Since I called yesterday for a Conservative MP to be hanged in Parliament Square, let’s redress the imbalance this afternoon by regurgitating a Conservative Party press release practically verbatim.

It concerns a little remarked-on side effect of the national ID card scheme which will make life a small misery for tens of thousands of people in rural and outlying areas of the country, and particularly Scotland. I hand you over to my Tory puppet-masters lizard controllers friends from Central Office:

Everyone will have to travel to a biometric scan centre to have their biometrics taken. There are 11 centres planned in Scotland: Aberdeen, Dumfries, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, Kilmarnock, Oban, Selkirk, Stirling and Wick. This could result in people travelling hundreds of miles at great cost to visit their nearest biometric centre, this is on top of the £93 cost of the ID card itself.

With just about 5 million people in Scotland, the bean counters have decided in their wisdom that these 11 processing centres will be plenty. (Anyone who’s ever had to queue in the rain at the passport office in Glasgow may take a different view.) But what may look sufficient on paper takes on a rather more depressing air when you sit down and work out what it will mean for ordinary people.

In actual fact someone (I forget who) crunched the numbers of processing centres per head of population a couple of years back and came up with some pretty startling conclusions. Now that the centres have been earmarked, we can see just how much extra hassle and difficulty the government plan to put you to when they take your fingerprints.

For someone in Gordon Brown’s constituency in Fife, for example, the process of going to Edinburgh to get your biometrics scanned will merely be intrusive, time-consuming and tedious. But for many others, it will be downright ridiculous. If you live in beautiful Campbeltown, for example, the round trip to your nearest processing centre, which is in Oban, is a full 174 miles – a trip of nearly 5 hours (on a good day). In fact, the geography of Scotland is such that tens, even hundreds of thousands of people are going to find that going to get their biometrics recorded is a real imposition. (The same is, of course, true of the rest of the UK, as well.)

The true insanity of the scheme is demonstrated most starkly by the fate that awaits the good people of Orkney and Shetland – some 40,000 souls in all. There are apparently to be no processing centres for ID cards on the islands – any of the Scottish islands, as far as I can see – and so every single inhabitant of Orkney, Shetland and all the others is going to have to go to the mainland to be registered.

The nearest centre is in Wick, which is nearly 200 miles away from Shetland. But it's not too difficult to get there. From Shetland's capital, Lerwick, simply hop on a ferry to Kirkwall in Orkney (7 and a half hours), then it's a short bus transfer to Burwick (45 minutes), a ferry across to John O'Groats (45 minutes) and another bus to Wick (about an hour). But make sure you don't show up at lunchtime; there's usually a queue.

OK, I'm being a wee bit disingenuous. You can fly to Aberdeen in only an hour. Why not book flights for yourself, your spouse and two kids and make a wee holiday of it (if a day in Aberdeen can be called a holiday)? Well, the bad news is that if you want to go next Monday, Expedia are currently quoting £1,236.80 for the privilege of taking your family to be barcoded. All of which puts the cost of ID cards in stark perspective. Still, it's cheaper than not going at all; a fine of up to £1000, denial of access to government services and all the rest of it. No, suck it up, citizen; this is the future, and there are no exceptions for the old, the infirm, the sick and the lame.

I’d suggest, at the risk of teetering on the brink of Godwin’s Law, that it would be appropriate if they laid on special trains to take us to be processed, but I doubt the fucking things would run on time.

Why do we put up with these people?