GUEST POST Like a challenging computer game? Try the Government Digital Service

Mark Valentine tried hard to prove his identity, and the Government Digital Service tried hard to prevent him.

The other day I had to do business with the Government Digital Service (GDS). This is one of those jolly three-word English phrases that make the heart sink, like Family Fun Day, Rail Replacement Service, Celebrity Game Show and Andrew Lloyd Webber. I suspect I don’t need to issue a spoiler alert to tell you that the weakest spot, in a weak line-up, was in the word “service”. There isn’t any. 

This claims to be a “beta” service. Apparently, this is IT speak for “here’s something we put together from four tin cans, a roll of wire and a clapped-out mellotron from the Moody Blues’ last album, now let’s try it out on the suckers”. But the GDS are being unduly modest. Actually, what they are offering is an “omega” service. It is the end of all things, particularly hope.

Neither worked. Repeatedly

To use their identity verification service, you have to try two things. One involves them taking control of your phone to photograph your passport. The other involves giving the government your bank account details. Despite certain misgivings, I tried both. Neither worked. Repeatedly. Nor did it work for several other people who tried it. Repeatedly.

But not to worry, there is a telephone support service. The icy voice of a woman who made Servalan sound like everyone’s favourite Auntie by comparison intoned: “We are experiencing high call volumes. Call back later.” They must be inundated with customers ringing them up to congratulate them on their wonderful system. 

Never mind, you can also email them. Their reply was very quick. It had been devised by a machine that had cut-and-pasted random text from their website, Pilgrim’s Progress, Waiting for Godot and the lyrics to ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ by popular music group Middle of the Road. 

I tried again. This time the reply, possibly from a near-human entity, was shorter. Had I tried rebooting? Funnily enough, I had, as this was the advice always offered to me by the young men with wispy ginger beards and smeared spectacles who always staff IT departments. If that doesn’t work, why not eff off it said. Well, it didn’t put it quite like that, it just referred me back to whatever benighted government department had started this whole fandango in the first place. 

As support services go, the GDS one is rather like being offered a boa constrictor in lieu of a truss. It crushes the life out of you. But if you like a challenging computer game at an ultra ultra level, go for it.

A 15th piece of evidence

The reason I had to use the service was because an arm of government wanted to verify my identity. I was surprised by this request. The taxman has always seemed cheerful about who I am when clawing away a chunk of my income, the Home Office were delighted to confirm that I was who I said I was when I bunged them £90+ for a passport, the Ministry of Transport are positively delirious when I send them money so I can road-test their potholes for them, and the NHS are so convinced by my identity  that they’ve devised a special Patient Access System whose chief purpose is to prevent me gaining any access to their services. 

When I counted up, there were at least 14 ways in which my identity seemed to be fairly well established. And that’s not counting my membership of distinguished bodies, genuinely useful, such as the National Trust, The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Friends of Arthur Machen and the Network of Ley-Hunters.

Faced with this battery of existing identity evidence, the government agency involved came up with the obvious solution. What was needed was a 15th piece of evidence. And the best way of getting that was via the GDS, because government IT projects are well known for their unblemished history of successful implementation and their blissfully happy customers. Even better, if for some completely unpredictable and unlikely reason the GDS didn’t work, they had a fallback. They would use the Post Office! This was because of course the Post Office also has an unblemished history of—well, etc.

At this point I became suspicious. There is a devious business model taking hold which imposes complex, hard to understand rules, and erects difficult, nigh impossible methods of complying with the rules. This then enables the lucky organisation to rake in the fines. For cases studies, see private car parks, railway companies, postal services and the NHS Prescription Service. 

Perhaps this lot were in the early stages of implementing just such a wheeze. There was only one flaw in my theory. This would require them to exercise ingenuity, which, like competence and common sense, was not a quality so far especially conspicuous in their performance. Still, they might have stumbled on the idea by accident, in roughly the same way they conduct most of their business.

Head for the hills

Amazingly, when I visited the Post Office, in a last desperate gamble, the counter staff made their system work, eventually. You know your IT service must be bad when the Post Office can do it better. Of course, given recent history, I may yet find that I am prosecuted by PO officials for High Treason or Piracy on the High Seas and will need to conduct a fifteen-year campaign to clear myself.

There is an old Chinese proverb I have just made up which reads: “Count blessed the day when you hear from no official.” If you hear from the GDS, take my advice. Sell all your possessions, burn all your documents, change your name, and head for the hills. Preferably the Himalayas.

Mark Valentine is a writer living in Yorkshire. Please don’t ask him to prove it.

