For those readers who fail to have the good fortune to be born UK citizens or subjects, the current goings on over the putative introduction of ID cards must seem odd in the extreme. Our government has been trying to force the blasted things upon us for years now. First calling them 'entitlement cards' - suggesting that we are illegitimate if we do not carry one and shouldn't be able to avail ourselves of the ill formed services currently provided. Next owning up in public as to their identity role and threatening to charge us £350 for the privilege of affirming our existence.

In a bizarre twist the legislation bringing in ID cards seems to have thrown up something very peculiar. It seems that in the new bill designed to combat illegal immigration, the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill Section 25 (Proof of Right of Abode), currently going through the legislative system, amends the Immigration Act 1971's list of the documents that can be used as proof of right of abode when entering the UK by adding: "an ID card issued under the Identity Cards Act 2006 describing him as a British citizen" and "an ID card issued under that Act describing him as a British subject with the right of abode in the United Kingdom".

Eh... "The Identity Cards act of 2006", that be the one that was voted through with a 97% majority in the post reform single parliamentary chamber will it?

This development, where governments (and the EU) justify legislation X, with reference to legislation Y where Y has no legal existence, but merely is something that the legislating authority would wish to exist is becoming quite common. The classic case in point is that of  the EU Constitution, so effectively described by my fellow Brussels Journalist Dan Hannan, but it seems that our national government is rapidly catching on.