The sacking of the sixth fingerprint specialist at the heart of the Shirley McKie case will perhaps be one of the final chapters of this long and wretched affair. This case has demonstrated beyond doubt that biometric identification is not infallible. Problems arise even when forensic specialists working in laboratory conditions, without significant time pressures, have access to recent full-rolled prints from a cooperative suspect. Surely no-one in Scotland can now believe anyone who claims that partial fingerprints, scanned and matched by computer in seconds against a database of ageing prints, could ever be a "gold standard" of identification.

Moreover, this case all too clearly shows the devastating effect that misidentification can have on an innocent person wrongly accused.

The Home Office is planning to take the fingerprints of every resident in Britain, including the many law-abiding citizens who have never been convicted of any crime. It proposes to allow the police to use these records to find matches against the, often unclear, prints obtained from crime scenes. If allowed to do this, there will be many more failures of identification, with the consequent risk of miscarriages of justice. Furthermore, most of those accused will probably not be serving police officers with the strength and determination to clear their names in court battles lasting for the best part of a decade.

Technologically-illiterate government ministers have been dazzled by consultants into believing that immature biometric technology could be a panacea. They should try to forget about the technology and their shiny new databases and consider what really happened in the Shirley McKie case. Then they must abandon their plans to force the population to submit to biometric data-rape. Now is an ideal time for Labour to abandon the ID scheme, potentially one of Blair's most enduring follies.

Geraint Bevan, NO2ID Scotland, 3e Grovepark Gardens, Glasgow.