The Joy of Six 1575

Zöe Franklin celebrates the 98th anniversary of the Equal Franchise Act, which gave women equal voting rights with men and calls for further reforms: "Today, barriers remain for women, disabled people, people from ethnic minority backgrounds and others who are underrepresented in public life."

Abandoning the triple lock on pensions  is more likely to condemn today’s younger generations to an old age of poverty than help them, argues Mark E. Thomas.

Josiah Mortimer on a study that finds the introduction of mandatory voter ID has damaged trust in British elections, not improved it.

"It’s not hard to see the appeal of a creed in which worldly success is a sign of God’s blessing to uncontrollably rich individuals like Marshall. And for a church that has become smaller and older, it offers energy, confidence and – perhaps most importantly of all – money." James Bloodworth says the weakening of the Church of England has empowered a new evangelical elite that includes Sir Paul Marshall.

"It’s become a cliché to talk about Ballard’s prescience – the so-called 'seer of Shepperton'. But it’s also an inescapable fact that even in his 80s, he could identify currents in our culture that were yet to break. " Louis Pattison finds that J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come, which depicts an England’s sliding towards fascism, makes uncomfortable reading today. 

Melanie Bell examines the careers choices made by Julie Christie: "Always uncomfortable with stardom – which she later admitted she found ‘terrifying’ – her choice of films increasingly became a conscious decision on her part to exercise some control over her career, turning down high-profile roles in commercial cinema in favour of independent/auteur-driven projects with narratives that dramatised the contradictions of contemporary life, many of which were sharply gendered."

The Joy of Six 1447

Keir Starmer's digital ID project is a techno-authoritarian’s wet dream, argues Carole Cadwalladr: "This is a policy that wasn’t in the Labour Party’s manifesto, that no party faithful campaigned for and that no voters were told about on the doorstep. Instead, after some brief ground softening by pet journalists in friendly newspapers, it appeared out of almost nowhere in late September."

David Nowell Smith shows that accusations of "left-wing bias" against the BBC have a long history and arose from newspapers' fear of competition: "The first coordinated newspaper campaign against the ‘Reds’ at the BBC was initiated by the Daily Mail in January 1937, less than two weeks after a new BBC Charter had given the Corporation further editorial independence."

Carolyn Jackson and Mieke Van Houtte say the high-stakes tests common in English schools could be having a serious effect on children’s wellbeing.

"Academics warned that recovery from the October 2023 cyberattack, apparently by an international ransomware gang, has been 'agonisingly slow'. Even the imminent restoration of functions such as the library’s online catalogue will be of only limited help to researchers still unable to access key resources: Frances Jones finds a lack of concern at the plight of the British Library.

"We handed a loaded weapon to four-year-olds." Alex Kantrowitz on the regrets of the man who built the retweet.

Dick Weindling and Marianne Colloms tell the remarkable story of the two men who robbed eight London banks in a morning: "Robert wrote a lengthy confession and said he did it for: 'the devilment of the matter – the excitement, the ingenuity, the almost impossible success to crown it all, urged me to attempt the fraud'."

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "I’ll fetch you one up the bracket"

Yes, what did happen to Liberal Democrat High Command to make it do a reverse ferret on ID cards? Whatever it was, the delightful Hazel Grove got a very sideways move soon afterwards. There's more about this in the Radical Bulletin section of the new Liberator (issue 432).

The derivation of Clarence "Frogman" Willcock was discussed on this blog last year, while "I’ll fetch you one up the bracket" sounds very much the sort of thing Sid James would have said in Hancock's Half Hour.

Wednesday

I don’t know about you, but I find myself increasingly confused over this identity card business. Just before Conference the usually delightful Hazel Grove told us that we should all move with the times and get one of the things; and, though an unadvertised consultation held at four in the morning in a locked church hall in Branksome came out against them, Ed Davey was very keen on the idea at his question-and-answer session at Bournemouth too. 

There, a tame journalist called for a show of hands and claimed that 110 per cent of those present had voted in favour of cards – and that despite my running round the room to vote against from at least five different seats. (This new tonic the Wise Woman of Wing mixed for me is the cat’s pyjamas!) 

Yet as soon as we got back to Westminster, everyone was launching petitions against the aforementioned cards. Faced with this confusion, I cleave to the words of the great Clarence 'Frogman' Wilcock: "I am a Liberal and if you ask to see my card again I’ll fetch you one up the bracket."

