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...

Now before I get into the knife twisting, and loath as I am to defend the Home Office, I'd like to make a couple of points that shouldn't be forgotten:

1. This isn't a matter of randomly releasing people who should still be behind bars. These are people who have completed their sentences. Debt to society paid and so on. So let's have a wee bit less of the Clarke let foreign crims back on the street rhetoric, eh?
2. Earlier in the week, opposition politicians were direly warning that Safety's position would be untenable if any (my emphasis) of the released prisoners had committed a further crime. I would think that they'd have been smart enough to realise that unless being an immigrant somehow innoculated them against recidivism, of course some of them were going to reoffend, just as one of the highest crime rates is among the entire population of former inmates (61% within 2 years of release, and much higher for younger offenders). So why on earth didn't the media (and I include normally smart interviewers such as Ed Stourton and Jim Naughtie) pick them up on this entirely unrealistic expectation?

No, the reasons why the Sweaty Baboon should be out on his oversized ear are:

1. His department — never the best with numbers or keeping records — had a (as he put it) systemic failure in two of their key competencies: keeping control of convicted criminals and keeping control over immigration. This is base service - the stuff that the Home Office does year in, year out. If they can't do that right, how on earth can they be expected to get such a massive scope increase as keeping tabs on every member of the population?

   Sorry Charles — you screw up on this level, you're clearly not up to the job. You don't have the ability, knowledge and talent to put it right and we don't trust you.

2. This came to public light following the Home Office being told about it for the fourth time by different Subject Matter Experts. If Clarke allows a culture that responds to the same issue when raised by the media, but not by the Home Office's own advisers, then there is obviously no interest in competence here.

Still, while we wait to see whether he has more resilient fingernails than we might reasonably expect, we can be reassured that the all those convicted of the worst crimes have been found on the Police computer. Is it just me, or would we rather they were found out there in the country at large? I can find pretty much every music track I own on my iTunes, but I'm buggered if I can find all the CDs.

Of course, this could all just be an attempt to align the fear of immigrants with the reality as a wee thankyou to the right wing press for letting them get away with it for so long. Frankly, the editors of the Mail, the Sun and the Express should be out on their arses too.

Before I forget, I finally got a reply from my MP today to my repeated questions about ID Cards. It encloses a non-form response from Andy Burnham no less that shows that at least the Civil Servant who wrote the reply had read my letter. I'll post it in in full in due course, but it's full of the usual garbage.