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I know the Lib Dems are always on about how terrible it is that other parties plagiarise our own policies and take the credit, and I thoroughly approve of today's "Making it Happen" announcement and policy document at least as to direction. But might I humbly suggest that when our people are scrambling around in the bowels of government looking for these savings that seem to have been promised by every aspiring government since Nebuchadnezzar they could do a lot worse than to shamelessly borrow these fellow travellers' ideas on demolishing the QUANGOcracy.

There. £64bn savings. Done!

Tristan points us to companies we might like to boycott who are now on he shortlist for contracts related to the ID cards and database:

ID Cards - companies to boycott:

El Reg gives us the list of companies able to bid for the ID cards contracts.
They are:

Accenture - BAE Systems - CSC - EDS - Fujitsu - IBM - Steria - Thales

Other ways to fight the ID card madness

But it got me thinking. Perhaps rather than just boycotting companies whose products, let's face it, most of us are unlikely to come into direct contact with other than IBM's (and even then having got rid of laptops to Lenovo probably not them), perhaps we should be more active. Perhaps we should start a campaign of mass action against senior officers of these companies, and major shareholders where appropriate. Like what the animal rights activists are doing but without the threats and violence.

After all, I would have thought that there are sound commercial reasons not to get involved. If a national ID cards scheme goes ahead there will be less scope for competition for creating computerised trust mechanisms in future. Of course the ones that get the contract will be in the money - at least until costs spiral and they get squeezed as with the NHS systems - but the losers will be locked out of ID and trust type systems for as long as the national scheme operates I'd suggest.

PS - I see from my logs that this post has made it onto some Accenture daily list of "negative" comments about them .  Good!  But to set your minds at rest, what I mean by "mass action" is shareholder action, using any influence we have in other organizations to get them not to do business with the companies who hope to be involved with the ID Cards, persuading like minded antiID card employees to not get involved and so on.  NOT Speak style attacks on executives, oh dearie me no!

The architect that put the windmill on Cameron's Notting Hill pad is proposing an idea to build artificial islands in the tropics to harness the natural energy that exists in those latitudes to produce electricity.  For a while now I've been interested in something similar, but subtly different - the idea that if we could harness just a tiny proportion of the solar energy that reaches the earth we could solve all our energy needs.

From a distance it looks like an island paradise, but get closer and those tall structures that could be palm trees turn out to be wind turbines - and the surf laps against wave barrages instead of sandy beaches. Welcome to "Energy Island", a vision of how humans could help meet our future needs for energy, food and water using the power of nature in the tropics.

Alex Michaelis, the architect who gave David Cameron's west London home a green makeover - complete with miniature wind turbine, solar panels and water recycling system - will launch the concept this year with a bid for funding worth $25m (£12.6m) from Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Earth Prize.

His proposal, which is dramatically more ambitious than the work he did on the Conservative leader's semi-detached house, is to build archipelagos of artificial islands that will produce electricity, clean water and even food in the belt of warm water that passes from the Caribbean across to the south China Sea, the Indian Ocean and west Africa.

When I suggested using giant solar power stations to produce electricity in the Sahara the most common objection was the transmission losses that would incur transporting that power to where it was needed.  So I developed my idea a bit.  My solar power stations would not produce electricity, but take sea water and turn it into hydrogen for fuel cells.  This hydrogen would be the thing that was transported to power hungry parts of the world, probably by ships themselves powered by fuel cells, and there used in its raw form for motor engines, but also turned into electricity for the grid closer to its destination and so with less transmission loss.

Maybe I should apply for the Branson money?