It's one of the basic tools of any magician — control of the audience's attention. It's said that a good magician knows at all times where the audience is looking, and controls it. Misdirect the audience into looking at your right hand, while your left hand palms the coin. Or, if that fails, use the Glamourous Assistant as the focal point.

Today's lesson in stage magicianship comes from our old friends, the Labour Party. While you're all looking at the left hand waving goodbye (or the Glamourous Assistant), the right hand is busy palming £400m of my money and yours.

That 8% cost slippage (that's £2.4bn so far, or 76% of the original budget for those keeping count) came out in the Gateway Review, a month past the required deadline, and just happened to be published within a few minutes of the Dear Leader's Resignation Speech. Mind you, the only reason it came out at all was because the courts ordered to be published.

Yes, it seems that even in its death throes, the Blair Project cannot resist spinning for all its worth. It's another Good Day to Bury Bad News — an open goal so wide that we should have seen it coming a mile off.

Oh, we did.

A long time ago, back when I was at school, I was given some rather good advice about putting forward an argument: always state your assumptions. Now, I'm not sure where the current crop of junior Home Office Ministers went to school, and I'm loth to point fingers at his former employer, but it looks as if Liam Byrne didn't learn this lesson, or promptly forgot it when he entered politics.

For Liam has seen the polling on the cost of ID cards and has come up with a whizzo scheme for reducing the cost from the likely £300 a skull: let's just glue together the existing data the Government holds.

Shame it's the very definition of a house built on sand, eh?

As spotted on Blairwatch, the list of ID Card Processing Centres has been announced.

With a wee bit of data manipulation (many thanks to those nice chaps at mySociety for their geocoding API), here's a first cut map of the locations:

Or, take a look at the full map.

This is a first cut - there are a couple of dupes where I obviously couldn't work out which was the correct place from the lat/long. There are also a few which the API didn't return data. In both cases, I'm too lazy/it's too late at night for me to manually correct them. I'll return to it on Friday night, when I'm back at home again. Now mostly fixed up with help from Tom's eagle eyes.

With apologies to la Hewitt for the title.

To start slightly off centre, this week saw two major scope increases for the National ID scheme (conveniently after the legislation has passed):

1. The NIR is to function as a complete population register with cross-functional data sharing that far exceed the stated strictly limited circumstances mandate. As previously predicted by the Fiend, myself and others, this is child's play once you have foreign keys to all the government's databases stored on the Register
2. Contrary to previous promises, the Card is to store your medical info. So as well as the inevitable Civil Liberties problem here, every provider of medical services is going to need the Card Reading Kit (previously estimated by the Home Office as £4k - £6k plus connectivity for each reader workstation). Whose budget is paying for this? Can't imagine the Dept for Health is jumping at the idea.

So I'm beginning to think that maybe the best way to keep tabs on the population isn't to give each of us an ID Card, but instead to lock the lot of us up in a secure location, and then HMG will know exactly where we all are. Oh, wait...

Continues below the fold »

OK, now that the Lords and Tories have caved, and given in on the worst aspect of the ID Card scheme (guys, we told you all along: it's the Register that's worrying, not the cards), we start thinking about the next step.

Naturally, the best thing to do is to simply refuse to be registered. But if you want to have foreign holidays (and my job means that keeping a passport is not optional), this won't work forever. My current passport runs out in January 2010 — just after compulsion for both Register and Card comes into force. So I'm currently debating whether it's better to hold out entirely until then, or 'arrange' a little accident for my passport earlier, even if that means being entered onto the Register.

However, what we could (and probably should) do is remember the lessons of the Poll Tax campaign. Leaving aside all the cost and technology arguments for a moment, registering the entire adult population by 2010 is going to be fearsomely difficult to actually implement. It's just too many people to get through a relatively small number of centres. Not only are there new registrations, but if you move house, get married/divorced, change appearance significantly or lose/damage your Card, you'll need to register that change.

So let's 'help'.

HMG have been swearing blind for ages now that a main reason why we absolutely must have ID Cards and the National Identity Register is to ensure that we comply with the new International Civil Aviation Organisation passport standards, and remain in the US Visa Waiver Scheme.

The work involved in this would therefore increase the cost of passports to £93 (HMG figures, disputed by the LSE amongst others).

Well paint me pink and call me Nancy, the Home Office has managed to do it sooner, cheaper, and without all the ID Cards/NIR nonsense. On Monday it announced it would issue its first Biometric, ICAO-compliant passports this week. Home Office minister Andy Burnham was quick to point out that the passports would confirm the identity of the individual.

So, all the benefits of ID Cards and the NIR, for the cost of .... (wait for it...) £53, or a supplement of just £11 on current prices.

As HMG is an entirely logical beast, with the interests of the country at heart, we can expect an announcement from the Safety Elephant in the next few days declaring that the ID Cards/NIR objectives met, and the rest of the scheme being abandoned.

Oh, wait...

Well knock me down with a feather, Parliament has actually passed something that:

1. I agree with
2. Most of the rest of the country agrees with

What!? I hear you exclaim. Yes, it's true. In the midst of ignoring the country at large and taking away a large number of freedoms (not least, the freedom to leave the country without paying several hundred quid to deposit vast amounts of your information onto a honeypot for identity fraudsters), Parliament has agreed to bring Englandshire into line with the rest of these islands (and increasing areas of Europe) and ban smoking in public places.