Particularly in reference to the ID card issue, but relevant also to the creeping pervasion of deleterious architectures of control and their sanction by governments, a nice quote from a Guardian article:

“Merlin Erroll (the Earl of Erroll, a hereditary cross-bench peer) is the founder of telephony company VoiceXchange and the most vocal IT champion in the House of Lords.

He puts it more forcibly: “If no members of either house know anything about IT, then bureaucrats will take control of our lives, or pretend they can do things they can’t.””

Now I’d go further and replace ‘IT’ with ‘technology’ in general, and it clearly isn’t just a UK problem.