Why is that eBay page with that bloke wearing his wife’s wedding dress still near the top of Blogdex? He’s been there all week.

And no, I’m not going to link to that loser. Instead, I’m going to link to a genuinely worthy man, namely Ben Hammersley, who has put up his account of the Marathon Des Sables - a one-week, 240km run across the Sahara Desert, which he completed with a broken ankle. We are not worthy. An astonishing account of endurance and of the spirit and camaraderie of all who took part.

Right, it’s Friday and it’s 5.30. I’m off to the Eagle to leverage short-term value-added empowerment.

I have got the final reel of my photos from last August back from the developers, which were of the beautiful city of Vilnius, capital of Lithuania. Haven’t yet got the means to post them up (or any of my other Baltic trip photos yet), but in the meantime you can enjoy some lovely old photos of Vilnius, as part of the Virtual Exhibition of Lithuanian Cultural Heritage. (via MeFi)

So the ID Cards Draft Bill has been released. I have multiple concerns, but I’ll boil them to as few as possible. The Home Office ID Card Site says that an ID card system will help fight terrorism, identity-related fraud, illegal working and public service abuse. I’m going to voice my (very condensed) thoughts on each of those, and tack a couple more on the end.

1. In what way will a national ID card system reduce the threat of terrorism? Terrorists tend to use tourist visas (which will be checked with less stringent verification under the new legislation), or they are people with genuine ID with no previous history of terrorist activity (in which case knowing their identity is of no use). Most of the 9/11 hijackers were unknowns, and many had legitimate ID papers. Neither the draft bill nor the consultation document mention any study detailing evidence where a national ID card had a definite effect on reducing terrorist activity. A draft report by Privacy International disputes the Government’s anti-terrorism claims. Wouldn’t the money on ID cards be better spent on proven methods like better intelligence and policing?

2. The Home Office claim that identity fraud costs the nation £1.3bn a year. However the document estimating this is based largely on guesswork (see Annex B) and most of this estimated cost is borne by the private sector. And out of this cost, a large proportion of this figure (£370m) is due to stolen and lost credit cards, but these are forms of fraud which an ID card system could not necessarily prevent. The amount of ID-related insurance fraud (£250m) is taken as an estimated 50% of an estimated 50% of all insurance fraud - these figures seem to have been plucked out of the air. Furthermore, there is no differentiation between identity fraud due to deficiencies in current systems of identification, and fraud thanks to incompetence or negligence by the parties involved in verifying the ID, and thus we don’t know exactly how much of the estimated fraud will be stopped with a new national identity card. The cost of such a scehem is at least £3bn and possibly a lot more (see later) - are the savings on ID fraud worth it?

3. Illegal workers are beneath the system as it is, they have no National Insurance number or anything like that. If their employers are willing to employ an illegal without an NI number, then they are not going to worry about someone without a valid ID card.

4. As pointed out in (2) above, there are no concrete figures for the scale of public service abuse. Most claims of “health tourism” and the like by ineligible people are based on anecdotal evidence. Nobody knows what the cost is, as the Department of Health has admitted. How can a sensible cost and benefit analysis of the ID scheme be carried out if we don’t know how much it’s meant to save?

5. How are the Government going to guarantee the security of the new National Identity Register? This will be built from scratch and supposedly will not be tainted by the bad data on existing, compromised systems. But either we will be using our passports and birth certificates as proof of ID to get the new cards, in which case compromised data is bound to be introduced, or the NIR will have to fully verify the identity of every single one of the 60 million people in the UK.

6. The biometric verification systens proposed are taken as 100% foolproof and a major component in ensuring the security of the system. However, fingerprints can be convincingly faked (and there has been little rigorous scientific scrutiny on whether actually are unique), and face recognition is still very unreliable. Only iris scans come out with any integrity, but these are expensive and intrusive, and have not been proven as practical on a wide scale yet.

7. The latest estimate of the cost of this project is £3 billion. Recent Government projects on assembling databases of people’s identities, such as the Criminal Records Bureau and Passport Agency have been costly, late and don’t even work properly. In fact many other Government IT projects could be described as having been similarly botched. With so much at stake here - a very secure register of every citizen in the country, how has the Government changed its practices (if at all) to take into account the lessons of past failures?

