Blair is a liar. But of course the notion any politician does not utter more than the occasional porkie pie is a very uncontroversial one. But as I said in the wellspring of lies yesterday, one can but marvel at the bare faced effrontery of it when our political masters stand up and state something is true when any person not wilfully blind (or David Blunkett) can see it is patently untrue just by reading a few newspapers or one of several thousand blogs and websites.
Mr Blair said political objections had been removed and the only obstacle now was technical. He made clear he wanted the project to “move forward” as soon as it was feasible.
He risked antagonising civil rights campaigners by claiming they no longer objected to the idea, which would see each citizen required to buy a computer-readable card that would record personal details.
Risks antagonising? Civil rights campaigners no longer object to the idea? Excuse the French, but, what the fuck? Blair is a bare faced liar. The only other alternative to that is that he is so ignorant of goings on outside the cloistered world of 10 Downing Street as to be completely deluded.
I will try my damnedest to refuse to get an ID card and I will openly declare that I do not have one when the sun rises on that evil day. I urge as many people as possible to not just resist but to do so openly when the time comes. They will try to make it very difficult to live without one so we must make the system unworkable by using whatever civil disobedience and intelligent resistance is needed. Do not cooperate with your own repression. Time to get creative, people. Time to get angry.
Cross-posted to:
I am angry and despite my cynicism of a Samizdatista, incredulous…
I’ll happily be arrested for failing to produce my ID. I’m sure enough people will resist that it becomes a futile exercise.
Regards
You won’t necessarily be arrested Andrew, you just won’t be able to buy that airline ticket or open another savings account or join that video club.
You will need that card.
And every time you use it, every time it is swiped, every time something is written to it that’s just another piece of data that can be used for purposes that may or may not have anything to do with benefiting you.
Your use of that card will turn you into a record keeper of your own life for someone elses benefit, probably the state.
As there is already a flourishing trade in bent passports, driving licences, credit cards, and other forms of ‘identification’, identity cards will just add to free enterprise in the criminal world, but irritate and curtail the law abiding public, while giving the government another peep hole into their lives. As has been shown in the most recent immigration spat, there is no point in ‘documents’, if when it is expedient for the government, they ignore the forged ones or applications for ‘entry’ using spurious details. For the government to offer this old chestnut up as an antidote to their own treasonous immigration policies is an indication of the justified contempt they have for the electorate. They should put an official notice on each port of entry into the UK: “Welcome to Kookoo Land”.
Do what I am planning to do, when ID cards are launched just get as many as possible. Think of it like 007s rotating car number plates, essential for evading the forces of the state.
In fact in the chaos, we could get together to verify our mutual fake IDs.
I refused to get one for many years in SA — before moving to Britain until the mid-1990s –- but the way they get you to do it in the end is by requiring, say, banks, driver’s licence centres, etc etc to demand your ID before allowing you to open an account, get a licence, get married, etc .
It’s not a matter of getting stopped in the street, not usually, unless you are carrying “the tools of burglary” or something.
Dave is correct. That is why, although I will do my damnedest to resist them, I make no vainglorious promise to never capitulate if they simply make my life impossible without one. That said, I will impose as much cost on the state as I can and be as much of a pain in the arse as I can with as many other people’s assistance as I can. I do not ever want this issue to ‘just go away’… and I do intend to offer a nifty line of White Rose and Samizdata.net tee-shirts saying “No, I do NOT have an ID-card”
What is so sad is that I can anticipate the following arguments in defence of ID cards:
We have forms of ID already (driving licences, chipped credit cards, etc) so why make a fuss?
The terror threat justifies em
We need to curb state benefit fraud
A lot of other cuddly European nations have them
Having an ID card will bring us all together and be a badge of pride in citizenship
It goes without saying that all of these arguments are crap.
I am waiting for the T-shirts. BTW Perry, you could bring out an early edition, with a message like “State ID cards suck”.
rgds
That’s a nice summary Johnathan
We have forms of ID already (driving licences, chipped credit cards, etc) so why make a fuss?
If we have all those already, why the need for an ID card.
The terror threat justifies em
The terrorists will simply get forgeries or else they wil be honest upright citizens who happen to have ID cards, who also just happen to be terrorists.
We need to curb state benefit fraud
You could do that by cutting state benefit.
A lot of other cuddly European nations have them
So they are further down the road to totalitarianism. So what?
