ID cards test Johnson's political skills

The announcement today that a compulsory ID card trial for airside workers has been dropped makes clear that the new home secretary, Alan Johnson, a good union man, is not going to take on the British Airline Pilots' Association and other unions in the runup to the next election. For the same reason, he is not going to annoy the rail workers who were also fingered as a test bed in the Home Office's megalomaniac ID plans. This speaks well of Johnson's political skills but not of his principles as democrat.

He is clearly trying to take some of the poison out of the debate by emphasising that identity cards will be voluntary (until MPs vote for a compulsory scheme). He says he will issue £30 cards to young volunteers across North England, and he is thinking of making it free for people over 75 years old.

It's all mood music: we are still stuck with a wasteful and invasive scheme. The really imaginative and bold action would have been for Johnson to conduct a review and announce a swift termination. But that would have meant confrontation with his department, which is wedded to its identity management strategy, trying to sell it to an increasingly sceptical public as a means of empowerment – " to make it easier for citizens to prove and manage their identity" in the words of Sir David Normington, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, and James Hall, chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service.

This is nonsense. The ID card is primarily a scheme that enables government to identify you, and that is made clear in a dubious little paper called Safeguarding Identity, produced by the Home Office last week, which describes how the ID card and the transformational government scheme mesh together in one glorious structure where data about the individual passes between departments. That is the prize and why they will use any argument and spend any amount to achieve it. Every case mounted in favour of ID cards has been convincingly knocked down. It will not protect us from terrorism, as Johnson concedes, and it won't do anything to stop crime. Its effect on benefit fraud is limited. The unions have rejected it, Sheffield city council refuses to take part in a pilot scheme, and politicians from all parties despise it.

The ID card is a dead duck: it's just that no one in government has the guts or sense to read the last rites.

Source: The Guardian