Keeping an Eye on Johnny Foreigner

A couple of weeks ago, the Government's imaginative brilliance and administrative efficiency were admirably showcased in a leaked series of emails by civil servants. "This has all the inauspicious signs of a project continuing to be driven by an arbitrary end date, rather than reality," one of them noted. He was referring, of course, to New Labour's Surveillance Makes You Free project, the biometric identity cards and assorted national databases which will serve to make the future as clean, fragrant and virtuous as the Vicar of Downing Street's very own conscience.

A spokesbeing for the Home Office said at the time that the Government was considering an "early variant" on ID cards, in order to hustle this particular white elephant into everyone's way by the scheduled date of 2008. Meanwhile the Home Secretary, John Reid, has swung into action with both feet forward, and the squelchy echoes of the resulting pratfall may delight our ears for some time to come.

Besides the introduction (along with the usual suspects such as tougher penalties, special envoys and lots more cash) of private thugs for midnight calls on suspected non-deportees and the famous uniforms, Reid's plans for the immigration service include "forcing foreigners from high-risk countries to have biometric identity cards by 2008" and "requiring all non-European nationals to have identity numbers before they can travel to the UK". If it doesn't work for Britain, test it on the animals.

The war on asylum-seeking terrorists who use our health service is a just war and a clean one. Everyone who travels into or out of the country is to be counted all out and counted all back, just like our boys in the Falklands. Identity cards for high-risk foreigners, being absolutely non-susceptible of forgery, fraud or Home Office unfitness-for-purpose, will facilitate this enormously. "We will extend exit controls in stages based on risk, identify who overstays and count everyone in and out, while avoiding delays to travellers, by 2014," Reid intoned. Let's hope the risk is considerate enough to be predictable and easily defined for the next eight years, so that these introductory stages are not unduly complicated. Still, it's a comforting thought that, by 2014, delays to travellers may be thought of as something to avoid.