My non-existent National ID Card

[peteryoung]

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.

Comments

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Hooray! Now if only we could get away from the continuing Your Papers Pliz mentality here in the USA. I've had the maddening case of being told by someone who has known me personally requiring that I show Photo ID to pick up my convention credentials "to be fair," which misses the point of a show-ID requirement completely. Alas, an entire generation now appears to be inculcated with this process-uber-alles idiocy.

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the time (here in New Zealand) my bank sent me a new card that required I get a pin number for it. This I did in the bank, I showing my drivers license as identification. (Which act as the default ID card here.)

Then, as my credit-card didn't have a pin number, I decided to get one for it while I was on the job. To which they asked for my identification again, they needing to enter the numbers from the drivers license. Proving, if we already didn't know, that it's all about gathering as much information about us as they possibly can.

[drplokta]

Rolling back surveillance by councils is not the answer. It brings the law into disrepute to have laws and regulations on the books that are not enforced, so we need to abolish all of the laws that can only plausibly be enforced by intrusive surveillance. Bus lanes, school catchment areas, mandatory recycling, tax and benefit levels that depend on who lives where and with whom, and so on. Once those are abolished, then we can get the councils to stop snooping.

[twinfair.livejournal.com]

I am amazed you are not allowed to briefly enter a bus lane to overtake a vehicle turning right. I do it all the time in Reading. Obviously I always give buses right of way before doing so but it seems and absurd use of the bus lane laws. I am sure when the law was introduced it was not the intention but as usual, poorly drawn up laws can be used in this way by the police, councils and the courts. What the hell is this country coming to?

[j-lj.livejournal.com]

I never could see the point ID cards. A friend who took part in the trial tried to use his to enter France before Christmas and was told by the Border Agency staff that it was not a vaild form of ID and could not travel on it. Lucky he had is passport with him.

[hnpcc]

Weird. I travelled on my Belgian Alien Resident ID card (which I kept, because I have so few things telling me I'm officially an alien) in and out of France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany[1] quite a lot. The UK and East Germany I did make sure I had my actual passport with me though, as they seemed a lot more... intense about border security.

[1] Yes, this was quite a while ago now.