EVEN at this late stage, the Government should sit down and have a long think about where it is going with the identity card project.

The very breadth of the opposition should surely be a cause for concern, making as it does bedfellows of those who in other areas are poles apart politically. What else at the moment unites old-fashioned left-leaning liberals so effectively with the libertarian tendency of the Conservative Party?

The arguments against are many. There is the ideological one, that citizens should be entitled to have a part of their life to call their own without the risk of the minutiae of their day to day existence being electronically logged and filed away, on the off-chance they might be up to no good.

And then there is the cost. ID card apologists have suggested that the money will be spent anyway on the database behind the biometric passports now being introduced, but long-term watchers of public-sector information technology products know all too well how costs can balloon out of control.

Now throw into the mix the human factor. The thousands of people with daily access to the database can cut corners, lose disks or be simply corrupt. That, sadly, is life.

Plus, too, the tendency of governments of all colours to look with touching faith towards more and more technology as the solution to everything.

Maybe, in a squeaky-clean world of painfully honest administrators, noble-minded public servants and IT managers who never go a penny over their budget or see their schedules slip by as much as an hour, there is something to be said for identity cards.

But, somehow, that particular Utopia seems as far off as it ever was.