In European hell, the food is British, the pop music German, the police French and the civil service Italian. So Whitehall isn't culturally disposed to taking advice from Rome about running an efficient public administration.
ID cards could be an exception. The Italian government is in the process of issuing electronic multi-purpose cards to the country's population. It is promoting the card as the prototype for a continent-wide scheme, which Britain is cordially invited to join. Whether David Blunkett will welcome the invitation remains to be seen.
Italy's minister of innovation and technology, a former IBM executive called Lucio Stanca, says the national smartcard is the logical solution to administrative chaos in electronic government. "We have at least 10,000 administrations in Italy. Either we allow them each to develop their own proprietary digital authentication, or we have one national standard."
Unlike the UK, which is slipping towards the 10,000-card model, Italy chose a national standard, which will almost certainly contain a biometric ID such as a fingerprint or retina scan. About 1.5 million people have already been issued with the card in pilot schemes, Stanca says, the rest will receive them over the next five to six years.
Citizens will be charged for the card, though the amount is still under discussion. (Italians already pay five euro for their cardboard IDs, which are renewable every five years.)
The Italian government, which currently holds the EU presidency, doesn't see why the card's useful ness should stop at its borders. "We cannot have a different ID card in Spain, and France," Stanca says, "we must converge".
Sure enough, plans for standardisation feature strongly in the European Commission's first "Communication" on e-government, published by the Information Society Directorate last Monday.
One of its aims is "strengthening the internal market and European citizenship through pan-European services". A handful of cross-border services are already available, for example between Belgium and France. But in general, government services generally operate within national frontiers. The EC communication suggests that this must change, while taking into account "legal and cultural practices".
Despite this caveat, the document can expect the usual hysterical re action in the Europhobic press. Tory Eurosceptics were largely responsible for killing a national ID card when it was proposed in the mid 1990s, making much capital of the fact that the card would have to carry the 12-starred EU symbol alongside the Union Flag.
Stanca says that he understands the concerns of "Anglo Saxon people", but assumes that an ID card will be inevitable on security grounds alone. The UK starts with an advantage, he claims. "You are better off than us because you can start from a modern card."
For the Italian card, the main obstacle is money. Stanca is battling with his finance ministry for funds to roll out the project, which is slipping behind schedule. In Italy, even Silvio Berlusconi's technocrats can't always make government run on time.