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week

• One of Violent Bonham Carter’s boys
• A phone number for the Overton-Window twins

Lord Chief Justice Goddard played a part in the abolition of national ID cards in 1951

With Labour returning to its ancestral love of national identity cards, the name of Harry Willcock has been heard again. He was the Liberal councillor and parliamentary candidate who, after being stopped for speeding in 1950, refused to show his identity card with the immortal words: "I am a Liberal, and I am against this sort of thing."

Highgate magistrates found him guilty of refusing to show his card - Wilcox had argued that this police power had lapsed when the state of emergency that gave rise to the relevant act had expired - but gave him an absolute discharge. He was also fined for speeding.

Despite the absolute discharge, Wilcox appealed to the High Court against his conviction for not showing his card.

At this point, as Neil Hickman tells in a letter to The Law Society Gazette, a second and very unlikely Liberal hero emerged in the shape of the ferocious lord chief justice Lord Goddard:

Let’s recall the post-war saga of identity cards. These were introduced as an emergency measure at the outbreak of World War 2. The post-war Labour government, an admirable administration but with a marked authoritarian streak, took a conscious decision not to repeal the relevant legislation; and the police routinely demanded the production of identity cards whenever they stopped someone. 

One Harry Willcock, stopped for speeding, refused 'on principle' to produce his identity card. On his appeal from the inevitable conviction before the magistrates, Lord Goddard said [Willcock v. Muckle [1951] 2 KB 844]:

'Of course, if [the police] are looking for a stolen car or have reason to believe that a particular motorist is engaged in committing a crime, that is one thing, but to demand a national registration identity card from all and sundry, for instance, from a lady who may leave her car outside a shop longer than she should, or some trivial matter of that sort, is wholly unreasonable… [and] tends to turn law-abiding subjects into lawbreakers, which is a most undesirable state of affairs. 

Further, in this country we have always prided ourselves on the good feeling that exists between the police and the public and such action tends to make the people resentful of the acts of the police and inclines them to obstruct the police instead of to assist them….'

And, though Willcock's conviction was upheld, he was not ordered to pay costs, and Goddard indicated that any future bench of magistrates obliged to convict a citizen of failing to produce an identity card should grant an absolute discharge. Identity cards were, in fact, scrapped the following year.

Neil Hickman, a retired district judge, is the author of Despotism Renewed? Lord Hewart Unburied, which I reviewed in Liberator last year. Hewart was a Liberal politician who later served as lord chief justice between 1922 and 1940.

Oh and Harry Willcock's full name was Clarence Harry Willcock, which may be why Lord Bonkers insists on calling him Clarence "Frogman" Willcock.

The Joy of Six 1413

Peter Black says the Liberal Democrats must continue to oppose national identity cards.

Wealthy donors are increasingly funding political campaigns, eroding the public’s trust in the political process. The government has the opportunity to reverse that trend by limiting the allowed individual donation amounts and capping campaign spending by political parties, argues Rose Whiffen.

"Our results showed that being bullied was associated with significant reductions in extrovert traits and conscientiousness (that is, being dependable and organised). The drop in conscientiousness could be because the target feels demotivated by the unfairness of being bullied – or the bullying may even take the form of removing meaningful tasks from the colleague." Samuel Farley, David Hughes and Karen Niven have researched how bullying can affect your personality.

Cambridge Town Owl introduces us to Cambridge's Elspeth Dimsdale, a pioneering woman Liberal parliamentary candidate.

Moon In Gemini calls Barry Lyndon (1975) a masterpiece: "He is despicable in many ways, but are the aristocrats he so desperately wants join really that much better? Do they snub him because he is cruel to his wife and stepson, or because he isn’t one of them?"

"He was so worried about being late, for example, that he would invariably arrive hours ahead of time – he once had to scale a wall at Lord’s after arriving so early that the ground was still locked. In 1984, confused about the regulations during an early-season Benson and Hedges Cup tie between Scotland and Yorkshire at Perth, he called two tea intervals. Whether it was bomb scares or pitch invasions, reflecting greenhouses or errant pigeons, they all conspired to trouble him." David Hopps has written the Guardian obituary of the umpire Dickie Bird.

Ed Davey wants to change Lib Dem policy on national ID cards

The big news from today at the Liberal Democrat Conference in Bournemouth is that the leadership wants to change the party's policy of opposing the introduction of a compulsory national identity card.

A fringe meeting at eight o'clock this morning, reports the BBC, showed strong support for the our existing policy of opposing the introduction of compulsory national identity cards:

The majority of those present argued against digital ID cards, over civil liberties and data security concerns, among other things.

