And without it, they would still be claiming expenses for cleaning their moats...yep big mistake that one ;-)
yeah, its nice though. I`m a happy boy. And unlike Sir Tony Of Blair I`m not responsible for the deaths of thousands of people or for appointing a loony chancellor who may as well have snorted our gold reserves up his nose.
Whereupon Pete opened his bag of warm chestnuts and offered them round, but the people noticed they were the very same chestnuts proffered by all branches of government, police, and salesmen in two-bob suits to sell us anything that will nibble away another little portion of our shrinking freedoms. Scare the people, tell them we'll protect them and they'll be desperate for this piece of plastic.. Would ID cards have stopped - let's take them one by one: thieves - the Brinks Mat robbery? terrorists - the London bombings? hackers - Gary McKinnon? drug smugglers - Curtis Warren? etc... would ID card have stopped any of them? Perhaps, but only if every shade of blaggard listed actually gave a flying fuck about ID cards when menacing a security guard with a sawn-off shotgun, or boarding a train on a suicide mission, or bypassing the world's supposedly highest security computer system etc...
What do you mean, "stopped"? You have just postulated a hypothetical system which could prevent all offences being committed before they happen, and then based your argument on saying that ID cards would not be that system so they must be useless. Did having police "stop" any of the offences you list? Or laws? Or courts? Or prisons? Obviously not, so from the logic of your argument, all those systems are useless and should be scrapped too. Coming back to the real world, nobody has ever said that National Identity would solve every problem, defeat every crime, and usher in Utopia. What it would do is enable quite a list of problems to be dealt with, make life more difficult for various types of criminals, much reduce the risks of identity theft, and much increase the chances of wrongdoers being caught. And some particular abuses, like one person having more than one UK passport, would become impossible. If you would prefer to stick with the weak, obsolete, muddled systems of the past, perhaps you would explain why.
So no point having it Pete if its not going to prevent crime or terrorism, glad you have come round on your opinion and joined the correct side.
None of the old identity systems is actually linked to real people in any verifiable way. Birth certificates, passports, driving licenses, national insurance numbers, electoral registration, etc are all issued remotely or by post, without any means of connecting them together for one individual. Not to mention the Police National Computer records. The essence of the new 2010 system, now sadly scrapped, is that the starting point is you paying a visit in person to the issuing authority. This establishes with certainty that you exist, that there is only one of you, and that your photograph, signature and fingerprints, taken on the spot, connect to you and no-one else. That is your unique ID. Each of the subsidiary forms of licenses etc is linked uniquely to the ID, thereby excluding the possibility of future duplicates, impersonation, identity theft, or error. It doesn't matter whether the person carries, or even possesses, a physical "card". The important bit is the uniqueness of identity, not the bit of plastic.
Could it be that so many of us have very little faith in anything politicians from any of the 3 main parties say and therefore when the ID cards were suggested and we were told not to worry if we had nothing to hide ,en masse we did not believe them. Politicians need to earn our trust and respect , till then and unless they can persuade the likes of say NATIONAL TREASURE David Attenborough to announce policy then they will often deservedly encounter our mistrust and anger. Not saying we should believe him either of course, just a marketing suggestion. Incidentally I don't recall them being touted as a replacement for anything and therefore no streamlining, only additional hassle, could be just my memory of course , but if that was what was being planned then it does make sense.
Silly me, there was I, thinking you were bolstering your argument for ID cards by trotting out the celebrated, not to say hackneyed, list of bogeymen. Ergo postulating a hypothetical system where the ills you list become a faint memory as a result of the ID card.
That put me right off ID cards. David mumbling Attenborough........... He would be a good advert for Tena For Men
Shall we all get numbers tattoo'd on our arms. Before you know it we shall have sleepwalked into getting bar codes tatto'd on our foreskin at birth. Women will have a lazer controlling their fertilisation or orgasm. Have the wrong bar code and you won't be breeding. An ID card is the thin end of the wedge of cheese round your knob.
ID cards - wierdy-beardy leftist idea designed to keep tabs on what everyone is doing all the time. It would not do anything useful in anyway whatsoever. What it WOULD do is keep a whole load of incompetent civil-servants employed snooping on everyone... Given the civil-service's abysmal record on protecting data would ANYONE in their right mind trust them with personal information ?
