Andrew Grice writes in the Inependent:

Ed Miliband has much more than winning the Labour leadership in his sights. He is convinced he can complete the first realignment in British politics since the Social Democratic Party of David Owen and Roy Jenkins left Labour in 1981.

“There is a progressive majority in this country; we did not secure enough of it at this year’s election,” he told The Independent. “I am uniquely well placed to heal the split there was in 1981 with the SDP, and win back people from the Liberal Democrats to Labour.

“We have seen half of a realignment of politics, with what Cameron has done with Clegg. The other half can happen with me as Labour leader, because I think I can offer a home to former Liberal Democrats and bring together a social democratic economic policy, redistribution, greater equality and putting individual liberty at the centre of who we are.”

Why is he so well qualified? Because he shares the Liberal Democrats’ agenda on civil liberties, ID cards, the detention of terrorist suspects without charge and university tuition fees, he replies. “The Liberal Democrats are on a journey. Clegg is taking them in a direction a lot of Lib Dem supporters are deeply dismayed about,” he said.

“I offer a home for Liberal Democrat voters in which they don’t have to trade abolition of ID cards for a reactionary assault on the welfare state, and they can be true to their values on both civil liberties and economic policy.”

Meanwhile Nicholas Watt, writing in the Guardian, reports David Miliband’s somewhat ambiguous comments on Labour’s ID card policy:

David Miliband makes it clear that Labour has to reassemble the coalition that handed Blair his victories. In an interview with G2, which took place during a tour of community groups in Milton Keynes and Stevenage, he says: “Unless we start winning back the Milton Keynes, we’ll never win power. We’ve got just 10 seats out of 212 in the south, excluding London.”

He makes clear he has no patience with his brother’s criticism of the governments of Blair and Gordon Brown. “I’m not going to run away from the best of what we’ve done over the last 13 years and I’m not going to reduce our crime policy to ID cards, or reduce our foreign policy to Iraq. We did lots of other things as well. We shouldn’t get into a situation where just because we find one thing people disagree with, we trash the whole of it.”

David Jarvis and Matthew Davis write in the Sunday Express:

Town hall snoops have been caught red-handed using the DVLA’s database to spy on people.

The Big Brother tactics emerged after councils were given the green light to use DVLA car registration records, strictly to track down owners of abandoned vehicles.

Instead, and in breach of the rules, “inflated” bureaucrats have been checking up on residents suspected of offences that have nothing to do with motoring.

As a result, several councils have been banned from accessing the database.

Scores more have received warnings after serious breaches were uncovered.

An audit of 155 of the 432 local authorities allowed to use the database showed that the DVLA’s system was accessed 750 times a day in the 2009/10 financial year.

However, it was discovered that ­councils were using the system to track down people for a variety of offences including horse fouling, littering and owning out-of-control dogs.

Apparently:

The barred authorities are Nottingham City and Ashfield in Nottinghamshire; Corby in Northamptonshire; Brighton and Hove, Hastings and Lewes, all in East Sussex; Elmbridge in Surrey; Hull in East Yorkshire; Tower Hamlets in east London; Blackpool in Lancashire; Bedford in Bedfordshire and Stroud, Gloucestershire.

Brian Wheeler writes on the BBC web site:

The pressure to make efficiency savings by any means possible – and the fear of expensive legal action from IT suppliers if contracts are cancelled means that some big IT schemes conceived by Labour are going ahead as planned.

For example, a huge scheme to transfer all medical records in England on to a central database – criticised by the Conservatives and Lib Dems when they were in opposition – is being rolled-out despite concerns from some GPs that patient trust will be compromised.

But alarm bells really began to ring for civil liberties’ campaigners when Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude and Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander unveiled the head of the coalition’s new Efficiency and Reform group, which is likely to play a crucial role driving through massive cuts in public spending across government departments.

Football fans will know Ian Watmore as the former chief executive of the FA, but in a former life, as a top civil servant under Tony Blair, he was the prime mover behind “transformational government”, Labour’s controversial plan to allow public sector workers to share data on individuals.

When it was launched in 2005, this was seen as the key to making big savings in the delivery of public services. It never grabbed headlines in the way that ID cards did, but to civil liberties campaigners it represented just as big a threat.

Mark Ballard writes in Computer Weekly:

The number of public sector workers caught snooping on personal records in the government’s largest citizen database continues to grow, with the total now 225 – and the true figure could be higher still.

Yet another employee has been sacked for accessing records on the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Customer Information System (CIS), which holds the personal details of almost everyone in the country. With more than 90 million records, it is thought to be the largest public sector database in Europe.

The latest addition to the growing number of staff caught snooping comes from the Northern Ireland Department for Social Development (DSDNI), which said in answer to a Freedom of Information request that it had disciplined 45 people for viewing personal records in the DWP CIS database since January 2007.

Some 225 government staff are now known to have abused their right to access CIS in their job. Workers at numerous local authorities and courts have been disciplined for looking up the personal details of people – usually celebrities or acquaintances – when they had no business justification for doing so.

According to the BBC:

The government has admitted missing its target of scrapping ID cards within 100 days of coming to office.

In May, in one of the coalition’s first acts, Home Secretary Theresa May said the bill to abolish the cards would become law by August.

But ministers ran out of time to get it on to the statute books before MPs began their summer recess.

The bill will now begin its report stage on 15 September with Royal Assent expected “later this year”.

However:

Phil Booth, national co-ordinator of campaign group No2ID, said he was not unduly concerned by the delay.

He told BBC News: “I’d far rather the coalition took the time and effort necessary to abolish the ID scheme properly than it hustled something as shoddy and inadequate as the original draft of the Identity Documents Bill onto the statute books, just for a quick and easy headline.

“Let’s hope that the delay is an indication that they are taking the flaws in the Bill seriously.

“Rather than criticising them for missing an arbitrary deadline, let’s hope we’ll be able to applaud the coalition for ultimately doing a proper job – even if it does take them a little more time.

“No one, least of all NO2ID, wants to be left with unfinished business on the ID front.”