Veteran MP Alistair Carmichael told the meeting: "It seems to me if we are going to go along with the Labour Party on this then we are saying 'we are quite happy to trust the government on this'.

"And I think the day we start saying we trust the government is the day that we stop being a liberal party."

He added: "I think it is ocean-going nonsense to change our mind at that this stage."

But Ed Davey, in a question-and-answer session later in the day, said "times have changed" and the party should look at the issue again and not be "knee-jerk" in its opposition. 

The same BBC report says:

He said he had been impressed by a visit to Estonia, where a liberal government had brought in digital ID that he said was "very different" to the scheme proposed by Tony Blair when he was prime minister.

If a UK system was about "giving individuals power to access public services" Sir Ed said he could be in favour because "that could increase people's freedom and rights", but he warned against a model that could be abused by an "authoritarian" government.

The journalist chairing the session then called for a show of hands on the idea of reconsidering our policy of opposing compulsory ID cards. Someone who was there told me there was 40 per cent supported for the idea, but the BBC report claims that two-thirds of those present supported it.

So what headlines are we hoping for if Labour brings a bill forward? 

"Liberal Democrats call for different sort of national ID card" doesn't sound like something that will enthuse journalists or voters. Maybe we will end up abstaining on this too?

The Joy of Six 1408

Helen Charman dissects the claims of the flag-bearing demonstrators. "One slogan used to promote the hotel protests on social media, often emblazoned over a Union Jack or St George's Cross, is 'Safety of Women and Children before Foreigners'. There is a clear distinction being made here between British women and children and 'foreign' women and children. The category of the vulnerable always already excludes the marginalised group being targeted."

All good Liberals know the tale of Harry Willcock – "I am a Liberal, and I am against this sort of thing" – and his part in the abolition of national identity cards after the war, but there was another hero in his court case. It was the unexpected figure of the ferocious Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard. Neil Hickman explains.

"For over three years, the people of the UK have opened their homes to Ukrainian families and welcomed them into our communities. Offering them safety in the face of Russia’s indiscriminate shelling of cities and the illegal occupation of Ukrainian territory. However, at no point over these three years has our government provided Ukrainian families with certainty or stability." Rowan More looks ahead to a debate at the Liberal Democrat Conference.

Finlay McLaren finds that the chief effect of podcasting has been to give more publicity to people who were already famous.

James Wright suggests commercial interests may encourage the spreading of unverified stories and pseudo-archaeology connected to ancient buildings.

"Old Nick was so enraged he laid an everlasting curse upon them, and hence it was said that after Michaelmas Day, any blackberries on the bushes now belonged to the Devil Himself and it was most unwise to pick them." Jim Moon knows why you shouldn't pick blackberries after Michaelmas.

The Joy of Six 1407

"The puzzle for me is what drives Labour politicians (and some others) around the ID card loop? What is the enduring appeal of ID cards that always survives facts and logic? Paul Krugman talks about ‘zombie ideas’, ideas that keeping coming back to life no matter how many times they are apparently killed off by reason and experience, such as the idea that the path to national prosperity is taxing the rich less. For New Labour, with Tony Blair still out ahead, ID cards are a beloved zombie." David Howarth on Labour's fixation with the idea of a national identity card.

Tim Leunig argues that Angela Rayner's problems with Stamp Duty shows that our taxation system is too complex: "When Angela Rayner bought her flat in Hove she owned no other house, in full or in part. It seems to me that the government’s own website is clear that Rayner was not liable for the higher rate of stamp duty. None of the further information on that page suggests anything different."

"A student can easily feed a PDF of the assigned book chapter to their AI application of choice and pass off the bot’s lukewarm analysis as their own; construct a study guide by uploading their notes to an AI tool marketed on LinkedIn by their peers; and even generate plausible rebuttals to arguments posed in discussion sections – all without arousing any suspicion from their overworked teaching assistants." Maria Gomberg on AI in American universities.

Marc Morris asks if William I's "Harrowing of the North" should be regarded as genocide.

"The best comedy does not 'feed prejudice and fear' but rather makes them 'clearer to see' he tells his students. But this view is challenged by talent scout Challenor, a smarmy agent up from London who takes a very different line. Comics are 'servants to the audience', not ‘missionaries’ but ‘suppliers of laughter’.  And in those two opposing views, we have the central tension of the play." Gerard Clough marks the 50th anniversary of Trevor Griffiths' play Comedians.

Gardens, Heritage and Planning visits the lost village of Imber on Salisbury Plain.