Right, no more. In very short summary, I don’t believe it will be totally secure, the marginal benefits will outweight the costs, and I expect them to escalate. And I haven’t even started on the erosion of civil liberties. But I’ll stop writing, else I’ll be here all night. All thoughts welcome.

Cash machine wrongly filled with £20 notes instead of tenners.

Why does this never happen anywhere near where I live?

It’s quite ugly, isn’t it? Most vexillologists agree. But that’s the least of the new flag’s problems. It doesn’t contain any green (the colour most associated with Islam) nor any red (which is associated with the Arabs). While the Kurds get a yellow stripe to represent them, the Arabs and Turkomens don’t get anything. What has alienated the Iraqis most is that it looks a bit too much like the Israeli flag. While the old flag is perhaps too interlinked with the old Ba’athist regime to be used in the future, they surely could come up with something better than this?

Random, related link - a nifty Flash flag finder, which will work out what country a particularly patterned flag belongs to.

A really excellent Flash presentation (warning, 1.3MB) by Tim Ireland, in response to this. It neatly highlights everything shit Labour has done, but how much shitter it would have been under the Tories. Go see it.

Ron Atkinson was interviewed in yesterday’s Observer, in which he apologises and denies he is a racist. The interviewer, Michael Eboda, sums it up best when Atkinson turns the tables and asks him if he thinks Ron is a racist:

“I don’t think you are a racist, but I do think you have a racist element in you and I don’t think you are aware of what racism is […] You come from an era when certain things were acceptable and I think you are not quite aware of what those things are. That’s when you can become racist. I think that in the instant that you used the term nigger you were a racist.”

This touches on some of the complexities of racism, and the differences between the overt racial discrimination and hatred that has now mostly disappeared from British life, and the more murky world of when someone is racist or offensive without realising it, especially when that person is of a different generation. Ron Atkinson grew up at a time when the n-word was not regarded as offensive, and in fact was not always used as abuse but as part of the language - he mentions shoes as being called “nigger brown” - and then reveals his incomprehension of why some black people refer to themselves and other blacks as “niggers”. He tries to reconcile both of these with the modern common view that to use that word in any situation is a very bad thing to do, but ultimately gets very confused.

The more I think about what he said, the more I think about the diktat of “political correctness”, and why it pisses me off. PC’s main modus operandi is marking certain words as ‘bad’ and sanitising language, in the hope that by abandoning old-fashioned terms people will also change their prejudices. It neatly deflects away from the harder problems of combatting the underlying racism in society into one of just what words to choose. It turns “you shouldn’t act like that” into “you shouldn’t say that”. With no solution offered as to how to confront inner ignorance and prejudice, this becomes “you shouldn’t say that in front of someone who might complain”

One of the best illustrations of what this can do is in “The Office”. David Brent will tell (mildy) racist jokes, unless he’s in front of the office’s only black worker, in which case he sucks up to him by saying how much he admires Sidney Poitier. When someone white complains about the jokes, Brent rubbishes it saying that the black worker didn’t complain, therefore it must be OK.

Ron has fallen into the same trap. When he said those fateful words he was off-mike and thought only his co-commentator and a few TV staff would have heard him. I think he is a man who genuinely believes in racial equality and has done much for it, but is ignorant of why certain words are hurtful and the complexities associated with them. All he knows is that he can’t say them in public, so he’ll carry on showing his ignorance in private without any thought as to why it is wrong.

What he said was, at the end of the day, offensive, and I don’t think he should work in the media for the immediate future. But looking back at his career of doing so much for black footballers in the 70s and 80s (and very little other personal history of any racism) and his quite genuine sorrow and contrition over the whole matter, I think his transgression is forgivable. What Ron Atkinson needs is education, not condemnation. He needs to become less ignorant and more aware of race and the issues around it - why not take him into inner city estates or schools with ethnic minority children and youths, get him to coach them at football, get him to talk to them, eat with them, live with them even, and find out the real issues for himself? Such a rehabilitation would be a suitable way of turning this sorry episode into doing a little bit of good.

Today’s random generator is Ex-Hilarator (via BoingBoing), which will randomly combine a cartoon and punchline together - most of the original material is quite unfunny but when diced & spliced together it can be hilarious, in a surreal sort of way. Unfortunately there’s no facility identifying particularly amusing combinations with an ID number or some such, so you can tell other people about particularly good combos, but it’s still worth playing with for 5 minutes…