As if the census, all UK citizens having a unique National Insurance number & an NHS number also, and the existence of the passport system, cannot be used as a means to identify people.

Someone should remind the database people what a primary key is, cause the National Insurance number is meant to be just that.

Oh and - yeah, sure, it's not possible to fake a biometric ID at all. The very idea was obsolete as a good way of identifying problems, before it was even hinted at being introduced.

I know what I'd be doing - if I were in certain lines of 'work' and anything like the ID card system was being introduced, and that's ensuring I had plenty of my people working on the system, designing it and with access to the datacenters, if not having bid successfully for the private sector contract for creating the whole thing. Duh, how do they think these 'hi-tech solutions' are compromised.

Somebody needs to leak the private data of a few thousand bureaucrats. No wait! Make that 25 million Eurocrats. Nothing important you know. Just their names, job titles, pay, home/work/cell numbers etc. 

In fact, you could make it an Open Source project. Be sure to assign each bureaucrat a unique ID number that can never be changed. Then use that to track them from job to job, and document each important decision and screwup they've made.

Here in the U.S. we could call it the O'Really ID.

given that we are the most spied-upon nation in the world - is this really necessary?

i feel i am living in a dictatorship - the only 'democratic' element is the election, after that they do what they like! hedonists....

emmigration is the answer - but where to?

I bet that to better scrutinize security they'll send everybody in parliament and the house of lords a few dvd's with the data of everybody in Britain, by mail, just to review things you know.
Perhaps to illustrate the dangers they can ask the banks to put people's CC information on those DVD's too, linked to the names, to show how handy collecting and cross-referencing data is.