The meaninglessness of 'progressive' in politics

The late great Simon Titley once wrote:

"Progressive." What does it mean? The only discernible meaning is "not conservative" or "not reactionary"... negative definitions. The "p" word is a lazy word, so give it up. It will force you to say what you really mean. We need real politics not empty slogans.

It doesn't even mean that now.

The Guardian tells us that Downing Street is exploring options for ‘progressive’ UK digital IDs contained in a paper from the think-tank Labour Together:

The paper has been handed to the No 10 policy unit to flesh out proposals for a BritCard, which would be a mandatory digital credential that Labour Together claims could help avoid another Windrush scandal. 

But it said it would also help reduce vast numbers of visa overstayers, saying half of those whose asylum claims were turned down over the past 14 years were likely still to be in the UK.

Conservatives will love this, convinced as they are that immigration statistics are a huge underestimate of the reality.

And how will the government avoid another Windrush scandal when it starts issuing the cards? What that scandal showed is that many British citizens lack the documentation to prove their status to the satisfaction of government.

The Joy of Six 1247

"The party’s organizing basis since the first day Trump took office has been to treat him as a civic emergency. This is the basis for demanding donations, volunteering, and sacrifice. If they are not willing to endure the relatively modest discomfort of a contentious intraparty debate to minimize the chance of a second Trump term, they’ll have broken faith with their supporters." Jonathan Chait says the Democrats will be making a terrible mistake if they stick with Jo Biden.

Paul Bernal warns against heeding Tony Blair's call for the introduction of digital ID cards.

"Doing the right thing economically ... meant Labour opened the door to the Conservatives who enthusiastically exploited popular frustration with austerity - as articulated in the famous 1949 Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico. This allowed the party to appeal especially to middle-class voters who had supported Labour for the first time in 1945." Steven Fielding warns Labour against repeating the mistake made by Clement Attlee.

Humanists UK provides a history of non-religious prime ministers and other politicians.

"As she sings in Backwoods Barbie (2008), 'Don’t judge me by the cover cause I’m a real good book.' When fans dig into Parton’s songs, books, films, and autobiography, they uncover an egalitarian vision of social cooperation." William Irwin examines Dolly Parton's philosophy.

Katya Witney thinks England chose the right time to retire James Anderson: "In the last Ashes series in Australia, Anderson took eight wickets in the three Test matches he played. He hasn’t played more than three Tests in an Ashes since the 2017/18 series, a calf injury limiting his participation in 2019 and being less effective than Mark Wood and Chris Woakes keeping him out of the XI last summer."

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Living for years on one of the islands on Rutland Water

As we end our week at Bonkers Hall, his lordship turns his mind from the general election to the thorny question of what to do about Earl Russell's Big Band.

This is an opportunity to say that Meadowcroft, Lord Bonkers' besmocked gardener, has long since ceased to be a portrait of Michael Meadowcroft. Muttering away in his potting shed, the gardener has acquired a character of his own.

As to Clarence 'Frogman' Willcock, he appears to be a combination of Clarence 'Frogman' Henry, the American rhythm and blues singer and pianist, and Clarence Harry Willcock, the Liberal who declined to show his identity card to a police constable in 1950.

Sunday

I was sorry to hear of the death of Clarence ‘Frogman’ Willcock. His hits ‘I Don't Know Why I Love You, But I Do’ and ‘I am a Liberal and I am Against This Sort of Thing’ could always be relied upon to get the young people up and cutting a rug at fundraising dances here in my Ballroom. 

Talking of which, I have finally bitten the bullet and told Earl Russell that his father’s Big Band was not scattered to ‘the round earth's imagin'd corners’, as I may have inadvertently given the impression, but has been living for years on one of the islands on Rutland Water. 

The aforesaid jazz musicians generally sport upon the shore in animal skins and play upon rude instruments of their own manufacture, occasionally accompanied by Meadowcroft (who can be pretty rude himself). Well, their next gig will not be on the shore but at the Royal Opera House, Oakham – I would have booked the skittle alley at the Bonkers’ Arms the other day, but there are rather a lot of them.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• I imagine he found Africa pleasantly civilised after that
• The Convent of Our Lady of the Ballot Boxes
• "The sort of places our schoolfriends’ parents live"
• Two of my sturdiest gamekeepers on the Thames-Clyde Express
• Stabbing an iguana with a toasting fork
• He doesn’t ask them lots of damn-fool questions

The Joy of Six 1221

Matthew Pennell still says no to ID cards (and so do I): "I’ve always noticed that those who advocate for ID cards are exclusively white British males living in Britain who in pretty much every respect are in the cultural mainstream, nothing would mark them out as being part of any social group on the fringe of society. Such people would not feel threatened being approached by a police officer or would never have to talk to other arms of the state, such as a housing officer, to avail themselves of certain public services." 

