By Michael Bywater
 

THERE is the question: when it comes to information technology, do we have any confidence in the Government? Not "a lot of confidence" or "a reasonable degree of confidence". Just "any".

 The answer is, of course, "no, not really; about as much confidence as one might reasonably have in a chocolate teapot".

 It is not just a matter of the larger issues, like the imbecilic proposals for mandatory snooping on internet traffic (you watch: they'll be law before you know it, and that faint gurgling you hear will be the sound of any future this country might have had in e-commerce trickling down the plughole.)

 And don't tell me about child pornography and drug dealers, either. Child pornography and drug dealing have been going on long before the internet was even thought of. They are simply conveniently thin ends of wedges.

 If the Government - whether Labour, Conservative or anything else - was, for once, honest and said: "We are pathologically committed to the idea of secrecy and monitoring; we have the power to investigate all your private correspondence and by God we're going to use it," there would be an outcry.

 But we don't expect honesty like that from governments, who exist to deal not in what is true, but what is saleable to the electorate.

 What is really depressing is the fact that the sods can't even get the hang of disseminating neutral or even positively useful information on the net. 

For instance, last week I needed to renew my passport in a hurry. For some reason, they want your birth certificate number. Not the certificate, just the number.

 Nowhere does the documentation give any idea of how one might get that information. So what, in the year 2000, do we do?

 Correct. We try the internet. We fire up Sherlock, Apple's ridiculous multi-engine search system, which clogs up everything by flashing endless advertisements at you even though you've paid for it, and eventually find ourselves at www.ukpa.gov.uk, the website of the Passport Agency. Which is broken. It is not only the slowest-loading, messiest, naffest front page I've seen for a long time, it is broken.

 Drop-down Java nonsense, claggy roll-overs, non-functioning links (when you can get them to appear in the right place long enough to click on them) and, in the end, the Freeze of Death and a forced restart.

 I tried elsewhere, too, and guess what: everything I looked at with "gov.uk" on the end of it was equally naff, or broken, or unhelpful or just plain sad.

 If the planned snooping on our private e-mails is a scandal, then the inability of government to get together just one workable, elegant website is simply catastrophic. But that's Britain for you: all spin and froth, all Blair and Hague . . . all hat and no rabbit. Twenty-first century? No, we'll not have that here, thank you very much.