In his response to the 28,000 or so signatories to a 'stop the ID Cards scheme' petition, Tony Blair remarked that the compulsory addition of fingerprints to the database would (retrospectively) enable the police to make comparisons against evidence from some 900,000 unsolved crimes.
Opposition parties say they were unaware of this as a 'feature' of the plan - which, one way or another, throws an interesting light on the process of parliamentary scrutiny.
Having read Mr Blair's response in full, I would make just two comments out of many possible ones.
1 - Regrettably, it perpetuates the impression of the ICAO as an external agency which is imposing biometric passports on a reluctant government. ICAO is an inter-governmental organisation of which the UK government is a member. It does what its members tell it to.
2 - The response criticises the petitioners for conflating the costs of ID cards and biometric passports... gracefully skimming over the fact that the reason these costs get conflated is precisely because the then Home Secretary deliberately interlinked the two for his own purposes in trying to justify the scheme without actually disclosing the cost estimates at his disposal.
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