The ID card is on its last legs - just let it die with dignity

The other day, Ms Smith travelled north, pushing her life support system and intravenous drip, to announce that the lucky people of Manchester would be the first in Britain offered the chance to pay £30 (or possibly £60) to have their fingerprints taken, their retinas scanned, their personal details entered on a trackable database and be given a plastic ID card that will have no clear value or purpose until at least 2015, if ever.

It doesn't sound like a particularly killer offer, does it? Not one to get Mancunians, even those married to Premiership footballers, rushing for their chequebooks; unlikely to cause quite the same buzz in Alderley Edge as the arrival of the Jimmy Choo delivery van.

This week's announcement also contained what, for me, is always a key indicator of New Labour desperation - the pledge that you'll be able to get your card in shops and supermarkets.

For the past 10 years, promising that sundry public services (voting, social security payments, after-school childcare, hip replacement operations) will somehow be delivered in the Tesco's checkout queue has been the default gimmick of the idea-free spin-doctor.

With senior Cabinet ministers reportedly demanding the ID scheme be dumped, with even David Blunkett (David Blunkett!) now describing the cards as unnecessary, with airline pilots - among the first groups to be forced to have them - promising a boycott, and with the Tories pledged to scrap the cards if, as seems overwhelmingly likely, they win next year, the future of the "plastic poll tax" looks pretty bleak, pretty short-term.

So perhaps it is time to consider what the ID fiasco tells us more broadly about government, and what it should do differently. One key lesson for politicians is that they should stop inventing problems for themselves.

God knows, there are enough real problems out there to fill any government's days many times over. Why, then, do politicians so often create fake problems to add to their burden?

New Labour's most notorious example of a fake problem was, of course, the alleged threat posed by Iraq.

Years of the Government's time and vast quantities of its credibility were consumed on a supposed danger that all the experts agreed was modest. Further political capital was spent in pursuit of the idea that Britain didn't have enough gambling. But no one ever asked for supercasinos. No one even wanted them.

ID cards have been touted as the solution to a number of real problems - terrorism, crime and so on - though none of their supporters can ever explain how having an ID card stops a mugger or suicide bomber.

But they began as the answer to a classic fake problem, still routinely cited by ministers, the need to "secure our identities" against "identity theft".

In fact, our identities are no less secure than they ever were. I'm certainly not saying that impersonation fraud and identity hijacks don't really happen; of course they do. But they have happened since the dawn of money.

What changed was that a combination of government and the security industry - ever-hungry for new sales opportunities - hit on the term "identity theft" as a way of making disparate crimes seem bigger and scarier than they actually are.

The facts about "identity theft" are that it is not rising, nearly all victims get their money back, the official body for plastic card fraud describes it as "quite a small problem", and a 2002 report by the Cabinet Office over-estimated its extent by about 900 per cent.

The idea that ID cards and a database would "secure our identities" was in any case illusory. With all our data stored in one place, vulnerable to thieves and to the Government's record of data loss and computer cock-ups, the cards were far more likely to put our identities at risk.

Why do governments so often tilt at windmills? Over ID cards, it's partly the usual desire for power and control. It's partly politics - Gordon thought it would be popular, and make him look strong.

But in an era of big, stubborn, difficult-to-solve problems (economic and polar meltdown, social immobility) I think ministers also have a genuine yearning for nice, easy problems that they can claim to solve, even if the only way they can get such problems is to make them up.

Unfortunately, though they may have thought Iraq would be a pushover, that the public would love ID cards and that supercasinos were the Pot Noodle of instant inner-city regeneration, little is ever truly simple, certainly not any of those policies.

Ministers long to be seen as active and useful; that must account for the constant announcements and Bills from the likes of Ms Smith. But it doesn't work.

The main story in home affairs should be of relative success: a steady and continuing reduction in crime. But because successive Home Secretaries have behaved as if there is a crime crisis, voters believe it to be so.

One of the Government's more intelligent members, the Health Secretary Alan Johnson, may have realised this.

According to one of his former spin-doctors, Jim Godfrey, Johnson has made a deliberate decision not to talk about the NHS in the belief that the less ministers say, the higher public satisfaction with the service rises.

Godfrey was critical of this but I think it's rather inspired. What's needed in government is a calm focus on core work, not constant attempts to manufacture success.

It's almost certainly too late for this administration but it still has time to divest itself of some of its stupider and costlier quick fixes - like the £5-£10 billion ID scheme. 

Gordon Brown's premiership will probably soon be dead. But as any terminal patient will tell you, how you die really matters.

This government still has a chance to die with dignity, doing the right thing on ID cards, proud of itself rather than stubborn and truculent to the last. I hope it takes that chance.