National ID cards - good idea?

[bickster]

They should be compulsory for those people who think they should be compulsory, and voluntary for everyone else.

where would that leave Lib Dem voters as they wouldn't be able to make up their mind which camp they are in ?

probably getting drunk in a gay friendly bar

[Gringo]

We have become what we beheld

1978: Labour opposed ID cards to curb illegal immigration

The Labour administration in 1978 believed the introduction of ID cards would be “unacceptable” and “objectionable” in the fight against illegal immigration, confidential documents released today show.

The comments were in a draft statement due to be given to the Commons by Merlyn Rees, the Home Secretary, who wrote that the introduction of identity cards “would require major changes in practices and powers reaching far beyond immigration control”.

He added: “In the past such changes have been contemplated only in war: the Government does not believe they could be justified on immigration grounds alone.”

The comments were later edited out of the final speech he delivered to the House, as a struggling Labour Government tried to resist the calls from Opposition leader Margaret Thatcher for more draconian measures to tackle illegal immigration.

In a secret discussion between Prime Minister Callaghan and the Whips on March 8 1978, a Downing Street aide wrote: “It was claimed that many Asian immigrants were very frightened.

“There was bitter opposition to the tactics adopted by Mrs Thatcher... and that resentment should be exploited by the Government.”

Ministers stuck by their pledge not to introduce quotas on immigration as they did not want the “objectionable” measure of requiring everyone to carry identification papers.

The confidential Government documents also discussed ways to expose “the fraudulent nature of Mrs Thatcher’s approach”, although a personal note written by Mr Callaghan warned that the Government’s response to Select Committee recommendations was too lacklustre.

He said: “We seemed to be accepting few recommendations – mostly ones to do nothing.”

[drat01]

Blimey I didn't realise that policies of 30 years ago were there to be taken into account now.

[nrogers]

Blimey I didn't realise that policies of 30 years ago were there to be taken into account now.

I'm surprised you think that Ian, as you use them to lash out at other parties.

[drat01]

Do I Nick? Interesting - I suppose when a political party is afraid to disclose anything what they would do all you can go on is past performance. Now if a certain party would actually start telling us exactly what they would do and how they would implement them it would be a great start.

And "lash out"? Strong words

[snowychap]

Big Brother database a 'terrifying' assault on traditional freedoms

Sweeping new powers allowing personal information about every citizen to be handed over to government agencies faced condemnation yesterday amid warnings that Britain is experiencing the greatest threats to civil rights for decades.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the pressure group Liberty, warned that the laws, published yesterday, were among a string of measures that amounted to a "terrifying" assault on traditional freedoms.

Proposals in the Coroners and Justice Bill include measures to authorise ministers to move huge amounts of data between government departments and other agencies and public bodies. Bodies that hold personal information include local councils, the DVLA, benefits offices and HM Revenue and Customs.

The Bill will allow ministers to use data-sharing orders to overturn strict rules that require information to be used only for the purpose it was taken. But it places no limit on the information that could eventually be shared between public bodies, potentially allowing vast amounts of personal data to be shared by officials across Whitehall, agencies or other public bodies.

Safeguards in the Bill will ensure that the proposed orders are considered by the Information Commissioner and require them to be formally approved by Parliament.

Ministers insisted there would be a series of safeguards to ensure that data was secure and not misused. But in an interview with The Independent Ms Chakrabarti warned the measure was one of a string of threats to civil liberties that range from attacks on the Human Rights Act, the advent of ID cards, and proposals to retain data on internet and email use. She declared: "The combination amounts to the most authoritarian time in my lifetime. In Britain, we are seeing happening things I would never have dreamt of seeing."

Ms Chakrabarti also condemned plans in the Bill to restrict the use of juries in inquests and hold hearings in secret. She added: "It's the second week of January and we have already seen plans for new gang Asbos and secret coroners as well as very broad data- sharing measures. What will next week bring?"

David Howarth, the Liberal Democrat justice spokesman, condemned the Government for "burying more building blocks of its surveillance state in a bill to reform the coroner service."

Nick Herbert, the shadow Justice Secretary, added: "This government has shown a cavalier attitude to the security of personal data. There must be proper safeguards for any measures which will enable ministers, with minimal parliamentary scrutiny, to allow sensitive information to be exchanged without barriers when it may have been collected for an unrelated purpose."

Speaking as she prepared to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the foundation of the National Council for Civil Liberties this year, Ms Chakrabarti vowed to resist a series of proposals she said would seriously damage personal privacy in Britain. But she predicted that the "worm was turning" with more people concerned about the importance of civil liberties.

Ms Chakrabarti warned about the "intrusion on privacy" created by the growth of the national DNA database, and attacked plans for national ID cards, due to be rolled out to the first British citizens this year, arguing that the developments had the potential to create a huge all-purpose database holding personal details of ever aspect of people's lives.

She said: "If the tide is not turned on communications data, data-sharing, ID cards and the DNA database, if that tide does not turn and if worse still it accelerates we are looking at a very different Britain in a very short time. We are looking at a Britain where there is no such thing as personal privacy at all."

