The Information Commissioner has warned that the UK is now the world’s most spied on nation in the world and this is before the compulsary ID card and Identity Database come into force.
The national co-ordinator of No2ID, Phil Booth, says:
NO2ID welcomes this long-overdue opening of the public debate, but fears that it is almost too late. People may be waking up to the surveillance state just as the final building blocks are being put in place.
ID cards and state-assigned ID numbers locked to your biometrics will be the capstone and key for the surveillance state.
Ministers talk as if government ‘management’ of personal identity were a good thing. State identity control is more like it. The government’s plans—the details of which it is clearly still desperate to keep secret —indicate a massive increase in data-sharing for official convenience and other hazily-defined purposes; effectively an end to privacy as we know it.
It’s not often I agree with everything a campaign group says but in the case of NØ2ID I can’t find anything to argue with. This government is not just taking our liberty, they’re takin a liberty. We don’t want to be monitored and tracked every minute and every hour of our lives yet the British government forges ahead with their database state.
I will not have an ID card or submit to the Identity Register until I am given the ultimatum: sign up or go to prison. If I didn’t have a wife and 4 kids I would go to prison rather than submit myself to this undemocratic, illiberal scheme but I have a family and responsibilities. Even if I am forced to have a card I will not use it unless I have no alternative and I reaffirm the following pledge which I took in June last year:
When the occasion suits me, and when the opportunity arises, I will endeavour to carry my ID card in my pants. Whenever I am required to provide my ID card to an agent of the state, or to an agent of a private organisation cooperating with the state, I will without prejudice or delay reach into my pants, withdraw my card, and present it to the agent.
In recognition of the humanity of these anti freedom agents I will not deliberately make my card look skanky, deface my card with pants related artefacts or otherwise treat my card in any manner different from someone who carries their card on any other part of their body. I will simply carry it in my pants as is my right.
Is it still the case that if we renew our passports sharpish, we won’t be ensnared by this obscene scheme for at least a few years?
ID cards didn’t stop the Madrid bombings.
ID cards will cost over 5 billion quid – which you and I will have to fork out for one way or another
ID cards won’t crimes like 7/7 from happening again (God forbid)
ID cards would not have stopped 7/7 in the first place
We’re already by far the most surveyed nation on the planet and yet STILL we can’t catch a criminal for toffee!
Exactly, this is the falicy in the whole corrupt, twisted scheme. Criminals, people smugglers, terrorists, etc. don’t carry ID cards.
The British government is too scared of offending people to solve crimes. The police are so heavily politicised that everything they do has to conform with Labour policy. Look at Manchester for instance – they were told not to carry out terror raids during Rammadan. FFS, if someone is plotting to blow us up I don’t give a shit whether they’re in the middle of a religious holiday or not – arrest the bastards and bang them up.
As a Muslim, I find the idea that the police wouldn’t arrest a criminal just because they’re Muslim and they might be fasting abhorrent. A criminal is a criminal. Would they not arrest a Christian during Lent then? Ridiculous.
I have to say, the leak of that story was fortuitous, but if it was ever a goer, it was stupid to say the least.
On the one hand, I don’t like the witch-hunt, but on the other hand, I despise political correctness. This might sound odd coming from a brown bloke with a chip on his shoulder, but I’m all for calling a spade a spade.
If someone is breaking the law, throw the book at them.