ID card debate hijacked

I wonder if the Home Office is regretting its MyLifeMyID website yet? The Drupal-based website, aimed at 16-25 year olds (for some reason?), isn’t having trouble attracting traffic… but unfortunately, a large chunk of its traffic is using the site to actually organise an anti-ID Card campaign.
This topic was always going to attract ‘undesirable’ use; and I’d personally have advised against an open forum model. But having made the decision to go ahead with it, I don’t think the requirement to fill in a complex registration form (age, gender, location, ethnicity) before commenting was smart.
I still believe there’s a case to be made for an ID system of some kind, based on the potential benefits to public services, if the technical hurdles can be overcome – or at least mitigated. We need ministers (or officials?) to accept there’s a massive engagement task here, probably the biggest currently on the government agenda; and to embark on a slow, sustained process to demonstrate that all the issues are being taken seriously, and that individual citizens will see real, direct, personal benefits as a result of it. And to accept that the public’s answer may still be ‘no’.
I’m not sure this site has done a lot to advance the cause.

6 thoughts on “ID card debate hijacked”

  1. I still don’t feel anyone has made a satisfactory case for ID cards. I hadn’t seen that website (but then I am over 25!).
    Given the problems with benefit fraud I can see half a case, but it strikes me as a huge investment in time, money and coercion for very little definite value.
    And I can’t help feeling that there’s an ulterior motive behind ID cards.

  2. Even if there’s a case to be made for ID cards, which I don’t think there is, the fact that we still live in a time where a government minister (David Miliband in this case) can make a comment such as “no-one can legislate against people leaving laptops in cars” (when the point is that such data should not be allowed to be in a persistent state on computers that are not physically tied down), and where personal data can go missing on such a large scale, just shows the ineptitude of governmental data processing and protection systems. On that basis alone, even if there’s some theoretical place for the state as keeper of that state’s citizens’ identities, such a scheme cannot and won’t go through any time in the next twenty years, and my guess is that such a scheme would in fact be unthinkable by that point.

  3. And really, it’s such a New Labour response to actually call young people (who aren’t stupid) voicing their opinions ‘undesirable’, and completely misses the point of a modern, engaging, listening website. Would you have preferred some kind of vapid PR exercise, with young people smiling and waving their ID cards as if they were in a mobile network advert? The fact remains that when the government faces a robust counter-argument on the subject of ID cards, they just don’t speak in a manner a lot of people find credible. Will people really become compliant if the technical hurdles are “at least mitigated”?
    And a public website gathering data on ethnicity, as if that’s anything to do with anything, is much more shameful than “not smart”.

  4. >”ID card debate hijacked”
    >but unfortunately, a large chunk of its traffic is using the site to actually >organise an anti-ID Card campaign.
    It sounds to me as if that *is* the debate, and that the “hijack” is to try and just implement it for certain groups (young people, foreigners) as a way of avoiding the debate – since ID cards implemented in the proposed way do not have public support.
    >We need ministers (or officials?) to accept there’s a massive engagement task here, probably the biggest currently on the government agenda;
    Certainly, but the problem is that I see no intention to actually listen to the public. As with 28 days, 42 days etc. the most likely thing is that “engagement”, “different approaches”, “we have listened and altered our approach” are simply presentational wrapping around the same proposal.
    That won’t wash.
    >and to embark on a slow, sustained process to demonstrate that all the issues are being taken seriously, and that individual citizens will see real, direct, personal benefits as a result of it.
    Frankly, I’d rather not have the benefits and lose the ID cards. From February:
    http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/2008/02/27/id-and-dna-id-rather-keep-my-freedom-and-be-mugged-more-often/
    >And to accept that the public’s answer may still be ‘no’.
    I will take some convincing that that is on the agenda. It’s a classic presentational tactic to ask “how should we implement this” – which is what the site does – rather than the rather more important “do you want us to do this”. People are attmpting to give the right answers despite being asked the wrong questions.
    We had a similar experience with a consultation in Nottinghamshire wrt Polyclinics 2 weeks ago, when the consultation document started with:
    “we want to know how you want is to improve Health Services”
    and suddenly switched to
    “The Government has decided that we are going to have one GP-lead Health Centre per Area”.
    A non-consultation consultation.
    My analysis here: http://tinyurl.com/5jerb6
    Rgds
    Matt Wardman

  5. @Douglas I don’t actually disagree with your points, mate. If I had to put my money down, I’d bet that it won’t happen. And I hope you appreciate, although I’m not sure you did… my choice of language was deliberately diplomatic.
    On Matt’s (as always, very solid) point: there have been examples where consultation has resulted in a dead stop. But there have been too many examples where the overwhelming response has been against, but it hasn’t stopped something going through.
    We’re putting a lot of money and effort into consultation… but I’m really not sure we know what we’re actually trying to achieve.

  6. @Simon: I appreciate it now – didn’t quite so much then, as I suppose I wasn’t sure where you were coming from! Thanks for your graceful treatment of my comments.
    I suppose what I was most objecting to in the post was the sense that you were suggesting that the site was only a mistake because of the reaction it got. Maybe, again, this wasn’t a meaning that you were intending. Matt summed up my feelings pretty well. Some of my family members are caught up in campaigns against the third runway at Heathrow (they live under the flight path) – they’re not usually the types to be politically agitated, but what has principally exercised them has been the nature of the consultation exercise. Famously, the consultation document asks a million and one different questions predicated on “If a third runway were built…”, but never gives people the chance to say they don’t agree with a third runway in the first place. Ministers, when challenged, say that they are already in favour of the third runway in principle, and so based the questionnaire from that presumption, yet officially, still, (that phrase again) “no decision has been made”.
    The answer has to be, of course, that if consultations can be held to have any value at all (and surely unpartisan consultations can), then they have to come before policy is formulated. Otherwise consultation will just be meaningless theatre to give an illusion of democracy a posteriori.
    Of course, it helps if the government can robustly argue their case in an open forum. Recently the M74 extension in Glasgow was approved after environmental groups dropped their objections to the project. People realise they aren’t going to win every battle. But when the government offers a pretence of a platform to people who know full well that their justified concerns are not genuinely going to be listened to because, although “no decision has been taken”, the decision has already been agreed “in principle”, that breeds abject disaffection and alienation from the political process.

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