Who would have thought it, the Department of Health is encouraging NHS organisations “to accelerate creation of summary care records (SCRs), with the aim of having them in place for most patients by 2013-14″. And 9m records have already been uploaded. This is a miracle.

At the general election 18 months ago, both Conservatives and LibDems were equating the SCR with the satanic identity card as a monstrous unmanageable database, and were vowing to abolish it. (And when they came to power as the coalition, they did abolish the identity card.) For some years before, Dr Ross Anderson of Cambridge University had been campaigning against the SCR on security grounds, and had won the ear of the British Medical Association. A bit later, Dr Trisha Greenhalgh wrote a magisterial academic report on the SCR’s shortcomings. With the government, academia and the BMA against it, the SCR was clearly doomed.

Yet, here we are, 18 months later, with government ministers saying how important the SCR is to patient care. And 70% of out of hours doctors say it enhances patient safety. What has happened to create this U-turn?

The cynics will say that the SCR project has cost so much that it has to be continued. Another version is that the nay-sayers have not come up with an alternative to the SCR – as nay-sayers habitually fail to do – and so ministers have decided to go with the devil that has already been paid for, rather than launch a whole new scheme from scratch.

I sometimes feel I am on my own in arguing that the Summary Care Record, handled properly, would increase my own safety and that of most other patients. I see myself as a gallant little fighter against the serried ranks of clinical SCR-naysayers, security obsessives and 19th century-style doctor/patient confidentiality ostriches.

A certain kind of right-winger fits the riots into the pattern of moral and social decline that she imagines has afflicted British society since the 1950s … Vicars blame materialism. I … rail against identity-obscuring head and facewear and am inclined to demand more CCTV and a rethink of the scrapping of identity cards.

However, Mr Aaronovitch is the only one to say that identity cards might somehow be relevant here.

One of the first coalition policies to be announced in 2010 was a plan to grant anonymity to men accused of committing rape. This had not been a policy in either the Tory of Liberal Democrat manifesto, and yet appeared to be cooked up by the cabal of eight white men who drew up the coalition agreement. Mercifully, with a lot of lobbying from women MPs and women’s organisations the plans were dropped. Women do not seem to be safe however, as, month after month, new proposals are introduced which threaten to turn back the clock on women’s rights, and even our safety, with alarming consequences.

The latest announcement is that the government will force police to stop holding the DNA of those arrested for rape, but not charged. The naive presumption, one assumes, is that the government believes if you are not charged you are therefore not guilty. However, Ed Miliband highlighted at PMQs this week, that of the 5,000 every year who are arrested but not charged, many of them go on to reoffend, only being caught because their DNA is stored on the national database. Given the disgracefully low rape attrition and conviction rates in this country, nothing must be done that limits or decreases the numbers of men being convicted and sent to prison. The government’s policy would do precisely that.

Thousands of DNA profiles could soon be erased from the police database – despite officers using it to solve countless serious crimes.

A judgement by the European Court of Human Rights ruled that it was illegal for the Government to keep the DNA details of those arrested – but not convicted – for an offence.

But critics say that without the database there would be thousands more unsolved crimes – and cases such as the rape and murder of Sally Anne Bowman would never have been solved.

In the ten years up to 2009 there were more than 304,000 crimes detected where a DNA match played a part.

He then lists “some of the convictions for serious crimes that might not have been solved if the DNA database we have today did not exist.

Philip Davies, Conservative MP for Shipley, West Yorkshire, gets a side-bar comment:

MY concern is that the Government is going in completely the wrong direction on law and order.

I have not yet been aware of any innocent person adversely affected by having their details on the DNA database. Actually, rather than impinge on freedoms, it enhances our freedoms.

The rapists, murderers and other criminals brought to justice by DNA – these people being taken off the street enhances my freedom.

Why on earth the Conservative Party would want to try to take people off the DNA database, Lord only knows.

It is total madness. They are in danger of making a massive mistake.

How many millions of hard earned tax payers’ money will be spent trying to catch Jo Yeates’s killer?

Hopefully nowhere near as many as the millions that were squandered in apprehending the wrong man in the Rachel Nickell murder case, before the real killer was finally caught – and only after he had killed again.

In the Nickell case, the police finally got their man after trapping him with a scrap of DNA. And we can only pray that the savage murderer who took the life of the young landscape architect from Bristol will be swiftly snared in the same way – but what if the police don’t have his DNA?

Hasn’t the time now come for everyone’s DNA to be stored on a national register – rather than, as is the case at present, just the samples taken from criminals or suspects?

In plain and simple terms, that means every person living in this country should, by law, be required to give a sample which would then be held on a database accessed only by law enforcement authorities.

He concludes:

And if you object? Well, I’m just wondering what you’ve got to hide.