Having an ID card will bring us all together and be a badge of pride in citizenship
Actually having one on Perry’s T-shirts would do the trick just as well, and be a lot cheaper (I hope).
eamon
I too plan on openly refusing to co-operate with any ID card scheme. But, like JohnJo, I’m concerned that I’ll have to give up an awful lot to do so. I dread the day the HR department of the company I work for tells me they can’t pay me unless I have one.
Perhaps our only hope is if Perry becomes a contestant in this:
Pick an MP in new reality series
I like my ID card. Very convenient when obtaining services from the government. Getting CPF statements, a driving license, National Service in-camp procedures(getting through the gatehouse), etc.
Of course, the point that it drives crime down is bullshit, but the argument that it makes the transaction of certain goods and services faster and more efficient is one that cannot be ignored.
Actually, thinking about this further, I have decided to keep any future compulsory ID card in my underpants. Then, when anyone asks for it I will produce it and offer it to them.
How badly they need to see it will be for them to decide.
Wobbly: So what? That means if people want to make the transactions they elect to use faster and more efficient, then by all means let them elect to get an ID card. It is forcing those who think otherwise that is the issue and why pinning the issue on utilitarian arguments is just playing into the enemies hands.
To verify yourself as entitiled to benefits or whatever woudn’t require the sort of ID that would enable the state to follow you or pick you out of a crowd.
Is there any objection to this?
Yes, that could work.
In addition, sometimes declaring it non-mandatory is a nonstarter. Here, every male(almost) under 35 is a reservist soldier, and an ID card(whether it’s the actual IC itself or the 11B) is useful for various functions(IPPT, ICT, etc). Hence, even without declaring it mandatory as a citizen’s responsibility, the government makes it practically so.
The Wobbly Guy
i am a foreign student studying in the UK and as such i think i will have to be among the first to get an id card and at that point i will begin to persue my masters in another country, one which does not feel the need to treat its own citizens like criminals.
Britain is really bridging the gap between itself and the continental Europe these days. One morning, you’ll wake up and realize that you finally are part of this happy, smiling European community. The ID cards are a good start…
I’d say it’s about time to start forming a guerilla group.
Mary Beth
If you are attempting to get a ‘masters’ in any country, first learn how to spell pursue. Unless of course you mean stalking your tutors. And stand by for someone who knows how to spell pedantic.
Perry, can Samizdata run off Tshirts with the “tagged cattle, branded slaves, “id”ed citizens” graphic?
I’m prepared to invest a few bob to underwrite some of the cost if you feel it’s too risky to pay for completely yourself.
Call it “investing in ideas” 🙂
Britain is a country where a one legged roofer can get into the country because the immigration services seem to have no problem with rubber stamping fraudulent off-the-rack applications.
Therefore all the terrorists need to do is pose as Eastern European one legged roofers and they will get their ID card granted the minute their applications are approved.
The whole idea is ludicrous.
Eamon Brennan
Hmmm.
Y’all are some truly funny people you know that? This subject has been hashed out before, with all the necessary hand-wringing and doom-mongering, so there’s nothing new here.
Well however it works out I wish you guys luck. Frankly I think you’re getting overly worked up over nothing. So what if they want to issue a new card? Perhaps they want to see if they can’t prevent illegal duplication? Maybe condense the number of ID’s required so that’s it easier to carry, use and to make it more universal?
Frankly there’s a lot of positives in a national ID system. I’ve been in favor of a similar system here in America for years now. I’ve been pushing for all school-age children to be photographed, fingerprinted and footprinted from the time they enter the school system to the time they graduate or leave the school system. And then a national database for any discrepencies. There’s a lot of missing kids in America, it would be nice if there was a system that could perhaps find them.
And ed provides us all with an example of the difference between those that trust government and those that do not. That, frankly, is what it is all about.
well ed, that is because you are basically a naive trusting statist with some economic fascist inclinations, so no surprise there. just another sheep waiting to be shorn
Yes Ed, you carried one on the ‘other side of the wall’ too, and it was required for every facet of your day to day life. Quite a system it was…
I wonder…will this mean they’ll be bringing back the STASI too? I mean those were some *great* guys…
HAHAHA!
You know. I’m worried more about privacy violations by corporations than by any government. Frankly the corporations have a better motive, money.
*shrug* go figure. But keep up the condemnations! Maybe we can all work out a decent prize for the best one.
🙂
Ed
‘*shrug* go figure. But keep up the condemnations! Maybe we can all work out a decent prize for the best one’
Of course – one of Perry’s T Shirts. You do realise he set up this this thread as yarn for his latest T-Shirt scam! -:) Let’s not beat around the cotton bush, PdH – just let us have the price, we surrender – it’s a deal.
