So ID Cards will be compulsory by 2010, and our government are acting like they have made an enormous and magnanimous concession to the majority of the House of Lords who remain skeptical of this ill-conceived notion.
It is just an act; This is a complete victory for the government.
Work has not yet begun on the ID card system. No infrastructure has been put in place. Nobody has been recruited to build it and the billions that this white-elephant scheme are likely to cost are still safe in HM Treasury. The probability that the UK’s biggest ever public-sector IT project will be complete in less than four years is low.
The ID Card scheme is the technological equivalent of building the channel-tunnel. It’s big and it’s infrastructure will need to span our entire country. It will need to be reliable, secure and foolproof if it is to have any hope of working. What are the chances of a mega project being complete and functional in less than four years time?
Most likely, the 2010 deadline will come and go and the project will be incomplete, massively over-budget and prone to exactly the kind of security leaks that will make this project a thousand times more disastrous than a city full of millennium-domes.
I don’t plan to be in London for the 2012 Olympics, however I am sure I will be reading headlines about how the new and over-budget ID card scheme is screwing up our nation’s security.
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