Nosemonkey's EUtopia

As feared, it would appear that two of the foreign criminals released without being considered for deportation thanks to Home Office blunders have gone on to face rape charges, with three others also found to have reoffended – ranging from dabbling with drugs to inflicting bodily harm. Meanwhile, 63 of the 79 high-risk ex-cons remain unaccounted for.

How is Charles Clarke’s position tenable? Sod that – how is the Home Office’s position tenable? And what does it say for our justice system that apparently dangerous criminals are being released into the community, despite being classified as “high risk”, and not being kept tabs on – even after high-profile murders committed by violent criminals who have been released early?

What happened to “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”? Yes, introducing a Supreme Court is a nice idea, and greater co-operation between crimefighting agencies and police forces could help. But why, after nine years in government, hasn’t Labour actually managed to sort this out?

They’ve been quite happy to scrap other government departments – perhaps it’s time to rethink the very existence of the Home Office and position of Home Secretary, and create a series of more focussed ministerial briefs without one person having to cope with all the myriad duties and responsibilities that being Home Secretary entails. Because considering that this latest scandal has been going on unnoticed and unfixed for seven years already, it would appear that the current system at the heart of government – let alone the machinery designed to keep our streets safe – is simply unable to cope.

Plus, as doubtless pointed out elsewhere, none of the current new governmental surveillance plans – ID cards and the like – would be of any use in this situation at all. Not only are these people foreign nationals, some doubtless here illegally anyway, and so would not be on the National Identity Register, but they’ve also simply dropped off the government’s radar seemingly as soon as they’d stepped out of the prison gates.

ID cards will be fine to track the law-abiding Mr and Mrs Boggins, but this is yet more proof that it is precisely the hardened, dangerous criminals that those pieces of plastic and the all-knowing database are supposedly designed to protect us from who will fail to be monitored once it’s introduced. Because if the government can’t keep tabs on a thousand odd convicted criminals, how the hell can they be expected to keep tabs on nearly sixty million of us?

(And, of course, this is before you even begin to consider the other ramifications of getting scared about people who have apparently all perfectly legally been released from prison having served their time…)

Police in “demanding more powers and interfering in public policy” shocker! Yep, “senior police officers” are reading from the government’s ID card script and spreading yet more stories of identity theft, passport forgery and whathaveyou. (And please note how carefully I’m avoiding the phrase “police state”. Oh… Damn…)

Because, you see, having got the ID cards bill through parliament, there’s still the database to sell. And, starting with a few friendly anonymous police officers mouthing off to the press to make it look like it isn’t just Whitehall that’s after this thing, they’re going to sell it like this:

1) Passports are easy to forge, even after the introduction of watermarking, lamination and machine-readable documents – all designed to make this more difficult
2) Credit cards are also easy to forge, despite electronic security measures
3) The placebo of chip’n’pin, hooking credit/debit cards to some kind of centralised registration computer, makes people feel safer and can help cut down on fraud
4) Therefore a centralised identity register will act as a handy placebo when ID cards inevitably start being forged

Although, naturally, they won’t use the word “placebo”… (In my case, chip’n’pin’s not even that – I’ve gone from entering my pin number once every 2-3 days, always at sheltered cash points where I can check if anyone’s looking over my shoulder, to entering it at least once a day, usually in crowded shops with no kind of screen to help me shield my number from anyone who happens to be watching – all they then need do is jump me outside, nab the card, nip round the corner to a cash point and empty my account. Which may be why Blair apparently wants us all to have to use ID cards when making withdrawals of £200 or more… Chip’n’pin has actually made electronic theft/fraud even easier.)

Of course, quite why identity theft will be cut back on when all criminals need to do is forge one single form of ID – where currently to achieve anything significant they’d have to forge a passport, bills and sometimes bank records, involving far more effort – has yet to be answered.

But I’m being cynical. Once the Hal 9000 of the National Identity Register is up and running, nothing can possibly go wrong… Labour are already starting to sound like Hal – and not just when it comes to assurances of the ID system’s reliability:

“The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.””‘I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that… This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”

“Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?”

“Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.”

“I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you. Or else the terrorists will win you’ll let the Tories in by the back door you risk letting the BNP into power…”

(I may have made up that final sentence…)