UK ID Cards DOA?

Regular/long-suffering readers will know that I am an implacable foe of the UK Government's scheme to make everyone in the country carry ID cards. As well as being a huge waste of money (all £19 billion of it), they will inevitably make us less secure (just ask Bruce Schneier).

So I was delighted to come across this fantastic scoop by The Sunday Times, which suggests that the scheme is much closer to collapse than even I might have hoped. This is based on some killer emails that were leaked to the newspaper by senior civil servants involved in the doomed project.

A sample of their candid views:

This has all the inauspicious signs of a project continuing to be driven by an arbitrary end date rather than reality.

...

I conclude that we are setting ourselves up to fail.

...

Just because ministers say do something does not mean we ignore reality - which is what seems to have happened on ID Card

And don't miss John Lettice's usual lucid analysis of what all this really means.