I was out of the country during the Labour Party conference, so it wasn’t until this week I found out about the funniest and certainly most ironic part of the event.

It seems one of the biggest cheers during Gordon Brown’s keynote speech came when he said that ID cards would not be made compulsory.

Put aside for now the fact that home secretary Alan Johnson already said the same thing a few months ago, and that the government has always been at pains to stress that compulsion was only a long-term option if take-up proved sufficient.

The greatest irony was that it comes to something when the party that dreamt up the idea of identity cards cheers its leader for saying that it won’t make its own policy compulsory.

There can be only one conclusion: please, someone, just put the ID cards scheme out of its misery while you can.

That’s not meant as a political statement – I’ve never had a problem in principle with ID cards; most European countries have them, after all. But the whole programme has been such a botched job from start to finish that it’s better to scrap the whole thing and start again. For once, this wouldn’t waste taxpayers' money, since much of the work that has already taken place is to support biometric passports, a project which is going to continue and does have some purpose.

We already know that a future Tory government would scrap ID cards forthwith, and if even Labour members cheer the fact they won’t be made to have one, then you have to wonder what is the point.

Labour have mucked this one up from the start. The cards were always going to be controversial, but the initial justification that they would help prevent terrorism was literally blown apart by the 7/7 Tube bombings in London, carried out by men that would have been perfectly eligible to hold a UK ID card.

Since then, the government has changed its rationale for the cards time and again, most recently coming to the conclusion that people will simply want to have one so they can prove their identities, even though they will not be a mandatory proof of identity for receiving public services.

There’s bound to a be an enthusiastic minority who go out and buy one, but what purpose will that serve?

The disappointment is that the concept could have been so much better, and actually serve a valuable purpose. At some point, it will become increasingly important to have a gold standard for authentication of our electronic identity, as more and more commercial and public service transactions take place online. Just this week, new figures show that banking fraud rose 55 per cent in the first six months of this year, stressing the importance of tackling identity theft.

An internet-enabled society will need a proper means of identity management, one that benefits citizens not monitors them. But the current half-baked scheme is not that means, and the sooner it is scrapped or radically re-thought, the better,