Matt Buck's Hack Cartoons

The Shadow Home Secretary and Conservative MP, David Davis, has resigned from his seat in the House of Commons. He says he has done this to highlight attacks on the personal liberties of the British people by government legislation. To me, it appears many of his public concerns lie in and around information technology, its commercial and governmental uses and misuses. This is a subject about which parliament is notoriously badly informed. Privately, his reasons may well also be connected to internal strains in the Conservative party.
Having said this, I think it is interesting and laudable that any politician would choose to make a statement and take an action like this on an issue which is so difficult to explain clearly and well. You might also wonder how much of an influence the idea of the man-in-the-white-suit and Hamilton sleaze-buster of years gone by, Martin Bell, has also been on Mr Davis' chosen tactics.


Matt Buck’s animated drawings

The government has announced one of its periodic relaunches of the National Identity card scheme. I would urge anyone who is interested in this debate to visit NO2ID's website to learn more about what this scheme actually involves for you. The drawing above is a take-off of John Tenniel’s original image. Tenniel famously illustrated Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books. (Every cartoonist has to have a go at this image, it's in the rules somewhere...)

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

A short nugget of information from Mr Chicken Yogurt which relates to the cartoon below. This image was drawn for No2id.



When you visit the link, you will discover a story from The Independent, about record-keeping and its problems. It is the simple observation that humans are not very good at keeping them. Then let yourself think about the scale of the task which the government is setting for itself in recording intimate details for all of us who live and move in and out of the UK. Remember too, the problems the government had when attempting to record a single simple fact, exactly who lived where, for the Community Charge (or Poll Tax.) Then see the record keeping disaster which is heading our way if the ID card project goes ahead. And bad records mean legal and administrative mistakes about you and me.

In among all the excitement yesterday, the government chose to release a long-delayed set of figures on the start-up costs for ID cards. There has been a fair bit of coverage of this, which is great because the figures are hair-raising - and these costs do not include little delights like the millions and millions of scanners which will be required acoss the country to make the system 'function.' The Home Office eestimates carefully 'divides' the project costs down into seperate areas, claims them as unrelated and in this way disperses the bill.

You can download the Home Office's artful report here - or get a fisking of it here.