Many of us have the mistaken idea that previous experience of poverty makes it easier for someone to take further hard knocks, argues Nathan Cheek.

Remember Amazon's 'just walk out' grocery stores? As James Bridle explains, they were not what they seemed: "An employee who worked on the technology said that actual humans - albeit distant and invisible ones, based in India - reviewed about 70 per cent of sales made in the 'cashier-less' shops as of mid-2022."

Charlie Clinton on the campaign to defend small music venues.

Anne Billson presents six films from the 1980s that should be better known: "Mike Hodges’s offbeat gothic thriller isn’t so much a film that has fallen into obscurity as a a film that never got a decent shot in the first place." 

"The Trip stands in Brewhouse Yard which was part of Nottingham Castle until the 17th century when the present building and caves were created. The earliest reference to its use as a pub, called the Pilgrim, comes from 1751. By 1799 the name had been changed to the Trip. The earliest mention of the Trip as the oldest pub in England comes from around 1910 when the landlord drummed up trade with new signage." James Wright goes in search on the oldest pub in England - it's clearly not the one shown here.

"Stop that, it's silly": My instinctive reaction to the government's latest proposal on smoking

Caron Lindsay raises the question of whether we should support the government's plans to prohibit anyone born after 1 January 2009 from ever buying cigarettes.

And I think she comes down on the right side:

I do think that reducing smoking is a good thing. I was absolutely in favour of the legislation banning smoking in public places. It’s a great thing that people under 25 have never experienced being in a smoky pub or restaurant in this country. It’s meant that people with conditions like Asthma can go out without fear. I don’t mind making cigarettes more difficult or expensive to get. 

But I think that the Governments’ proposals are a step too far. Adults, all adults, should be free to do and buy what they like so long as it doesn’t harm others and it seems strange that one 40 year old can buy cigarettes and another can’t. How can that be liberal?

Along the way she suggests, surely rightly, that the measure will grow the black market for cigarettes and be used as another argument for making people carry identity documents.

If such an arbitrary cut off date isn't against human rights legislation then it should be. But I have to admit that my overwhelming proposal of the impression is that it's not illiberal so much as silly. Hence the video above.

I am reminded too of Calder's First Law of Politics:

If all parties are united in support of a measure, it will turn out to be a disaster.

The Joy of Six 1097

"When a prime minister appoints the son of a former KGB agent, his own brother and a major Tory donor, all against the decision of the Lords Appointments Committee, the system is quite clearly broken." George Foulkes says that, when it comes to reforming the House of Lords, we should look to Europe for inspiration.

Toby James give six reasons why the Tories' impending voter ID law is a bad idea.

Jay Joseph looks back on "a century of failure and hype" in the search for a genetic basis for schizophrenia.

"One example of an early public walk is the New Walk in Leicester which was opened in the late eighteenth century as a promenade and is now Grade II listed." Clare Hickman looks at at what the 18th-ccntury concept of the "public walk" can teach us about health, urbanisation and access to the countryside.

Patrick Barkham meets the man defending a forgotten London river. "Then my walk with Paul Powlesland on the banks of the River Roding collides with contemporary Britain. There is a tributary, sending a steady trickle of sewage into the main channel. A flashy new block of riverside flats, failing to provide residents with any greenery or way to access the river. Further along, heaps of fly-tipped rubbish and the recent relics of camps created by desperate people without homes."

"As the scientists explore the chamber, they hear footsteps and screams. Jill (Jane Asher), a sensitive computer programmer, sees a vision of a young maid running up the stairs, as if hounded by some unseen force, and falling from the top to her death. Peter (Michael Bryant), the team’s headstrong leader, is sure that the stone itself is their new recording medium." Sean McGeady marks the 50th anniversary of Nigel Kneale's television ghost story The Stone Tape.

The Joy of Six 1085

David Hencke on the government's determination to rush ahead with introducing photographic voter ID in time for next May’s local elections - despite a warning that the timetable involved is "likely to introduce significant risk to safe election delivery".

The Crime Survey for England and Wales, which estimates levels of offending based on a sample of 13,500 households, suggests overall crime is falling, with a steep decline in theft. But crimes recorded by police are on the increase, with offences of violence rising sharply. Danny Shaw untangles the data.

