Firstly, the economic argument. £5 billion is a vast amount and at £60 per card per person, the Home Secretary expects us to fund the scheme ourselves!
Frankly, there is little that could possibly be less popular. Spending £60 on a piece of plastic which contains my iris scans and fingerprints (which I usually carry on me anyway) is not going to be popular when we're up to our eyeballs in debt, both as a country and individually, and basic costs of living are hard to cover.
Secondly, the libertarian argument. Quite frankly, when the Opposition is against this, a party which is seen as being stricter in social policy than the current government, you know you're becoming too severe. Whatever happened to the government not holding our data without good reason? Are we not private citizens?
Most of us are not criminals, most of us are hard-working, tax-paying citizens with a right to privacy and a right to not have our data held on a supercomputer somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
As for the argument that it will help prevent identity theft, well that is easily countered by pointing out the government's loss of several laptops, brief cases and flash drives containing none other than our personal data. With even more of it floating around, basic maths tells us that more of our data will be lost.
Also just pointed out to me is the problem of hackers. If they can break into the Pentagon's security, this should be a piece of cake in comparison. I'm no computer wizard, but it seems to me that any large amount of public data that is sitting in one place is just begging to be broken into and played around with.
[Hat-tip to Mock The Week for the humour]
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