Tony Blair must have been worried by the independent report last week that Britain is already a surveillance society. He spent much of his monthly press conference today trying to defend the indefensible - his plan to impose compulsory ID Cards and a vast, intrusive National Identity Register (NIR).

He failed, of course, but his attempt was a classic piece of Blair speak. He managed to avoid telling any direct lies whilst grossly misleading people on almost every significant point.

Check out the transcript. The most striking thing is that Blair only uses the word "privacy" once - at the end, in order to dismiss it out of hand. He says "The real issue here is not privacy or cost, it is modernity."

Wrong. The issue is privacy. Blair's casual dismissal of this crucial human right is frightening but not surprising.

Blair is clearly uncomfortable with the concepts of privacy and freedom. The civil liberties debate gets only a token mention. Again Blair simply dismisses the issue rather than addressing it.

He talks of safeguards, pointing out that the NIR will not contain medical or tax records. That's true but irrelevant - by introducing a single, unique, lifelong identifier to be used everywhere the NIR will enable consolidation of those different systems. Your NIR Number will become the key to a virtual distributed database containing a record of your entire life. And safeguards have a way of being eroded - the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) is a relevant example.

Blair says that full accreditation will be required before organisations can access information. Again true but irrelevant. It implies that the number of such organisations will be small - however the government has made clear its desire to see ID cards used in all walks of life. Presumably therefore such accreditation will not be required of shops, pubs and libraries that "merely" demand you produce your ID Card on entry.

Oh, and he repeats the line about organisations only accessing data with the individual's consent. Yet again true but irrelevant. Once ID Cards become compulsory there is nothing to stop any shop, club, public service or other organisation from demanding your consent before dealing with you. Any legal issue of consent becomes meaningless when without giving such "consent" you can't exist in society.

Blair then goes on to repeat the misleading link between biometric passports and ID Cards, claiming again that most of the cost will be required for biometric passports. Complete nonsense - the requirements for biometric passports are far simpler than the government's proposed scheme. The "biometric" required for the US is simply a machine readable photo. For the EU Schengen area a fingerprint will also be required - but not an iris scan. And hang on a minute - the UK has an opt-out from the Schengen requirements!

Most importantly of all there are no international requirements to link biometric passports to a ubiquitous citizen identifier and a massive central database.

Blair's closing comments about the possible applications of ID Cards are clutching at straws. For example he says it would make opening a bank account easier - true, but only because government rules have made the process so difficult! And how many times in a lifetime do most people open a bank account? He even mentions online shopping - how on earth will his much loved biometric technology help there? Does he expect us all to have iris scanners attached to our PCs? Or does he - perish the thought - not really understand the technology he's advocating?

None of these arguments are new, Blair has been ignoring them since ID Cards were first suggested. Either he doesn't understand or he doesn't care.

Perhaps the poor man simply needs educating. You might like to write to him and help him out.

Blair ID cards NIR privacy UK politics ukpolitics