Following meekly in the undistinguished footsteps of the Queen of Complacency, Polly Toynbee, Johann Hari, writing in the Indy, has turned his attention to the always thorny issue of government, databases and personal data, and put up a sterling effort at becoming Polly Pot’s ‘Prince Consort’…
The Seventies pop screecher Leo Sayer announced last week that [...]

Any one who believes that the civil liberties objections to the introduction of identity cards and the near unchecked growth of the database state and the surveillence society are ‘shockingly feeble‘ or a very middle-class disorder would do well to take the time to read both the Information Commissioner’s Office’s ‘Issues Paper: Protecting Children’s Personal [...]

It’s not often I have anything positive to say about the Lib Dems, but just for today I’ll make an exception in the case of their proposed ‘Freedom Bill’ or ‘Great Repeal Bill’, which they also called it.
Okay, so its pretty much a gimmick with little real prospect of going anywhere other than the Lib [...]

There’s been a couple of noteworthy responses to Mr Eugenides fisking of Polly Pot’s recent Blairite love-in that, in turn, deserve a response.
Tom, at Let’s Be Sensible, seems to be trying to be, well, sensible in taking issue with Mr E’s humourous commentary on vegetable masturbation and proves…
…well only that tastes vary.
Like so many oither [...]

Every so often one finds a politician making a comment or statement in which something causes you to pause for a second and say to yourself, ‘just what, exactly, are they actually saying here?’
Such a statement can be found right at the beginning of Tony Blair’s recent attempt to sell ID cards to the readers [...]

Let’s get the recommendations out of the way first.
Over at Comment is Free, AC Grayling does a fine job of dismantling Tony Blair’s defence of ID cards, on which I’ll have a little more to say in due course. Henry Porter, writing on the same subject, is of course well worth reading too.
Meanwhile, Mr Eugenides [...]

Since the first formally proposed by this government, opposition to the introduction of identity cards and, particularly, the national identity register has gone down two interlinked routes; one has been objections on civil liberties grounds and the manner in which ID cards alter the relationship between the citizen and the state, the other has been [...]

I don’t often pull stuff out of the comments boxes, but the following response from Nigel Sedgwick, to a recent piece of mine on government IT cost overruns (specifically on the NHS electronic patient record system) and how this is likely to relate to the National Identity Register and ID cards, is worth bringing out [...]

Not unsurprisingly, the news that the NHS’s new electronic patient record system is running more than two years late and looks likely to cost more than three times the £6.2 billion cost that was touted at the time that the project was given the go ahead  – or was that £2.3 billion and ten times [...]