2003-01-13»
slashdotting the vote, part 2»The STAND campaign is beginning to be picked up by the media. We’ve swung the vote from 2:1 support to nearly 2:1 against in four days.
I’m interested in seeing how the government replies to this. Officially, the consultation is just that, a consultation. The Home Office civil servants are still very insistent that there are no official government proposals on ID cards yet.
That position, unfortunately, was belied by Lord Falconer’s (and Downing Street’s) own press release in December that said:
Public support is growing for the government’s proposals on entitlement cards. The response so far to a public consultation on the scheme shows a two-to-one split in favour of the plans.
… which, really, is why STAND got involved. Public consultations aren’t referenda; but if you want to puff them up as such, you do have to live and die by the numbers. There’s no groundswell of support for ID cards, and the government knows it. There might be, if they actually engaged the public in a discussion. But that’s hard, and central government really have less experience in doing that than you’d hope. They’re also, admittedly, often not in the best place to do so. Who ever trusts a government document? The ID card doc tried very very hard to be an impartial, depoliticised document, and it fell over for two reasons. Firstly, and most crassly, because Falconer decided to politicise it. And secondly, and more subtly, because one of the interested parties in creating an ID card is the civil servants themselves. With all the objectivity in the world, that interest leaked through every page of the consultation doc.
In other news, Alan Mather, who works for the e-envoy (Britain’s Minister for The Bleepy Things), has spotted STAND for the first time. “I didn’t come across them during the RIP hoo-ha.”, he says, which is funny, because I’m pretty sure we started it. Hi, Alan!