Identity Management: Appropriate Utilisation, Effective Maximisation

The Prince in Waiting, Gordon Brown, has come up with a wonderful new way to drive down the cost of New Labour's solve-everything surveillance project: he's going to sell the databases to high-street businesses. This means that police could be alerted instantly and utterly when a wanted person (or, for that matter, anyone who was disliked for any reason by anyone with access to the data) used a cash machine or a supermarket loyalty card - all in the name of crime prevention, of course.

"There is going to be a key issue over the next 10 to 15 years about identity management right across the public and private sectors," said a spokesbeing for the Prince. Identity management: what a charming phrase. "It's about people coming to accept that this is not only a necessary but desirable part of modern society over the next 10 years"; as with so many New Labour innovations, the commodification of our retinas, fingerprints and genetic inheritance is not only inevitable but will actually do us good. If we would only stop trying to interfere with management decisions, and start to realise what a crime-free, respectful, humanitarian-interventional, profitable society is being constructed for us, everything would be wonderful. "What [the Tories] are objecting to in the political sphere is going to be absolutely commonplace in the private sphere and saying 'it's not the British way' is just not going to work." Apparently the Tories are the only opponents of the Surveillance Makes You Free scheme whose opinion is worth answering.

Still, "Brown believes that, if myriad private databases develop, there is a risk that information will leak or be stolen." Now, there's a thought. Brown has set up a task force to look into the problem. As one would expect, given the qualifications and experience required, the task force will be led by a banker and will "examine the evolving technologies used for identity management and consider how public and private sectors can work together to maximise efficiency and effectiveness" and will "be a key part of the identity management architecture across government" and will "build on work underway across Whitehall". And we all know how well Whitehall has handled the matter so far.