…says the person calling himself the Right Honourable Alan Johnson MP.
Amusing comments.
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We need identity cards, and soonJuly 2nd, 2009 |
 13 comments to We need identity cards, and soon |
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What fecking planet does he or she live on? Of course it becomes vital if it is made so. D’oh!
Good to see though that most commentators want to shove ID cards up Johnson’s arse.
May I request some help with cultural understanding. It has been about 3 months since I set foot in Blighty. In those far-off days, the Guardian (Grauniad?) was reliably left-wing. Extremely left wing. Carrying a rolled-up Guardian seemed to be the City-equivalent of wearing a Che T-shirt on campus — and almost as common.
Yet most of the comments on the Honorable Gentleman’s article are negative. From Guardian readers. From the reliable core of middle-class useless tossers who work for government in some form or other and vote Labour whenever the opportunity offers.
What is going on here? Help please!
@contractor000
I don’t know about the rest of the world, but the UK has been through it twice already and revoked it each time, firstly in WW1, revoked in 1919 and secondly in WW2, revoked in 1952.
The issue isn’t so much the ID card itself, it’s the National Identity Register, the amount of data recorded and the ability to link that data to other databases; and ‘mission creep’. The WW2 card had three functions in 1939, 39 by the time it was abolished.
Chances are your details will still be recorded on this database if you apply for a driving licence or a passport. Making the card itself voluntary does not mean the ID scheme will not go ahead.
If it goes ahead as planned the UK will be only the 6th common law country to introduce them, after Cyprus, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. Australia has dropped its plans for a similar scheme. Other countries with ID schemes have different legal traditions.
“…is a simple means of helping you, and I,…”
Oh for heaven’s sake. Can you help I understand why even government ministers writing in national newspapers can’t use pronouns correctly any more?
Could you send I some ideas? Maybe you could give I some lessons in correct grammar.
Mercifully, ID cards will not survive budget cuts in the next year or so; however, even if cards are scrapped, don’t for one minute think that the government, be it Tory or whatever, will not press ahead with centralising and aggregating data on the public. It is the database, not cards, that is the problem.
Quite right Bexleyite (shame about your old M.P. of course…).
The person who claimed that no country has got rid of an I.D. card scheme once it has been established did not even know of the history of his own country – Britain.
The Liberal (“of the old school”) party man who challenged the I.D. scheme after World War II did a great service for civil liberties.
But even for people who do not care about civil liberties – the I.D. card scheme is expensive and Britain is going bankrupt already.
Game, set and match.
I have edited the format of Nick M’s comment to make it clearer that the first part of it is a quote from Guardian commenter “contractor000”.
While on the subject of editing, thank you to the Samizdata éminence grise who removed the two smam comments.
Hmm. Is it better not to have an ID card or to have a fully-vetted ID card that is entirely fictional and lets the government know nothing truthful about who you are and what you are doing but allows you to do whatever you want? Seems a simple hack. Some people will wind up with a desk drawer full of alternate identities.
Fisked in detail at my blog.
Sorry Natalie.
If it’s voluntary, great. Now I can volunteer not to have one.
But I have to say if Mr Alan Johnson MP read a lot of the comments on the Guardian page he might feel that people don’t like him, his government or indeed the Labour movement as a whole.
I can see the memo from G Brown now. “So how did it go, Alan?”
What a mendacious article. The vast, vast bulk of the cost of identity fraud comes from credit card fraud and the public already pay for that through credit card fees and interest. ID cards would to nowt to stop that… unless whenever you used a credit card you had to verify your identiy with the card somehow. They are not proposing that so credit card fraud won’t be combated by the ID cards.
What Alan Johnson won’t admit to, and it is this that drives the ID card scheme, is that the National Insurance database is filled with fraudulent numbers.
The whole notion if it being voluntary (ID card and NIR) destroys the effectiveness of it to combat fraud – there is a compulsion to have a NI number if you want to work legitimately, there will have to be compulsion in the NIR at least if it is to combat the NI database fraud.
The only means to combat that type of fraud is to do away with National Insurance and stick it on Income Tax. I’m all for that so that people have a better idea of how much tax they are being relieved of.
In Peru, where actual banditry is known to happen, there is an ID card scheme. So if you take a bus journey you need to write your ID number on a form (or passport number if you are foreign), you get videoed by camcorder on the way in and once seated and the buses have GPS tracking. That stuff is not unreasonable if you consider the stories of armed attacks on buses to be real.
But, if you check into a hostel – passport number please. Book a tour of some tourist site – down it goes in the paperwork – as if theft of tourist attraction tickets was a big problem. It’s interesting that some of those tickets involved a bus journey but those weren’t secure – only the long journeys had the real security measures. Getting to the point, when you buy alcohol at the airport, yes your credit card is checked against your passport and the passport photo against your face. I was there a month and almost had my passport number memorised, I was citing it that often.
With all the talk about making the card verifiable against the register with a card reader and network wizardry you can be sure the same things will happen here, but slowly more functions will involve online checks as well as simple record keeping – for efficiency, of course – and at that point the level of tracking present in Peru will be present here except here it will be in the database not just on paper and the cost of re-using that data for whatever the authorities like will be much much lower.