My non-existent National ID Card

Something I want to mark here on my LJ: as of midnight last night ID cards in Britain became history. The scrapping of this frighteningly ill-judged national database – first proposed by David Blunkett in 2002 and which, as the Manchester trial proved, was never any better than a very faulty system – is something I backed and supported from the very beginning because of the kind of future this was promising for the UK, with New Labour's ever-increasing measures to straightjacket ordinary people with their efforts to criminalise the entire population. In increasing numbers of professions – mine included – as a fully record-checked Brit you are only safely employable if certain authorities say you are, but this mindset has been wrongly extended to supervise various voluntary walks of life, and all based on the amount of information they have on you, for which, incredibly, you sometimes also have to pay to provide before your clearance.

Damian Green MP, the minister with responsibility for the abolition of ID cards, said, "It is about the people having trust in the government to know when it is necessary and appropriate for the state to hold and use personal data, and it is about the government placing their trust in the common-sense and responsible attitude of the people." Amen to that.

In the courts, thankfully, it's still 'innocent until proven guilty'; in daily life, however, the UK has still not finished was its experiment in inverting this axiom. These things filter down from the top, and I optimistically believe we are still in the process of nipping in the bud a possible Orwellian future – next in line for reigning in: local councils and their freewheeling overindulgence of CCTV.