It’s a little-known fact that the Income Tax Reform Act of 1986 — signed into law by the vaunted Ronald Reagan — made it impossible, for the first time in American history, to find ordinary work without an identification number issued by the federal government. Prior to 1987, I worked all the time for people who never bothered with an SSN (“social security number”) or TIN (“taxpayer identification number”), but it became impossible, after that.
I rolled over and starting giving people the SSN that had been assigned to me when I was foolish enough to apply for one at the age of sixteen years, in 1974. It made no practical difference to me: people I worked for still wrote me as a 1099 (independent contractor), and paid me every penny agreed for any given piece of work. I was to be responsible for all tax liabilities, which responsibility I once dispatched by telling an IRS agent in a personal interview that he was never going to see me give up a single dime.
The number in question is 430-21-4093. I just want eveyone to know that I’m a good citizen — to this rotten degree, anyway — in full compliance with the state’s demand that I be numbered.
That’s 430-21-4093. My name is William Joseph Beck III, and I was born on November 27, 1956, in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Anyone is free to use that number, too, because I don’t.
In the tug-of-war with the state, it’s sometimes better to let go of the rope and watch them fall on their asses.
Let them sort out who’s who.
So ed is more worried about companies. why does that not surprise me? and if you stop shopping with some company, are you worried they will use your loyalty card information to send the strong arm boys around until you resume shopping at sears? somehow i think the state is kinda more of a threat regarding how it used information about you if you do something they do not like.
Ed,
I’m curious as to how exactly such “precautions” help children. Seems more a way to identify corpses (if you’re lucky enough to find one) than prevent kidnaps.
As for being afraid of Corporations, well, I’m more concerned with Governments as they have quite a bit more cash, a lot more political power, usually half the brain-cells devoted to common sense, and several armed groups capable and willing to act on their behalf.
“but the way they get you to do it in the end is by requiring, say, banks, driver’s licence centres, etc etc to demand your ID before allowing you to open an account, get a licence, get married, etc .”
Actually in Britain they’ve been doing this for a decade–and now it looks like it will soon become impossible to buy any big-ticket item without. So the ID card will simply be demanded instead of: Passport/Driving Licence and two utility bills (not mobile phone bill), and proclaimed as making life easier.
Does anyone understand why a mobile phone bill is not adequate proof of address? Is this the way the bureaucratic mind works: the phone is movable, therefore the phone company whose bills you are paying might not know where to send them or who to send them to.
JohnJo had the most subversive idea. He’s going to keep his ID card in his underpants. That is hysterical! The dismayed faces at banks and government offices! Oh, that was a great Saturday morning laugh!
Back to Perry’s original point: Blair is a lying, messianic dictator with his jackboot wedged ever more firmly on the back of the British neck. His ambition is to be king of Yurrop, envied and admired by all for his charm and ability to change accents at will. (Watch for David Blunkett to go next, as Tony realises that his sacrifice of the lying cow Beverly Hughes wasn’t enough to please the gods.)
No doubt any ID card would have twelve yellow stars on a blue background on it somewhere.
The govt’s earlier literature on this subject envisages us having to present ID cards to claim benefits, work legally and to access state services such as education and healthcare. They also talk of the advantages for banks and other such organisations being able to rely on the ID card. I’d be surprised if banks and other financial organisations were not required to demand this ID for setting up accounts, large transactions, taking our mortgages or obtaining credit cards. Given that such financial dealings are now an open book for the British state due to a considerable legislative onslaught on financial privacy stemming back to the Thatcher era at least, it would seem a logical step for the state once the ID cards are issued.
Those who have pointed out that the state is likely to make it impossible to live without one, whether or not it is compulsory to carry, are right. The govt plans to make it compulsory to own, and very difficult or impossible to be without one. The proposed ID card will effectively be a licence to go about your day to day activities, revocable by state officials at any time and for any reason they or the govt chooses.
Exactly how, technologically, will these cards work ? Chips, rather than magnetic strips I assume. But, do chips get wiped in the presence of a magnetic field ? Or does one require something different in order to wipe the chip of data ?
Whichever it is, John Jo has the right idea, I would just add one more thing to Perry’s list of saleable items. An under underpant card holder guaranteed to wipe all data from the card on every extraction. If it’s the card that is ” malfunctioning ” they can’t charge us for the replacement : a few million such requests every week or two will quickly make the system fall over.