Do radical protests turn the public away from a cause? Colin Davis concludes: "When we look at public support for the protesters’ demands, there isn’t any compelling evidence for nonviolent protest being counterproductive. People may 'shoot the messenger', but they do - at least, sometimes - hear the message."

Rachel Cunliffe says there’s something discomforting about the way North London has become the butt of Tory jokes about out-of-touch elites.

To mark the centenary of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Literary Hub invites four writers and academics to discuss the importance, context, artistry, and legacy of the poem.

Graham Chapman on a new scheme to boost England's declining curlew population: "The first of this year’s birds to migrate away from Norfolk departed at sunset last Wednesday and arrived on a Staffordshire field at sunrise on Thursday. It then flew towards Ireland and made an anxiety-inducing trip out into the Atlantic before returning to dry land."

Nick Clegg, Roe v. Wade, Facebook, privacy... and Lord Bonkers

Remember when Nick Clegg told us he would defy the law and refuse to register for an identity card? (It was during a Lib Dem leadership election, if that helps narrow it down.)

I thought of him when I read this Guardian story:

When local Nebraska police came knocking in June – before Roe v Wade was officially overturned – Facebook handed the user data of a mother and daughter facing criminal charges for allegedly carrying out an illegal abortion. 

Private messages between the two discussing how to obtain abortion pills were given to police by Facebook, according to the Lincoln Journal Star. The 17-year-old, reports say, was more than 20 weeks pregnant. 

In Nebraska, abortions are banned after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The teenager is now being tried as an adult.

Court documents filed in June and made public on Tuesday show how tech companies including Facebook contribute to criminal prosecutions of abortion cases. 

I've never liked Facebook. I helped run an account at work, but only had a personal account for a few days before I deleted it. I once bought a book on Facebook, and that made me dislike it even more.

Facebook reminds me of the days when corporate social media was a new thing and training courses told you that your ideas about privacy were old fashioned. Young people didn't care about privacy at all: they put their whole lives online.

That bright-eyed approach didn't last long in the real world, but somehow it remains hard-wired into Facebook. Perhaps it's because of its origin in universities. There, making new friends and showing that you have made them, is all.

The Guardian quotes unnamed experts who say this shocking case shows the importance of encryption and minimising the amount of data Facebook stores on its users.

Those experts are right.

As to Nick Clegg and Facebook, I think Lord Bonkers got it right too:

Who should I bump into in London today but our own Nick Clegg? Curious to know what he is doing with himself these days, I treat him to lunch at one of my clubs.

He turns out to be full of his new job, telling me how Satan’s chief operating officer Mephistopheles called him while he was walking in the Alps last summer and invited him to fly to Hell to meet Satan himself. "I said to them, if you're prepared to let me into the inner circle, in the black box, and give me real authority, then I'm interested."

Clegg describes Satan to me as "a shy guy" and "thoughtful", before adding: "The thing that persuaded me to do it is Satan and  Mephistopheles asking the right questions for the right reasons - about things like the barrier between free speech and prohibited content, wellbeing of children, integrity of elections, AI and giving people control over their data."

Let us put churlish thoughts aside and hope that Clegg can do for Satan what he did for the Liberal Democrats.

The Joy of Six 1009

"There is a lot of common ground between most councillors about the pragmatic methods needed to deliver services and a better future for those they represent. That common ground too often gets dissipated by an unnecessary tribalism and arrogance with people defending their tribe to the end instead of accepting compromise and joint working and rightful involvement." Richard Kemp looks at the new coalitions emerging after this month's local elections.

Maddy Shaw Roberts reports that musicians and music businesses are warning time is up for UK grassroots acts and European orchestras are resistant to booking UK artists because of ‘paperwork and expense’.

"The law remains fully committed to backing the ‘static’ but specifically to the propertied ‘static’. Modern methods of control over space and access to it are not only legal but technological – CCTV and other surveillance, ID cards, swipe cards, fingerprint and face recognition software. Open space in many of our cities appears free and easy, but lots of concourses, squares and plazas in new developments are privately owned, and you can be prevented from protesting, hanging out or doing pretty much anything depending on the power and will of private corporations." mudlark121 surveys 1000 years of laws against travellers, wanderers and trespass

Richard Mabey mourns the debasement of the English hedge.

"One of the new Road Collision Reporting Guidelines stresses that journalists should not use the word 'accident' for a road collision but, instead, use 'crash'. Carlton Reid on new guidelines for journalists.

Alun Harris offers a quick guide to the work of the horror writer Ramsey Campbell.

