No Mandate Brown is slowly but surely revealing himself as the tin-pot dictator we all know him to be.
Between 2009 and 2014, new rules will come into force requiring 53 pieces of information to be captured and handed over to the state for every journey in and out of the country. As well as the type of information you’d expect – name, date of birth, nationality, passport details, etc. – they also want to know how much you paid for your ticket, credit card details, email address, “no show” details for previous flights, itinery, contact numbers of people being visted and “other biographical information”.
This information be required for ports, including the Eurotunnel, but that’s not all. Anyone sailing a yacht out of territorial waters for the day will need to provide the information, as will anyone flying a light aircraft out of British airspace.
The British government says that the information will allow them to refuse travel to anyone a bit dodgy but the rules will allow them to stop people who have outstanding fines such as parking tickets from travelling.
So who’s going to check these details collected on every one of the 305 million journeys in and out of the country? HM Revenue and Customs? It’s a well-known fact that they’re cutting jobs so perhaps not. The police? They can’t even keep up with Criminal Record Bureau (CRB) checks to stop kiddie-fiddlers from working in schools, let alone check 305m travel details a year. The security services? They certainly don’t have the resources and given the role of security services in pretty much every attrocity and crime against humanity in recent history, nor should they.
This is an ill-conceived idea with absolutely no merit whatsoever. The state has no business knowing all these details about citizens. Government exists to serve the people, not the other way around.
Technorati Tags: Police State
Which after today’s scandal of the child benefits loss of data they will simply lose and your details will be in the hands of fraudsters.
Todays news is’nt so bad as it first seems, the disks are only lost in TNTs system, not in the Royal Mails, they will turn up soon enough.
At a rough guess, the package has been eaten by one of their machines and it has chewed the label off, no big deal.
I used to work for the Inland Revenue, as was, and things like this happened all the time. At the end of the week, we would look at all the items with out labels and send them on as best as we could. Which was nearly everything, so I woulf not worry so much about it.