{"id":1852,"date":"2009-06-17T11:24:31","date_gmt":"2009-06-17T11:24:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/?p=1852"},"modified":"2009-06-17T11:24:31","modified_gmt":"2009-06-17T11:24:31","slug":"blue-steel-in-the-hour-of-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/?p=1852","title":{"rendered":"Blue Steel in the Hour of Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2009\/06\/17\/id_card_tory_warning\/\">The Register reports<\/a> that the Conservatives are writing to companies involved in &#8216;ID card contracts&#8217;, asking them to reconsider, this is a good first move but something more forceful is needed before the next election:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>NATIONAL IDENTITY CARD SCHEME<\/p>\n<p>As you will be aware, the Conservative Party has stated publicly <strike>that it is our intention<\/strike> <strong>that we will commit<\/strong> to cancel the ID card project <strong>and related databases<\/strong> immediately on our being elected to government.<\/p>\n<p>I am writing to you as one of the companies involved in contracting for the project. I wanted to make it clear to you that our <strike>intention<\/strike> <strong>commitment<\/strong> to cancel the project remains unchanged. I think it is important that the companies concerned bear this carefully in mind before committing to any long term contracts for the project, since it will <strike>not be our intention to proceed with<\/strike> <strong>be a manifesto commitment to cancel<\/strong> the work if we are elected.<\/p>\n<p>In addition, I wanted to draw your attention to my concerns about the nature of the contracts that are in development.<\/p>\n<p>In March, the Home Secretary announced that the cancellation of two contracts for the national identity scheme, one to upgrade passport application systems, and one for a biometric database, would incur costs of \u00a340 million.<\/p>\n<p><strike>Whilst we do not intend to scrap<\/strike> <strong>We will also <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2004\/04\/19\/biometrics\/page4.html\">substantially overhaul<\/a><\/strong> the programme introducing biometric passports, <strong>therefore<\/strong> I wanted to make it clear that we will <strike>take an extremely sceptical view of<\/strike> <strong>actively contest<\/strong> any future contractual arrangements <strike>on ID cards<\/strike> that appear to have been put in place simply to tie the hands of a future Government.<\/p>\n<p>In light of this, I urge you to consider very carefully your future involvement in the ID Card project.<\/p>\n<p>Yours sincerely<\/p>\n<p>Chris Grayling<\/p>\n<p>Shadow Home Secretary<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Register reports that the Conservatives are writing to companies involved in &#8216;ID card contracts&#8217;, asking them to reconsider, this is a good first move but something more forceful is needed before the next election: NATIONAL IDENTITY CARD SCHEME As you will be aware, the Conservative Party has stated publicly that it is our intention [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[34],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irdial.com\/blogdial\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}