MP and ID

A week and a half ago I made use of WriteToThem.com to contact my MP, Ed Vaizey regarding my opposition to the government's identity card legislation currently going through parliament. To sum up: it's too expensive; the technology is not reliable enough; given the past record of large, public IT projects it will be massively over budget, very late and fail to deliver core functionality; it won't have any significant effect on benefits fraud, terrorism, etc. (in fact, it may make life easier for terrorists and organised criminals, who now have only one document to forge or otherwise work around), and there are massive civil liberties concerns. Vaizey already opposes the ID card bill on similar grounds, but I figured it was worth giving him some support in this.

I was pleased to receive a short email from Mr. Vaizey the next day, pledging to continue to oppose the bill and drawing my attention to a letter (which he had written) on the subject in that week's local paper.

I was even more pleased when Saturday's post brought me a proper letter, thanking me for my thoughts, talking about his position on ID cards and enclosing a copy of Hansard for the day of the ID Card Bill's second reading debate. Not bad.

Bastards

I was in a meeting in Cambridge yesterday when I heard. We had travelled by train, via London, to the meeting, so there was no chance of returning home by the same route. However, as is usual in such situations, people pull together and sort things out -- another group at the meeting had come by minibus and had enough spaces to give our group a lift for most of the distance. Many others were not so lucky. I am still awaiting news of a colleague who left the meeting early, and would have been due to reach London shortly after the explosions. His journey was probably not a good one.