, to rule out the creation of such a common reference point between the Identity Register and certain proscribed classes of information, Police and Medical Records having been cited explicitly; this is in fact not the case. To prevent the creation of such a link one must not only prevent the recording of relevant unique identifiers from Police and NHS systems in the National Identity Register; one must also prevent the recording of any unique identifier contained in the Identity Register in data held in the corresponding systems that you do not wish to be linked to it.

The National Identity Register contains just such a unique identifier; the National Identity Registration Number (NIRN), which is unique to every individual recorded in the National Identity Register and is explicitly included in the information which can be disclosed to third parties under paragraph 14(2)(a) of the Bill; being one of the items of data listed in paragraph 4 of schedule 1 to the Bill. Further, once the NIRN has been disclosed, the Bill provides for no explicit restrictions or constraints on its recording and/or use by a third party, not even to prevent that third party passing the NIRN on to others.

I trust that you will recognise immediately the significance of this issue.

Not only does it remain perfectly possible to create the very kind of linkages between Police, Medical and other records and the National Identity Register that the Home Secretary might otherwise appear to be ruling out; but once the NIRN gets out ‘into the wild’ though having been disclosed to a third party in the course of using the government’s identity verification service, it then becomes possible a third party; for the most part this will be private sector businesses, to use the NIRN as an identifier in their own database systems.

This has two immediate effects.

First, all such Private Sector databases wherever they are held become entirely transparent to the government and its ‘agents’; including the Police, Security Services, DWP investigators and pretty much any other agency with access to the National Identity Register and cause to wish to access or monitor personal data held about any citizen. The government et al will know exactly who is using the Register as it records all uses of it for verification of identity and will, therefore, know precisely where to look for data and what to look for – anything which includes or is linked to the NIRN.

Second, by providing a common reference point for establishing identity, it enables the Private Sector to more efficiently and accurately share and exchange personal data it holds about individual citizens. Even if we accept government’s assurances that it does not intend to create an all-encompassing governmental data system, which I don’t, there is nothing to prevent such a system being created in the Private Sector and entirely outside of the control of either government or the citizen. The Data Protection Act provides entirely insufficient safeguards to enable individual citizens to secure and protect their personal privacy in such a situation.

In short, without statutory restrictions on the disclosure, use and recording of the National Identity Registration Number by either proscribed government agencies or by the Private Sector the inevitably consequence of this Bill, if not a government-owned and operated ‘Database State’, will be but one or more parallel systems within the Private Sector over which there are no adequate controls or safeguards.

However, there is no fundamental reason why the NIRN should be, or has to be, disclosed to a third party in the course of providing an identity verification service.

There is significant body of both extant literature and technological development in the field of what are called ‘zero knowledge systems’, systems which enable the verification of identity without the requirement for either a National Identity Register or the disclosure of personal data to a third party. In such systems, identity verification is a simple matter of ‘yes or no’. The subject either is the person they claim to be, or they aren’t. For all that such systems can more than adequately perform the basic function of an identity card; i.e. verify identity, and provide far greater security and privacy to the citizen, the government has refused throughout to consider such a system as an alternative to its own proposal.

There is, quite simply, no benefit to the citizen in permitting the disclosure and recording of their National Identity Registration Number by a third party and the potential for considerable harm and unwarranted intrusion into their personal privacy if such is permitted without restriction, particularly as Private Sector businesses are rarely, if ever, bound to consider, let alone observe, the provisions of article 8 of ECHR in their dealing with the public. There is, however, both considerable benefit to the Private Sector in being handed, by government, the means to accurately share and exchange all manner of personal information and data about their employees, customers, etc. Regrettably, one must consider both that there are those ,either in government or in positions in which they are advising government on this Bill, who are both perfectly aware of this fact but who see no more significance in it than that it will assist greatly in selling the take up of identity verification services with the Private Sector, not least in creating a potential lucrative market for information sharing which will, no doubt, attract its full share of would-be middlemen and information brokers.

If the House of Lords succeeds in nothing else in its consideration of this Bill during the course of Third Reading it should be to bring forward an amendment to the Bill which places clear restrictions and prohibitions on the disclosure, use, recording and transfer to third parties of the National Identity Registration Number, particularly in relation to use of the NIRN by Private Sector businesses.

At the very least one would expect a diligent government to specify clearly in secondary legislation, if not primary legislation, which classes of ‘user’ the National Identity Registration Number may or may not – be disclosed to and upon what basis, for what reasons and for what uses the NIRN may be disclosed, recorded and or used. Transfers of the NIRN to other third parties should be prohibited outright. At best it should require that identity verification be conducted on a ‘zero knowledge’ basis such that the NIRN is never disclosed to a third party and incorporate clear legal sanctions against any third party found to be making use of the NIRN in any manner not specifically prescribed in law.

Thank you for your time and consideration, I trust I have been clear enough in raising my concerns, which are admittedly rather technical in nature that you may feel confident in bringing them to the attention of the House and might even consider putting forward an amendment to the Bill of the kind I have suggested in regards to the NIRN.

Regards

——-

Sending this today.

Oh, before anyone says anything - yes, I know Lord Holme is a Lib Dem peer but he is chair of the cross-party constitutional committee and this is so important that its a case of bollocks to party line.

And if I’ve not observed the proper form of address for writing to a peer, tough. I’m a republican.