Chance to earn Brownie points

While he trundles about the country, trying to win over voters before grasping Tony Blair's tarnished crown, he should announce that he plans to drop ID cards.

The projected costs of these cards are spiralling by the week, or maybe even the day. So the Prime-Minister-in-waiting could win himself what we can fairly call Brownie points by ditching the preposterous scheme in favour of respecting citizens' rights and privacy.

At a stroke of his well-chewed Biro - he looks like a man who chews Biros, and I write as one who should know - Gordon could save money and gain face. Opposition to the cards is to be found at both ends of the political spectrum, so by dropping them, he could gain prestige on the left and the right.

He would be disposing of one Blairite obsession too far, a scheme which, as part of the National Identity Register, would allow the Government to keep track of everyone by accumulating and cross-checking enormous banks of personal data.

Do we really want our lives to be turned into "registrable facts", to dip into the unlovely jargon, that have to be constantly updated so that the Government knows everything about us?

The row over ID cards flares up occasionally, only to die down again, usually when people sigh, shrug and say asinine things such as: "I've done nothing wrong, so what have I got to fear?"

Without wishing to succumb to too much paranoia, perhaps what such people have to fear is the Government knowing too much about them. It is true that most of this information is recorded somewhere, but the Government apparently wants to put everything it knows about us on one enormous database. Isn't that even a little bit scary?

The proposed reasons for ID cards usually include fighting terrorism, tackling illegal immigration, fighting benefit fraud and identity fraud. Yet there is no proof the cards will do anything at all in any of these areas. So it seems wasteful to invest so many dizzying millions on the questionable things.

Every precedent suggests that a big Government IT project may well not be a good idea, not least because in all likelihood the computers won't turn on without crashing.

Besides, whatever happened to good old British reserve, to people only knowing what they need to know about us, and nothing more?

There are other, less concrete considerations, too. Identity is an interesting area of self-study, embracing such notions as "who am I?" and "what makes me who I am?" Are we what we wear or what we eat; what we watch or what we read; what we think or prefer not to think; what we do or don't get round to doing?

Identity could be said, simply put, to be who we are - but do we ever really know who we are? Perhaps identity lies in the armour we put on, the clothes we wear, the remarks we make, in order to get out of the door in the morning and face the world? Maybe true identity is the small naked self we keep hidden, except that increasingly no one keeps anything hidden these days.

Pardon me, I seem to have lapsed into philosophy of sorts - a basic, rough-and-ready, spur-of-the-moment sort. But I like this accidental direction. Identity cards are worthless for many reasons, not least because who is to say what our identity is in the first place? So if identity is hard to pin-down, what's the point of putting it on a hi-tech card?

So go on, Gordon. Be bold and be penny-pinching. Do yourself and us a favour by abandoning these intrusive and unnecessary cards.

DAVID Cameron, the Tory leader, has spent two days living with an Asian family, an experience which has allowed him to waffle on about the need for different communities to accept each other.

Which is fair enough and he'll not have an argument from me about that.

But it is still hard to accept the high-profile habit politicians occasionally have of doing something for a day or two - living off the dole was an old Tory favourite - and then rushing to their own conclusions.

The word lurking somewhere in the background might just be "opportunism".