Nicole Kobie has interviewed ID card commissioner Sir John Pilling for IT PRO “about his thoughts on the identity scheme and why we might all think he’s a bit of prat down the line”:

Q: You admit yourself in the report that you didn’t know that much about the subject when you were picked for the job. Why do you think they picked you?

A: I think it’s by definition. It can not have been an easy job to fill. Because the opposition have a set of policies on the subject which are rather different to the Government’s.

The election has to happen rather soon, whatever the Prime Minister thinks. He can make it happen a little bit sooner, he could announce it today if he wanted, but whether he announces it early or not, it’s got to be quite soon.

And I suppose realistically the likelihood is that this job will disappear if the current opposition become the Government. I mean, they haven’t addressed anything as detailed as the future of the ID commissioner, but it certainly would be a colloray of the certain types of things they are discussing.

So who wants to drop what they’re doing to take on a role that is only going to last for a matter of months? They were forced to have somebody as the ID commissioner, because by law they couldn’t issue a card until they had a commissioner.

They solved the problem by coming to somebody like me, who wasn’t actually looking for a job and didn’t mind if the job actually continued or not. I’m so old and so past it that I didn’t apply for the job and wouldn’t have been willing to do it on a full-time basis, because I’ve got other things that I am committed to. They said they’d be willing for me to do it on a part-time basis if I were willing to do it on a part-time basis.

And I thought it sounded interesting. It raises tricky issues about identity and what we mean by it, and about why it is that there are growing problems of identity fraud, and growing internationalism. I’m trying to avoid [saying] globalisation, but I think it’s a bit difficult to avoid it all together. Globalisation and technology, the use of card technology, various features have lead to more and more emphasis being put on identity. People’s anxiety about borders and illegal immigration and so on and so forth.

I have relatively little background in that. I think one of the great joys of retirement is you have time to spend poking around in things you didn’t have time for when you were working. I’ve done a number of new things since I stopped work four and a bit years ago, and this was another different thing.

It’s not the summit of my career to do this. I’s something I’ve taken on to be helpful.

This entry was posted by andrew on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 23:45 and is filed under General, Neutral, UK News Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.