It’s no different in the States. When I moved back here from London three years ago, I was shocked by the number of times I had to recite my social security number. Want a mobile phone, connections to electricity, water, any one at a bank to speak to you about anything at all? Let’s have the number, sweetheart. It is insidious, because it seems designed to get one into the habit of reeling off the number for anything whatsoever and it is clearly nothing but a tracking system.
On the local news last night, I learned that all tourists from the UK (and Yurp) are now required to be fingerprinted and photographed once they arrive. No targeting. Everybody. I saw a harried mother and an older woman (both of whom are obvious threats to the American way of life), interviewed. The older woman said that she had nothing to hide, so it didn’t bother her. This is my mother’s mentality and it drives me insane. It’s not the bloody point.
An infuriating aspect of the segment was the news that Canadian and Mexican visitors wil be exempt from this newest intrusion. Note to terrorists: if you are looking for an inroad to America, may I suggest…
The desperation to be seen to be doing something, as opposed to actually doing anything, always produces the same results. Mothers with crying toddlers will have to stand in another hour long queue (after having been on a plane for nine hours), for the crime of having come to Florida to spend money on a holiday. Meanwhile, a guy in a stolen car with a small suitcase in the trunk will be waved through Canadian customs. End result: people who are guilty of nothing have even more information amassed about them and more inconvenience to put up with. Criminals get round every brilliant new Homeland Security move, and we are all exactly as safe as we were to begin with.
Ed, this is a serious question: What privacy intrusions do you fear from corporations or other business entities, and in what ways can they harm you?
This scheme is going to administered by the Government that gave us the pasport debacle,the immigration fiasco, the Inland Revenue Assessment meltdown and policed by those who gave us Soham.
The Government doesn’t have the computer capacity or the staff to run this this properly, as we will find out when an pensioner called Betty Smith is arrested for being a terrorist.
It’s the Jobsworths we have to watch,but if you want to combat it the best way is information overload.
Peter UK – you forgot the passport fiasco. Remember the thousands queuing round the building and Jack Straw handing out umbrellas?
The trouble is that once the right to be anywhere or exist without having to account for yourself has been eliminated, the abuse gets worse.
I have just had a letter from a fund management firm telling me that under new anti-laundering legislation, I have to provide them with a copy of my ID including photo, a copy of my bank statement, and a utilities bill, all certified by a commissioner of oaths, so that they can be sure I am Dave F and I really do live at xxxx Cape Town. The penalty for failing to do so is that my unit trust funds will be frozen. This applies to all persons with bank accounts, savings, investments etc under the Financial Centres Act, or Finca, which is in line with international practice now being implemented — so stand by Britain, if you don’t have this invasion already.
Thanks Verity but I had it down as a debacle,missed an s though.
Why is that the more authoritarian a government becomes,the more incompetent it gets.or is it that authoritarians are just incompetent gits?
Great article. I’m still spitting blood that Our Glorious Leader™ has proclaimed all our objections worthless. I’m about to go and add to the updates I’ve put on Stand.org.uk since then. Anyone interested in all the various objections to the introduction of ID cards here might be interested in perusing the site.
Oh, and fantastic graphic; I too would be interested in buying a Tshirt with it on. :o)
I found this discussion from a link on Stand.org.uk. I also wrote the following on Downing street says:-
The reason I object to an ID card is because I don’t need ID’ing. I already know who I am. If I “Choose” to ID myself to anyone else I can do that without another government issued document. I don’t work for the government, and I’m not owned by the government. So, I’m happy enough for the government to “request” I carry its formal identification document, although I would politely decline the offer, but I am deeply offended by its legal imposition of such a document. I will choose to break the law rather than become one of the oppressed compliant sheeple. Sometime you believe in a principle so strongly that you have to stand up and be counted for what you believe in. This for me is that moment.
I would rather leave the UK and take my taxable income with me than become a “compliant serf”. I believe so strongly that this is a total and abhorent breach of my self sovereign status that I feel morally obliged to resist it in totality. What is needed to defeat this proposal is large organised civil disobedience. The Government should be representing the will of its electorate. Its failing
Mark
This is not a utilitarian argument. It goes to the heart of our view of the State. The liberal, Anglo-Saxon, Common Law view is that the State exists to serve us. Hence “public servants” (which is exactly how I try to treat every policeman I meet – to keep him humble).
Compulsory ID cards, bearing biometric data, will involve a reversal of that view. We will exist officially because we have been licensed, badged, certified by the very State we thought existed only by our will.
