My mum — and yours too, I’m sure — used to say this: “If you’ve got nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

That’s not bad advice for six-year-olds, but I’d expect better from the government.

Yesterday, I went to a speech delivered by identity minister Meg Hillier, who was telling attendees what’s next for the contentious and expensive programme at an event hosted by think tank the Social Market Forum.

She admitted that the government has had some communication issues with the card roll out, saying it would have been “much better if we talked to people before we made an announcement.”

“Please, feed in your ideas,” she pleaded.

The thing is, I don’t think she wants my ideas. I don’t think she wants the ideas of anyone who doesn’t like the cards. I don’t think she nor the Labour government want feedback from critics — be they campaigners like NO2ID or opposition government parties or people who simply don’t like big databases. I think she and her party only want to hear “nice” things.

I say this because she then accused people against the scheme of using the government’s two year failure to talk about ID cards to “scaremonger.”

A few moments later, a Social Market Forum plant in the audience lobbed a softball of a question at Hillier, accusing critics of “paranoia”.

Hillier noted that the public is “happy to share [personal data] if you trust the system and see some personal value.” She couldn’t seem to understand why we the public are happy to unthinkingly hand our data to Amazon or PayPal, but balk at giving it to her government, despite frequent data losses.

With a tone suggesting she thought the headlines a bit unfair, she said: “Every time a data stick is lost it’s a big deal.” She also suggested the media were being unfair in their description of the scheme, saying she’s “never ever read an article that doesn’t call them the government’s ‘controversial’ ID cards”. (I’ve since decided to use “contentious.” I hope she appreciates it.)

And when one man asked a question about the prospect of being fined or even jailed for not updating the ID card database if you move — which is part of the current legislation — he was scoffed at and mocked by the people standing around me at the back of the room, who were clearly working the event, though it wasn’t clear if they were with SMF or the Identity and Passport Service or something else.

One lady wrote “NO2ID” on her notepad and showed it to her friends, clearly expecting a response, like it was a joke. Another man with an IPS badge couldn’t stop grinning like a fool and looking around for someone to join in with him every time a negative question was asked (I don’t think he realised I was a journalist, despite the notepad). Others flitted around passing notes, showing notebooks with messages on them to each other. It was hard to focus for all the whispering. I felt like I was back in school.

What did I gather from this? The government and its think tanks don’t think much of dissent. They don’t respect your opinion, not if it differs from their own. They don’t want your feedback, unless it’s “nice.”

This differs quite a bit from what the Identity Card Commissioner — who sadly didn’t appear to be at the event — told me a few weeks back. While his office may turn out to be a fairly toothless watchdog, he feels it necessary to talk to critics:

[If] I listen to people who are against the whole thing and get them to tell me why they are against the whole thing, that helps me to decide where to put my effort to scrutinise the system…They certainly are people who have thought about it more than most people… Therefore one wants to hear for oneself what they have to say because it helps to decide what your priorities should be when you scrutinise the whole scheme.

He later added this, in a lesson the government should learn, of the scheme:

It deserves to be scrutinised not just by me but by people completely outside the system altogether.

Right now, when it comes to ID cards, the government isn’t listening to people’s concerns. But come the May general election, I suspect the message will become harder to ignore.

On behalf of admitted hacker Gary McKinnnon, London mayor Boris Johnson wrote in yesterday’s Telegraph an open letter of sorts to the new American president, Barack Obama.

Johnson was laying out an argument for why McKinnon shouldn’t be extradited to the US to face hacking and even terrorism charges, for sneaking into NASA and Pentagon systems just a short while after September 11, which if nothing else, was a pretty stupid thing to do.

Johnson makes the usual arguments — McKinnon is crazy, he has Asperger’s, he was hunting UFOs, he did no damage, it was easy, aliens really do exist — none of which seem very good reasons to dodge the law, but then, I also don’t think McKinnon’s really likely to do much harm to the world if he’s left out of prison, so who really cares?

Johnson does, clearly, taking time away from his busy role as leader of one of the world’s largest, most demanding cities at a time of crisis in its leading economic market to defend McKinnon with an alien-joke filled rant.

But to ask Obama, he who is busy saving the world and all that, to step in? Surely Johnson is kidding? Referring to McKinnon’s case, he writes: “There is one last piece of neocon lunacy that needs to be addressed, and Mr Obama could sort it out at the stroke of a pen.”

I’m not sure Obama has that power, but even so, I am pretty sure he has a whole big massive bloody freaking huge list of neocon lunacies that still need sorting. Eight years worth, in fact.

Once he’s finished sorting out the Middle East, saving the US and world economies, shutting down Guantanamo Bay, and overturning other, uh… issues left by the last administration, there’s the US healthcare and education systems that need a look-in, too.

No wonder then, that Obama’s inauguration speech asked people to take responsibility for their own lives, and maybe McKinnon, Johnson and the UK powers-that-be should do the same. It’s time the UK courts and government made a decision on this seven-year-old case and either ship McKinnon across the pond for his trial or finally refuse to extradite him, thereby taking it out of Obama’s busy hands. Why is Johnson demanding action from another government when he could just as easily demand it from his own?

Besides, it’s highly unlikely (in my opinion, and I’m no lawyer) that McKinnon will be sentenced to the oft-quoted 70 years in prison — and even if he does, at least he doesn’t have to worry about ending up in Gitmo anymore…

Last month, I wrote a