Just after the general election, a certain T.Blair said ‘he would listen to what the electorate are saying’. Puzzling then that there is such a committment to ID cards.

But will they even take off? Increasingly, the opposition to ID cards is becoming more focused, more organised and more vocal as this story in today’s Observer from the Unison annual conference shows.

From an e-government perspective, there is a great demand for persistent unique indentifiers for CRM systems, integrated data and so on. However, if the government continues to confabulate ID cards with persistent identifiers it will take even longer for this issue to be resolved.

Unfortunately they have politicised this in a way that will make it harder to achieve unique identifiers in technical systems. While most people probably will not object to having a single identifier to interact with the public sector (local authority, health, inland revenue etc) - there is a difference between this and having to carry an ID card …and having to pay for that ID card.