What's weird about the latest Home Office announcement on ID cards is not the mendacity. One gets used to that. It is its pretence simultaneously at calm and radical change.

Let us be clear: there is no radical change in this announcement, a compulsory identity card trial for airside workers due to start in September has been abandoned by the new home secretary but for the rest of us the Home Office line remains the same. No compulsion (as the Home Office means the term) was going to be applied until almost everyone had volunteered, and it was only a matter of rounding a minority of resisters and marginalised people.

The Home Office's idea of voluntary is not the same as yours and mine.

Since 2004, and in petto before, the object of the exercise has been for the scheme to have "parasitic vitality", for it to be a vampire on the body politic. It was – and is – to proceed by one-by-one "designating" under the Identity Cards Act other documents issued by official bodies, primarily passports.

Once a document has been designated, you won't be able to apply for one without also applying to be entered, for life, on the national identity register. If you don't it won't be that you have been refused (say) a passport; you'd have voluntarily decided not to apply. There's no compulsion to have a passport. It is useful for travelling. But you aren't compelled to travel.

Or to drive. Or to work as a security guard. Or with children. Or in healthcare. To get parole from prison. To practice as a lawyer. Any official licence, registration certificate or permit can be designated, and – by the home office's lights – handing control of your identity to the Home Office's Identity and Passport Service will be entirely voluntary.

That they were due for a confrontation with the airside worker's unions over designating new passes at Manchester and City Airports is an illustration of just how voluntary "voluntary" really is. But the fact they have now ducked that fight for political convenience suggests we can say, no. We just have to unveil the fraud of no compulsion first.