Stella Rimington, the Judi Dench of the twilight world, has acted as a conduit for intel's view on ID cards. They will not work.
Asked at a further education conference whether she thought ID cards would
make the country safer, Dame Stella Rimington replied: "No is the very simple
answer, although ID cards have possibly some purpose.
"But I don't think anybody in the intelligence services - not in my former
service - will be pressing for ID cards."
On the same day, Sir Ian Blair gave the Dimblebore Lecture, trying to disguise his support for a single police force a la NuLab, behind honeyed words of opening debate and acquiring responsibility.
First, we want a single police service, not a multiplicity of them. By, that
I do not necessarily mean a single national police force but one holistic
service to cover the whole of the mission.
Despite calling for a debate which involved the public, Blair betrayed his liberal-left roots, praising the welfare state (namechecking Beveridge) and decrying local constabularies as islands of lower middle class conservatism. He painted a bleak picture of high crime, violence and anti-social behaviour that required the police to act as the moral arbiters of society, All as part of the debate. The conclusion boils down to "We have lost your respect, That is your fault and you must do something about it by having a debate led by us."
Sir Ian Blair's support for Labour's policies of a national police force, obscured by totems of accountability and transparency, ran through this speech. Perhaps he genuinely welcomes a debate, but only if the conclusions are correct. The invocation of the 7th July as 'the event' around which all police work should be organised was another hint at the paramilitary policing which would provide moral comfort to state defined communities. ID cards never got a look-in just to avoid the appearance of bias.
You see, the British never really got to grips with policing because the lack of a written constitution demonstrates our lack of forethought in these and, no doubt, so many other matters:
And here I come to the second question, which is 'who is to decide?' and I
return to my story about running back that far.
Despite my whole professional lifetime in policing, I believe it should be
you, not me, who decides what kind of police we want. I'll return to the third
question - about how - later on.
For nearly two centuries, the British have not considered any of these
questions very thoroughly. That is fairly typical.
We are one of the few countries in the world without a written constitution.
We have none of the exact distinctions between the executive and the
legislature of the United States or between the roles of central and local
government in France; we operate through gradual compromise and evolution.
But, even in that context, the police have a disadvantage.
We have been a service which has always been separate and silent, which
successive governments - until recently - and all of you, your parents and your
grandparents, have broadly left alone to get on with the job that you have given
it.
Two answers: remove gun control and elect chief constables for each county or borough. Easy, isn't it!