This morning, there was more bad news for the Home Office: Hundreds of inmates have escaped from open prisons. Shouldn’t the Home Office now consider a change of name? How about “The Lights Are On But Nobody’s Home Office”?

And the ever-excellent Charlie Stross weighs in with a third blog post on the insuperable problems with National ID cards. Charlie is an SF writer and IT expert (his day job used to be writing for the IT press) and this and his other posts on the ID card fiasco lays it all bare. His current work-in-progress is a novel set in the Britain of 2016, and concentrates on the ID card mess. So he has done some research on the subject. Read his posts on the subject and despair:

It is, in fact, the biggest fiasco since the Poll Tax.
… All because of the quid pro quo the French government demanded in return for closing the Sangatte refugee camp (i.e. that the UK adopt an ID card), and Tony Blair’s Americanophilia (which caused him to demand that the British ID card follow the example of the US REAL ID Act and use biometric authentication), and the gravy-train instincts of the usual government IT project contractors.