Manchester ID Cards Pilot Fails
The government is pressing ahead with the piloting of the ID cards scheme in Manchester, despite Manchester’s complete and utter indifference:
96% of respondents in a recent Manchester Evening News online poll opposed the scheme. Fewer than 2,000 people in the north-west have “expressed interest” in the ID cards, and that number includes opponents like myself.
Despite lack of interest, the government is still pushing ahead with the scheme, spending £230,000 every day to bring it about. Its current claims are that it is a cheap, convenient way to prove your identity.
An ID card costs £30 initially, compared with £77.50 for your first adult passport – but for now you need a passport to apply for an ID card. Regardless, the ID card scheme costs every taxpayer about £300. It would save money if the government instead gave everyone a free adult passport when they turn 16. The passport cost has also increased from £42 in 2005, only £8 of which can be justified for meeting international standards for the insecure “e-Passports”.
I don’t need to carry about vast quantities of paperwork with me on a daily basis to prove my identity or address. I rarely need anything more than my bank card to talk to my bank. A card that lives in my wallet is something I’m more likely to lose – and risk the fine for not reporting a lost ID card..
Clearly, I don’t want an ID card and shouldn’t register. But why am I protesting against it? It’s a voluntary scheme, and people can take it or leave it, right?
Well yes. It depends though on whether or not you want ever to leave the country on holiday or on business again. It’ll depend on whether or not you want to end up at university. And with function creep already driving the Independent Safeguarding Authority’s Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS), that’ll only be the tip of the iceberg. Voluntary yes, but compulsory by stealth. It strikes me that Manchester though has already moved beyond those arguments – the city both doesn’t know the pilot is taking place and doesn’t see the need for it. And why should they? As Home Office minister Meg Hillier said to them:
“But another real benefit is that once you have registered no-one can steal your identity” and “the databases will be very secure – think Police National Computer. No-one will be able to download information and it will not be on PCs on people’s desks.”
Except haven’t I read they’ve already been cloned? And since when are government databases secure? People’s information won’t be safe on ID cards, and given that abundantly clearly innocent people are being accused of terrorism merely for taking pictures of sunsets or high streets, how can anyone have any faith in why the government needs this scheme to succeed? Of course the reason why they need it to succeed is quite sinister: they want to recast the entire nature of identity for the 21st century. ID cards are a vital component for how these people see people’s relationship with government in the future, and they will use any argument, threaten every punishment, conceal every truth in order to make it happen. It must be resisted at all costs, not just ignored. Hillier went on to say:
“The penalty charges are really an encouragement to keep info up to date – this only actually affects your address. The main beneficiary of up to date address is the card holder so we don’t envisage many people not complying.”
See? ‘We’ll punish you for your own good.’ It’s authoritarian and quite quite despicable.
Stephen Fry: Tories Should End Alliance With Homophobes
Stephen Fry has suggested the letter he and other celebrities have signed, condemning the Conservative Party’s EU Parliament alliance with the Polish Law and Order Party and Latvia’s Freedom and Fatherland Party, offers David Cameron an opportunity to walk away from them:
Jonathan Freedland describes the anti-semitic and homophobic backgrounds of these parties:
there was a time when no self-respecting British politician would have gone anywhere near such people. Kaminski began his career in the National Rebirth of Poland movement, inspired by a 1930s fascist ideology that dreamed of a racially pure nation. Even today, the PiS slogan is “Poland for Poles”, understood to be a door slammed in the face of non-Catholics. In 2001 he upbraided the president for daring to apologise for a 1941 pogrom in the town of Jedwabne which left hundreds of Jews dead. Kaminski said there was nothing to apologise for – at least not until Jews apologised for what he alleged was the role Jewish partisans and Jewish communists had played alongside the Red Army in Poland.
Incredibly, Kaminski’s Polish party is not the most unsavoury of the Tories’ new partners. That honour goes to the Latvian grouping whose members have played a leading part in the annual parade honouring veterans of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS. Lest we forget, the SS were the crack troops of Nazi genocide; the Latvian Legion included conscripts, but at least a third were volunteers, among them men with the blood of tens of thousands of Jews on their hands. It is in honour of those killers that Cameron’s new buddies march through the streets of Riga.
And Fry went on to make an extremely salient point, given the current economic circumstances:
Fry told Channel 4 News he fears there will be a nationalistic and homophobic reaction to the current recession, unless groups across Europe take action.
He told Channel 4 News: “This is a problem that is not going to get smaller because, as we start to pay for the financial disaster of the last year, a kind of great pimple of nationalism, homophobia and racism is going to erupt around Europe because there is going to be trouble with unemployment.
“The problem with the 30s was not that period. It was the end of the 30s when you start to pay the price – and that’s why it matters now to make a stand because things will get worse.
I couldn’t agree with him more. The letter he signed his name to says:
“It is not just that your new Polish allies oppose gay marriage and adoption but that their vile rhetoric – branding homosexuality as a ‘pathology’, gays as ‘perverts’, and describing ‘the affirmation of homosexuality’ as ‘the downfall of civilisation’ – was used to whip up hate during their election campaign.
“Your party’s decision to host an LGBT event at conference is a good step in the right direction.
“But it will seem empty – a two faced gesture – if in the same week you fawn over allies whose homophobia has no place in modern Manchester, in modern Britain, or in Europe.”
Stonewall Boycotts Tory Conference Pride Event
Stonewall Chief Executive Ben Summerskill has pulled out of tonight’s gay pride event at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester:
Ben Summerskill, head of the equality group Stonewall, has pulled out of a new Pride event at the Conservative party conference after the party hosted ’extreme’ European politicians.
Summerskill had been lined up as a star speaker at tonight’s event in Manchester’s gay village, but Channel 4 News has learned that he will not be attending.
“There is no doubt the progress that has been made in the last couple of years has genuinely been historic. It would churlish of anyone not to welcome the apology a couple of months ago over Section 28,” said Summerskill.
“But the event tonight has been overshadowed by the presence, not just at conference but on the same platform as some senior members of the party, of people of such extreme and offensive views.
I’m going to go all contrary on this one and say Summerskill was wrong to pull out. If he’s right about Michal Kaminski (as I’m quite sure he is) I’m not sure what purpose a boycott serves, but more importantly what purpose playing into a homophobe’s hands serves. Yes it’s rather likely that the Tories will be the governing party once more next spring, yes Stonewall are probably pretty peeved about that, given their successes under New Labour (although it should be remembered that most of them were despite New Labour). But say there really is a seething undercurrent of homophobia amongst the Tories, and even that David Cameron’s prepared to do deals with homophobes in the EU Parliament, how are the gay rights lobbying group’s interests best served by being outsiders?
This boycott comes across as ill-timed and ill-considered sabotage. I’ll never be a fan of the Tory Party as long as I live, but I don’t see how a Chief Executive of a human rights group can behave in such a partisan manner when many of the people whose interests he claims to represent are entirely happy with Cameron’s Conservatives.
