Press if full of stories about ID cards. The FT in particular (well, I say this as it’s the paper I usually read) has excelled itself - the last few days there have been articles, leaders, opinions. All of it coming out against ID cards. The major unions are against them.

The Information Commissioner has questioned the whole way it’s being approached, particularly the idea of asking people for all the addresses they have ever lived at.

One reason I don’t like them (and there are many others) is that it makes it harder for people to leave a dodgy past behind and re-invent themselves. This would be one of those things that many advocates of ID cards would find difficult to understand - but the point is, many people (as Jarvis Cocker once put it) have ‘watched their life slip out of view’.

Then they make huge efforts (often with little resources or support) and sort it out. And then they want to leave all the bad experiences behind. Can they do that knowing that all their previous misdemenours are held by the state? These might not be big issues, but they can equally drag people down and backwards.

The FT opinion writers are saying they can’t find one positive reason for ID cards. And neither can I. What’s more, I can’t understand why Blair wants them so badly. They don’t make any economic sense, they will probably have very neglible impact on fighting crime and they will not reduce terrorism. My conclusion is that it must be an extension of the weird pyschological control freakery of the Blairites that they can’t stand the thought of not knowing exactly what everyone in the country might be up to.

Or maybe they just want that £100.00 out of all of us? (If it is £100.00).

And for anyone interested of the possibility of ID cards becoming an organisational point of focus of discontent, look no futher than what the impact of trying to introduce ID cards is having in Japan…(you’ll need to get hold of today’s FT - check out the story on the back page..)