Unbelievable.

Remember that these people want to record your personal details on a massive database. Not someone else's: yours.

Do you trust them to do so? And if so, why?

THURSDAY AFTERNOON UPDATE: Astonishingly, it doesn't stop there. Dr Crippen has more on the MTAS affair, which started as a standard government cock-up and has mushroomed into a major scandal that would, in any other walk of life, see heads roll.

MTAS is the Medical Training Application Service, which is supposed to simplify the process of applying for junior doctor jobs. MTAS is all shiny, centralised and automated, so naturally, like everything Patsy touches, it has turned into a monumental, steaming fiasco; a giddy, full-scale, balls-out Mongolian clusterfuck of galactic proportions.

It has emerged that any candidate for a junior doctor's position can read the correspondence of any other candidate to and from MTAS. They can do this simply by going into their inbox and changing the message number displayed in the URL field.

Just stop and think about that for a moment. If I could access someone else's internet banking simply by changing the account number in the requested field, someone at RBS would be fired by close of business. In no other field of endeavour is incompetence and waste so routinely shrugged off as par for the course as it seems to be in the governance of the country.

Imagine a pile of shit so large it could be seen from space: the air black with flies for miles in every direction, rivulets of stinking liquefied effluvium wending their way from the base of the huge cack-heap into every nook and cranny of this land; an all-pervading stench so horrendous that it put families from Inverness to Exeter off their food. Wouldn't you expect someone to clean it up? Wouldn't you expect the arses that had deposited this great heap of filth to at least acknowledge their part in creating it? Instead, Patsy tells us that "fewer beds are a sign of success", that the NHS has just enjoyed its "best ever year" (presumably 2007 is already on course to be a fucking triumph), and that MTAS is the best thing since banana Nesquik.

It's 4:30pm as I write this: Patsy's probably knocked off for the evening; gone to her constituency to chug back some rubber chicken and shake a few hands, then back home for a well-deserved glass of Chablis, and maybe an episode of Scrubs (for research on how hospitals work - you know). Meanwhile, spending on the NHS IT system is predicted to hit £20 billion, NHS trusts are getting hospitals to unscrew every third lightbulb to save money, and junior doctors are sitting with cups of coffee reading rival candidates' application forms. (Evening update: the website has now been suspended.)

I repeat: if you believe that the government will bring in ID cards competently, securely and within budget, in God's name, why?