QUENTIN LETTS: A 'People's Panel' to decide on digital ID cards? That's just stooges and trusties so ministers can get the result they want
Who needs a House of Commons? Downing Street, again hoping to impose ID cards on an ungrateful nation, had a better idea. Public consultation would be delegated to a 'people's panel' of 100 citizens who would be selected by... the Government!
Cabinet minister Darren Jones shimmered in at lunchtime to announce this remarkable idea. He was, as ever, delighted with himself. Mr Jones is that one who looks like the late actor Richard Wattis. He is one of the few clever dialecticians in the current regime, and boy he knows it.
Drollery quivered at his lips. Needing no notes, he placed his soft fingers atop the despatch box and twiddled them as he batted back MPs' questions.
Cold rebuttal was disguised amid smirking assurances and bland evasions and an elaborate politeness. Mr Jones is the nearest thing the Starmerites have to a Gove.
Tony Blair's lot tried to introduce ID cards and failed. Last autumn, when Andy Burnham was winning too much publicity, No 10 announced compulsory digital IDs. That happened just before the Labour conference and Mr Burnham's challenge to Sir Keir was duly upstaged.
Labour MPs later gave the policy a thumbs-down and the idea appeared to have been shelved. Now it has been revived. ID cards are the idea that will not die.
Mr Jones breezed through a sales routine familiar to anyone who has followed this argument over the years. He ached for modernisation. Digital IDs would save billions of pounds. They would become a 'front door' to public services, making public services obtainable at the press of a mobile-telephone button.
Technical support aces would be on hand to assist oldies, technophobes and simpletons who became confused. To show how wonderful a system it was going to be, Mr Jones explained it would be built from scratch by our crack-troop civil servants. Uh-oh.
Digital ID will first be used to carry out digital right-to-work checks, but ministers envision this expanding to include things like childcare, tax, national insurance and even registering a marriage
As he ironed his case you could almost hear a surge of violins and a chorus of hallelujahs from the nation's smudge-faced indigents. Thank you, Bwana Jones, for bringing us to Utopia's palm-fringed shore. The spiel was as idealised as one of those architectural drawings in which a brutalist car park has its edges softened by squiggly, pencil-drawn trees.
Amid it all was this revolting idea of the 'people's panel'. Mr Jones murmured that he was aware the policy had 'sparked significant public interest' (translation: is about as popular as shingles). He was thus preparing a 'national conversation' with the public. It would involve a 'deliberative democracy process' in which a 'citizens' assembly' of 100 souls would meet officials and be instructed about the manifold glories of digital IDs. This panel would 'form a legal part of the consultation'.
Sir Desmond Swayne (Con, New Forest W) yelped, 'that's my job!' What Sir Desmond meant was that the whole point of the Commons is to be a people's panel – and one that is democratically chosen, at that. Mr Jones's alternative outfit would be 'stooges and trusties selected by the minister'. Mr Jones beamed.
Vikki Slade (Lib Dem, Mid Dorset) wondered what would happen if this new people's panel concluded that digital ID cards were a terrible idea. Mr Jones, super-oily: 'I'm so confident that we'll get that panel to a place where they recognise it's a perfectly sensible thing to do that I think it will be a useful process.'
There you have it. This will be a useful process because I know I can fix the dullards.
MPs lined up to say that their constituents hated the ID cards idea. Jim Shannon (DUP Strangford) even invoked the Book of Revelation and the Sign of the Beast. Mr Jones was unfazed. He had worked out how to bypass our parliament.
Nor is he alone. The home affairs committee has said it will use a similar citizen's assembly to help it work out what the public thinks of immigration. Vetted participants will be paid to come to the right views. Sorry, to take part.
Filter, tame, dilute: Labour's answer to the filthy populus.
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