theguardian, working with No2ID, have carried out an excellent investigation into the new “more secure” biometric passports, of which three million are already in circulation. These passports contain information on RFID chips – entirely unnecessary for a valid passport – from which a hacker can extract your biometric information, making it possible to clone the information into a forged passport. So much for security.

Compare the reactions. Nick Clegg:

“Three million people now have passports that expose them to a greater risk of identity fraud than before. We need an urgent redesign of the biometric passport and a recall of all insecure passports once a new protected design is available. In the interim the government should provide commercially available RFID-shields for passports to those with the insecure design.”

The Home Office:

“This doesn’t matter.”

And these people want us to trust them with our biometric data on a giant national database.

While we’re talking about civil liberties, here’s an excellent quote about 90-day internment from today’s Telegraph via Radio 4’s newspaper review:

Habeas corpus is a fundamental part of the British constitution. The liberty of subjects must not be subordinated to the preferences of a prime minister, however trustworthy, or to the convenience of police forces. Mr Blair sometimes acts as if being locked in a cell for 13 weeks was equivalent to waiting for holiday snaps to come back from the developer.

Roll up! Roll up! British identity for sale! Get ‘em while they’re hot!

I am selling/leasing my British identity to the highest bidder. Unfortunately, the buyer will only own it for a limited period of time (probably will expire sometime after 2008) as the UK government will be nationalising it at that point and placing all details of the said identity onto a national database, for which privilege the owner will have to pay an exhorbitant fee.

Half of all proceeds from the sale will go to www.No2ID.net, the remainder will be used to get a new identity

Best before 2008.

(You can use eBay’s “Watch this item” functionality to see how much it goes for.)

J’accuse: the Labour Party, with the smoking bill, in the House of Commons.

The Salisbury Convention, initiated by Lord Salisbury, is the arrangement that dictates that the House of Lords will not vote down or wreck with amendments measures that appeared in the Government’s manifesto. It dates back to a time when the big Tory majority in the House of Lords – thanks to the hereditary peers – meant they could, theoretically, block the Government’s programme.

The convention has become increasingly disregarded, for good reason. While Labour insist the Lords should stick to it, they have themselves failed to follow through on their promises to make the second chamber more democratic. The Tories and LibDems in the upper house therefore argue that the chamber as it exists now is how the Labour party chose to leave it, with the in-built Tory majority of the past long gone. They also argue that, thanks to the continued use of first-past-the-post in general elections, the party make-up of the House of Lords actually better reflects the views of the public at large than the undeserved majority achieved by Labour in the House of Commons.

In today’s theguardian, Baroness Scotland is quote as insisting the Lords should leave the ID cards bill alone:

“We went to the electorate and said, we want identity cards and it will be a compulsory scheme in the long term.”

Lord Phillips, for the LibDems, points out the exact wording of the Labour manifesto:

We will introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports.

His position is that this should mean that people renewing their passports could opt to join the voluntary scheme, not be forced into it, as the Government wishes. Semantics aside, the wording of Labour’s manifesto is redundant, and it is their own doing, because on page 66, it said:

We will legislate to ensure that all enclosed public places and workplaces other than licensed premises will be smoke-free. The legislation will ensure that all restaurants will be smoke-free; all pubs and bars preparing and serving food will be smoke-free; and other pubs and bars will be free to choose whether to allow smoking or to be smoke-free. In membership clubs the members will be free to choose whether to allow smoking or to be smoke-free. However, whatever the general status, to protect employees, smoking in the bar area will be prohibited everywhere.

Having made this promise, in the manifesto on which all Labour MPs were elected, the Government then allowed their MPs a free vote and the exemptions for bars and membership clubs were removed.

Why is it OK for Labour MPs to ignore one section of the manifesto, while peers (who were not elected on it) are expected to fall in line with another?

theguardian reports that Passport cost rises by 21% to pay for security checks. Now, if I was very cynical, I’d think the Home Office were going to ramp up the cost of passports each year so that when it finally comes the time officially to include ID cards with them, that final leap in price turns out to be much less than anticipated.

But, as I say, that would be very cynical.

…from Lord Mackenzie, on ID cards:

He told BBC News: “Let’s look at the Soham murders. If Ian Huntley had had an identity card, would he have got the job at Soham school which allowed him to commit the murders? I think not.”

Erm, I think so, your lordship. Huntley didn’t disguise his identity to get the job so where would an ID card confirming that help? (Ignoring the too-often-forgotten fact that he didn’t work at the school attended by his victims.) The problems highlighted by the Bichard Inquiry related failures in the way Humberside and Cambridgeshire police forces recorded intelligence information, and how that weakened criminal records checking, an entirely separate issue from ID cards. A shameful attempt to use an emotive crime to distort a controversial issue.