Depress yourself with this:
The Home Office is spending hundreds of thousands of pounds recruiting a PR team to sell the benefits of compulsory identity cards before legislation for the scheme has been before Parliament.
It is advertising for a head of marketing on a salary of up to £66,000 to promote the ID scheme not only to the public but to MPs and public sector groups. Legislation enabling the Government to set up a population database containing the details of every citizen and to begin issuing ID cards in three years is due to be included in the next Queen’s Speech.
From 2007, all new passports and drivers’ licences will double as ID cards. By the time they have been issued to 80 per cent of the country, Parliament will be asked to make the scheme compulsory for all. A programme team has been set up to mastermind the plan, including the testing of the biometric identifiers, such as iris prints, that will be included on the cards.
I recently defended democracy here, but this is its ugly side. I mean, if a majority gets to vote, and if out of that emerges a guy who wants us all to have these ID card things, and if most people have them anyway … what the hell, right? The difference between eighty and a hundred is, democratically, insignificant. But when it comes to liberty, that difference is all the difference.
TO: Brian Micklethwait
RE: I’m Waiting….
…for the little microchip in my fourth-point-of-contact.
And I INSIST on chosing my own de-humanizing CUID; CBP 4718, in honor of George Lucas’ great inde scifi film.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
I still remember meeting at least two separate victims of German World War II camps in elementary/middle school.
They had numbers tatooed on their arms as permanent reminders of the treatment they endured.
I don’t want to come near the end of my days with the same practice in a different form.
What is the correct name for a fascist dictatorship, run by a committee rather than an individual?….surely it cannot be ‘NuLabour’?
Curious, isn’t it, that this is being hustled through before the end of a parliament, and that the public and parliamentarians have scarcely yet been asked about it.
Indeed, one of the jobs of the seconded executive concerned will be to lobby MPs and Lords. You can read the ad here.
I’m depressed too… But if you don’t like it Brian, there’s still just about enough liberty left to allow us to fight it. You can join NO2ID.
>> I recently defended democracy here, but this is its ugly side
What has this to do with democracy? We may live in a supposedly democratic state, but this ID card scheme has never been put before the people for endorsement, nor their representatives, so the ID card has not been democratically ‘tested’ and has no connection with democracy. The ID card scheme will be presented to the people’s representatives one day, probably on a 3-line whip (will they still be called whips if hunting is banned?), and it may be passed, but it will still not be a democratically endorsed law.
It is fundamentally not possible to have a democracy where the representatives are controlled by a higher power than the electorate as is the case in Britain. Democracy has its flaws, and any democracy that does not include explicit means to respect and guarantee the rights of minorities is worthless, but irrepective of the potential flaws in democracy it is a fallacy to believe that we have one in Britain.
We have a Parliamentary Democracy, which has come over time with the increased dominance of Party to mean that we get to select the Party we most want to govern our state rather than who we would like to represent us – probably the weakest form of personal representation that can be achieved by a state while still claiming to have a democratic process. We will not and cannot have democracy in Britain until the concept and practice of ‘Party’ is eliminated from the legislature.
All that notwithstanding, while I hate the idea of ID cards I am not especially afraid of them in Britain. Our ineffectiveness in deploying national IT schemes means that the information associated with my ID will probably be unavailable when needed or obviously incorrect and of no value. We can generally rely on the inefficiency of the state to limit its’ attempts to govern us. If the state gets its’ act together on IT then I will be really worried, by the time these ID cards are deployed, complete with the iris scan data etc., it will probably be possible to read an iris pattern on a digital cctv camera from 30M, so it perhaps not the ID cards that pose a threat to our liberty so much as the data the state wishes to capture.
craggy_steve –
I agree re. the State’s incompetence when implementing large-scale IT projects. That will be what ultimately defeats Obergruppenfuhrer von Blunkett’s scheme. However I don’t think we can rely on this situation lasting.
The neutered dogs in Parliament who supposedly represent us won’t raise too many objections once a Bill is ready so the only defence will be our own i.e. mass civil disobedience in refusing to possess a card.
Pete_London is right that civil disobedience is called for in this case. But be careful:
My passport expires in 2008. It would be a funny co-incidence if it went missing some time in, oh, 2006.
The most worrying thing of course is that people are voluntarily having their children chipped. How could you do such a thing?
Rob
That would be most unethical and out of order. Thanks for the reminder.
AID
I’ve mentioned the chipping of young children to friends whilst doing the propping up of the bar on a Friday night thing. All express shrieks of horror and outrage but I just know vast numbers of people will still acquiesce.
A nation gets the politicians it deserves – and that holds true whether it is Iraq, the UK, or Timbuktu.
The Electors and the Elected bear equal blame for the demise of what was once a civilised society. The one, for being corrupt, conniving and incompetent, the other for allowing it to happen.
The years of sanguine acceptance of third rate politicians, and their third rate political dogma, are finally reaching the point where, there is little chance or hope for a future with any degree of brightness or optimism.
We are witnesses to the triumph of the mediocre and the mundane, over innovation and inspiration, of the evil and corrupt over honesty and integrity. Socialism, in whatever form, is truly a mental disease.
This is truly the dawn of a new ‘Dark Age’,
Depress yourself? Hmm. Not depressing, how I read it. Why does someone throw money and effort into a frantic marketing drive?
What this really tells me is: Blunkett has latched onto this ID thing and dragged it far further than most of the rest of the cabinet want, certainly futher than the country at large will calmly tolerate. Poll-tax scale riots could be anticipated with certainty. That sort of thing destroys careers. As politicians, they’re now mulling over whether they’d prosper more by standing beside him – or behind him, knife in hand.
Julian Morrison, With respect,you are seeing the small picture. ernest young has described the big picture, and he is absolutely correct on every point. The British people are aware of the corruption and ineptitude in their government, and they didn’t put a stop to it because they didn’t care. The result is, the government is gaining ever more power over them.
Socialism is indeed a mental disease and the people at the top are either deranged or wicked. They are not well-meaning but misguided.
As the pundit once remarked, democracy is nothing more than two wolves and a sheep taking a vote on what to have for dinner. The difference is in having a Constitution and a Bill of Rights. ( And maybe not even then. )
Maybe. But more often democracy is a flock of sheep collectively choosing which one of them the wolf will eat.
Wasn’t a recent description of democracy in this blog, ‘A bunch of hyenas, voting for a crowd of jackals’?