Thus sang the wonderful Poly Styrene from the fast and furious punk band, X-Ray Spex (The Day the World Turned Day-glo was, and remains, one of my favourite ever 45’s).

So what can it have to do with the Home Office? Well according to their website http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/about-us/purpose-and-aims/

one of the seven objectives of this government department is to

safeguard people’s identity and the privileges of citizenship

When did this happen? How can the state imagine that it has the ability, or the right to safeguard our ‘identity’. What happens if the state’s version of identity clashes with our vision of identity? Or we get a more malign state?

I keep thinking about the presentation last week at the conference on Identity Management where a well known (in e-govt circles) civil servant kept going on about ‘trust’. He must have mentioned it at least a dozen times. It’s part of the Blairism of public life; shout loud enough and you can imagine everyone will eventually agree. But no. I don’t trust the civil service; I don’t trust that particular civil servant. I don’t trust politicians. I suspect most people don’t.

I don’t see how my ‘identity’ has anything to do with the Home Office as an institution, or the individuals that work there. This is a a real fundamental shift in a whole set of values about democracy, and more fundamentally about our rights. Where is the right of the individual to opt out of the Home Office intertwining their weird policies with our identity, which surely goes to the core of who and what we are.

There’s an old adage about trust needing to be earned. We should all return to that as a starting point. And we should all have the right to keep our identity private, and out of the hands of the state and it’s - to be honest - often untrustworthy servants and hangers on.