The retoxification of the Conservative Party

Embed from Getty Images

Back in 2007, before many of my readers were born, I wrote a post here about the Conservatives' announcement that they would scrap Labour's identity card scheme if they won the next election.

This is good news and the Conservatives are to be commended. But I wonder how this will play with the membership. 

I remember one of my walking holidays around the South-West coast from the early 1990s. I spent the night in Kingsand - a charming village across the Tamar from Plymouth. It was one of those magical evenings where you make friends with the locals and people keep buying you drinks. 

Towards closing time, the local Conservatives came in from a meeting and I got talking to them too. They had been talking about identity cards and asked what I thought. I said (a little pretentiously) that I didn't see why, as a freeborn Englishman, I should have to carry a card to show my right to be in my own country. 

Yes, they said, there was one person at the meeting who had said that, but the rest of us are all in favour of cards. There major reason for supporting them was their belief that the country was overrun with illegal immigrants.

In reply Iain Dale - I had quoted him at the start of the post - said:

Even I was a bit surprised by the general euphoria which has greeted this announcement. The Tory Party is changing.

Maybe it was changing in 2007, but it has certainly changed back. I have not seen a single Conservative question announcement that we shall all have to produce an identity document to vote in future.

Iain himself seems very keen on the idea:

Exactly. The only people who are against this are people who tend to think they benefit from the rigging. Everyone has some form of ID and if you don’t, get one. https://t.co/YmspWIs8HN

— Iain Dale (@IainDale) October 14, 2019

Twelve years is a long time in politics and I don't want to be hard on Iain. In the days when blogging was a thing I always found him friendly and helpful.

He was even, along with Tim Worstall, one of the people I copied when starting to blog. Between them they taught me to write lots of short posts rather than pretend I was writing a comment piece for a broadsheet newspaper - we had them in those days.

But all this does lead me to the idea that the Conservative Party is little more than a ruthless attempt to ensure that those who have wealth and power keep it.

They will take on any shape that helps them - libertarian, nationalist, caring, authoritarian, intellectual, populist - much as Boris Johnson will say anything that will get him through the next 30 seconds.

A true Conservative would rejoice that Britain has such an informal electoral system that commands universal report.

But then, as I have often argues, the real problem with the Conservative Party is that it is not Conservative enough.

ID for voters: In praise of the person from Penge

Photo from Geograph © Stephen Craven

I have a new hero: the person from Penge.

In a tweet today the Guardian's Peter Walker reported from a polling station there:

One person apparently had ID but disliked the idea so much they opted to not vote.

Because there is something profoundly unBritish about such demands to show officialdom your papers.

Indeed I rather grew up with the idea that not having to carry an identity card was a sort of reward for Britain having won the war.

We British preferred things to be a little informal. We trusted one another and preferred the spirit of the law to its letter.

You may argue that this view we held of ourselves did not have much basis in fact. Even if that is true, it is rather beside the point. As individuals and as societies we need our betters selves to aspire to.

A belief that fair play is a fundamental British characteristic would not survive much study of our imperial history, but I would rather we saw ourselves that way.

This view of Britishness used to be a Conservative one. It was Socialism, they told us, that wanted to regulate people. But that changed long ago.

Here is part of a House Points column I wrote back in 2007:

In the early 1990s I was walking the South-West coast and spent a night in Kingsand -- a village across the Tamar from Plymouth. It was one of those magical evenings when you make friends with the locals and people keep buying you drinks. 

Towards closing time, the local Conservatives came in from a meeting and I got talking to them too. They had been discussing identity cards and asked what I thought. I said (a little pretentiously) that I didn't see why, as a freeborn Englishman, I should have to carry a card to show my right to be in my own country. 

Yes, they said, there was someone at the meeting who thought that, but the rest of us were firmly in favour of cards. It turned out this was chiefly because of their fears about illegal immigration.

There is no evidence that personation is a problem in British elections. Postal voting is a different matter following Labour's decision to encourage it at all costs and should be investigated.

I remember, too, the day I knocked on the door of a long-vanished Market Harborough care home to see if I could canvass the residents. I was told that one of the local Conservative grandees had kindly arranged proxy votes for them all so there was no need.

The Conservatives know there is not a problem with voting at polling stations, but they probably hope that demanding proof of identity will depress the turn out to their advantage.

Most of all, though, this measure is an attempt to placate the sort of Conservative members I met in Kingsand.

They are convinced that Britain is overrun with illegal immigrants. They probably also believe that those immigrants all vote, most of them more than once.

It is to placate them that this demand for identification is being introduced