Simon Davies, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE), says he has lost valuable consultancy work and seen his income fall to below £10,000 a year as a result of ministers’ repeated personal attacks.
After he contributed to research published last May, which estimated that ID cards would cost £300 per person rather than the £93 claimed by ministers, he was branded “highly partisan” by Charles Clarke, the home secretary.
Clarke also called the findings by Davies and other academics “technically incompetent” and “fabricated”. Since then, Davies has faced repeated criticism from ministers, including Tony Blair during prime minister’s questions in the Commons last month.
“I have been hit very hard by this,” said Davies this weekend. “I have been hounded. I could imagine that an academic who is subjected to attacks of this kind could do something stupid. This shows that the government has made clear that if any academic challenges government policy, it will take off the gloves.
“I can understand how David Kelly must have felt. When I first heard what Clarke had said about me, I was devastated.”
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Kelly, an Iraq weapons inspector, killed himself in an Oxfordshire wood in July 2003. His name had been leaked as the source of a BBC news report that Alastair Campbell, then the government’s communications director, had “sexed up” intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction before it was published. Kelly had also faced harsh questioning from the Commons foreign affairs select committee.
Davies has been backed by the director of the LSE, Sir Howard Davies, a former chairman of the Financial Services Authority, who said his complaints to Tony Blair about the treatment of the academic and the LSE had been ignored.
“Independent academics have done their best to produce costing for the scheme and the report has been dismissed,” he said. “This is brutal politics because ministers are desperate to win the vote on identity cards.”
The LSE analysis has been cited by critics of the government’s bill for a national identity scheme. The plan is opposed by some Labour backbenchers as well as the Tories and Liberal Democrats. It was defeated by a majority of 81 in the House of Lords where it was argued that parliament should be given details of the scheme’s costs before being allowed a vote. It is due to return to the Commons.
Blair last week agreed a compromise that new legislation would be introduced before the cards became compulsory. Ministers have refused to reveal the findings of a new official study of the cost, conducted by consultants KPMG.
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Simon Davies, who works part-time for the LSE and depends on earnings from outside consultancy, said the attacks on him by ministers meant many companies would no longer employ him as a consultant.
As a result, his income has halved and he has had to move from a rented house to a bedsit in London. The lack of space has meant he has even had to give away Buster, his german shepherd dog.
Davies was one of a group of academics at the LSE whose investigation found the costs of the national identity card scheme would be as much as £19 billion — three times the government’s initial estimate.
When the report was published, Clarke immediately launched a virulent attack on the report, its authors and on Davies personally.
“Simon Davies is coming from a highly partisan position. He has put in a set of very questionable assumptions,” said Clarke on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
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He said the report was a “technically incompetent piece of work” and claimed the LSE had “refused to allow anyone from the Home Office into any of their discussions whatsoever”.
Clarke’s intervention opened a bitter row between the government and the LSE, once seen as a centre of the “third way” philosophy that shaped new Labour. In their attacks on Davies, ministers — including Baroness Scotland, the Lords leader, as well as Blair and Clarke — have highlighted Davies’s role as a director of Privacy International, a human rights group.
Sir Howard Davies has accused the Home Office of using “bullying and intimidation” in its attack on the LSE’s work. He wrote to Blair following his comments last month in defence of the academic, pointing out he was one of about 60 who had contributed to the report.
“It is quite wrong to suggest he (Davies) is the sole author of the report,” he said. “I would also question the assumption that an interest in civil liberty necessarily means that one is biased when producing an estimate of costs.”