If I don’t want to be scanned, swabbed, fingerprinted or whatever, then these cards will involve an assault.
Blair and Blunkett are control freaks. They are visiting their own personal insecurities on the rest of us. Ghandi style “passive resistance” will be quite enough to make this go away. If we (and in “we” I hope I can include the thousands of public servants who will be required to be the Government’s “kapos” if this prison camp is to be built) don’t co-operate, they can’t do it.
Let’s show the British State the limits of its power. We have never needed a written constitution because Governments knew that “village Hampdens” everywhere would stand up to them. That’s how the last ID cards were defeated.
1984 ANYONE!!? NOT ONLY AM I SERIOUSLY ANGRY ABOUT THIS BUT I’M ACTUALLY PRETTY SCARED!! LOOKS LIKE THE THOUGHT POLICE ARE ON THERE WAY!!!
Dear everyone
Do read Leo Abse’s book ‘Tony Blair: the man who lost his smile’. Someone gave this to me, but I think it only costs £9.99 – a must-read!
Marie
The sick and sad thing about all this is that you have to think, what’s happened to Labour?…a party founded in roots of universal sisterhood, brotherhood and pacifism. Here they are embarking on a white supremist mason vision of anti Islamic/tribal people, then we are all suppost to jump for the police state reactions to the ensuing direct action… ID cards, and all the rest of it. And this maliagn facist influence that Blair, Blunket etc are ‘channelling’ now seeks to use refugees and the newly expanded eastern europeans (this is the new constitution…starting May 1st!…so what are the fucking scitzo’s talking about a referendum for????!!!! :)) This negative timeline bad karma christian patriarchal ‘order’ using Roma etc, as scapegoats for their own ‘bad karma’. (or tryinmg to!!) The landowning masonic fascist conduit’s punting out racist propaganda about Roma travellers as a scapegoat. They are sound people. This again is a ‘crux’ point….
Roma>>>>>freedom, land squatt, no government control.
Landowners>>>private land (theft) , fear and control for MONEY MAKING.
Are these individuals stupid, simple, evil, mere puppets, or just naive egoisers? or what?
Would a Tory PM have embarked on this misadventure (An anti Islamic ‘Jihad’), in league with Bush black babby killer? Maybe, maybe not,… seeing as the whole of the rest of Europe was/is against these essentially racistly motivated ‘adventures’ in the east. If there is a devil this is it! (Bush is of course in realty talking about himself his own religion…’axis of evil’),
Throwing away hard won human and civil rights…like it’s nothing. Uniquely in europe we are now subject to US law (without them being subject to ours) and have (probably illegally) backed out of European human rights legistlation to a large degree. What are they on? It’s a nightmarish false trip that Blair/Bush have embarked on. The pair of fundimentalist nazi christians. (that’s the key linking connection here) Scary karma.
ITS A DISGRACE.
I think the correct way forward would be respect and humility (for Islamic tribal people), to back off and be humble.
Rest assured that ‘their’ hierarchy, their system, is not goanna keep control of people’s minds and realities for much longer. It’s the end of that era!
They are fighting the incoming tide.
Jah sees,
King Amdo.
Hi again.
Juztapose this…
The leader/s of the landowners sadism bloodsport cult (a very maliagn influence in society, as I have discovered myself whilst residing in North Wales) announce that there will be ‘blood on the streets’ if their activities are curtailed. Are these individuals arrested under any number of statues? No of course not, that’s the way the ‘game’ works. These people are british white landowners!
If you are referring to hunting, it seems to me that if hunters hunt on private land with the consent of the landowner, what is the problem? If a hunt enters private land against the wishes of the landowner, well, that is altogether different.
You are misuing the word hunting. What you are doing is not a hunt, but a abusive ritual.
And you sir, are a doomed dinasaur.
At least we can leave bloody old blighty, so that makes us a democracy eh?
Evil plastic fascist cunts…
WE KNOW.
Check this out, then you will too…
http://www.suite101.com/discussion.cfm/ritual_abuse/111339/latest/1
Cymru Tribal Soverignty!
You are misuing the word hunting. What you are doing is not a hunt, but a abusive ritual.
And you sir, are a doomed dinasaur.
At least we can leave bloody old blighty, so that makes us a democracy eh?
Evil plastic fascist cunts…
WE KNOW.
Check this out, then you will too…
http://www.suite101.com/discussion.cfm/ritual_abuse/111339/latest/1
Cymru Tribal Soverignty!