She warned: "There is a creeping contempt for individual liberty and dignity. There is no sense of history."

Yesterday Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, insisted ministers would have to pass a series of hurdles before data-sharing was authorised, including public consultation, a report by the independent Information Commissioner, and the approval of an order in Parliament.

He said: "I think all members of the public, as I am, are in two places on this. Data relating to you and your family should be protected and that is an absolute imperative. But you don't want personally to give the same information again and again if it can be safely held and safely transferred."

Erosion of civil liberties: A call to arms

Senior figures in British public life are launching a "call to arms" to highlight the erosion of historic civil liberties.

These campaigners, who include the former director of public prosecutions Sir Ken MacDonald, the former attorney general Lord Goldsmith, as well as the musician Brian Eno and the author Philip Pullman, are backing a series of events to coincide with a major civil rights convention in London next month, at which they will speak. Organisers expect 1,000 people to attend the Convention on Modern Liberty, at which other speakers will include Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, Dominic Grieve, the shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, the campaigning Tory MP, and Lord Bingham, the former law lord.

Organisers of the event, at the Institute of Education, including the TUC and the rights group Liberty, said Britain could become "a new kind of police state". And yesterday, the journalist Henry Porter, one of the organisers, said: "This is a call to arms," and he warned of "the constant moves to a database state and threats to an individual". He added: "This is thoroughly dangerous." Baroness Helena Kennedy, the human rights lawyer, said: "We are seeing ways in which our system of law and the protections we have as citizens are slowly but surely being undermined. Liberty is being eroded for all of us."

[Gringo]

Speaking of Henry Porter

Henry Porter: Labour's attack on parliament invokes Henry VIII

It's best to highlight this government's attack on liberty rights and privacy with cases where people have been penalised by the government or its agencies when they've done nothing wrong. But occasionally it is worth looking at the legislative process because it is the failure of democratic and protective instincts in parliament that are at the root of the crisis of liberty.

I make no apology for reproducing part of an editorial about the Climate Change Act from the subscriber magazine Criminal Law Week. It's arcane and it's dry, but it explains exactly what's going on.

This act is one of the new breed of acts, vast swathes of which exist only in the hypothetic, to be enacted by secondary legislation behind the scenes, with no or minimal parliamentary scrutiny.

What parliament has effectively done is issue the government with a blank cheque in relation to climate change to make provision as it sees fit be that in respect of the criminalisation of the private citizen for failing to leave his rubbish out at the right time or in the right manner, or the penalisation of companies for giving their customers plastic carrier bags (13 pages of an act of parliament being devoted to this topic!). It is difficult to see how parliament could consider such a lack of transparency acceptable.

If you're looking for an answer to the question – how does Labour make so much law without anyone noticing? – and if you want to know how 3,000 new offences have been created, over a third of which carry prison sentences, then you are half way there. The shocking abuse of secondary legislation, usually referred to by the term "statutory instruments", is one of the scandals of our time.

Statutory instruments – ministerial diktats by any other name – are a way of making sure that little is debated or scrutinised by MPs. With their increasing use, power passes from the chamber of the House of Commons and parliamentary committees to ministers and ultimately to senior civil servants, a naturally undemocratic group who think of the public as an awkward managerial problem.

The provisions, which are inserted in a bill and allow the government to amend or repeal the legislation without debate are known as Henry VIII clauses. With good reason: they were named after Henry VIII's Statute of Proclamation of 1539, which gave him the power to make law by proclamation.

There is shameless honesty about this name. Although today there is theoretically a process of scrutiny, research by Richard Cracknell says most statutory instruments are, in practice, not debated. Of those that are, the majority are discussed not on the floor of the House of Commons but in a standing committee, after which they are reported to the House and voted on without any further debate.

The crucial point is that the trend is against debate and scrutiny in parliament. Cracknel's figures show that the number of acts passed is in decline over the last 30-40 years, while the number of statutory instruments has seen a sharp increase. From around 2,000 a year until the late 1980s to around double that now.

This pattern started under the Conservatives but it took off with Labour. "While the number of acts has been declining over the last four decades," writes Cracknell, "the number of pages of acts has tended to increase. Statutory instruments have grown in number and in terms of the total number of pages."

MPs either have no power to debate and scrutinise legislation, or there are so many pages of it that proper scrutiny is made impossible.

That is why parliament has lost so much power to the executive; that is why so many people have the vague feeling that law is being made without debate – pretty much in the manner of a syphilitic 16th century tyrant.

The Conservative MP Edward Garnier told me, "This is legislation made for the convenience of the government and its civil servants, which is wholly impossible to scrutinise in the Commons. The last few criminal justice bills, eg the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, the Offender Management Act 2007, the Identity Cards Act 2006, are all terrible examples of 'Christmas tree' bills on to which the government hangs anything that comes to mind and which vaguely fits into some power given a minister by the act."

[Gringo]

With a recession in progress it's up to all of us to tighten our belts and cut down on the wasteful unproductive spending. Nah.

Manchester may trial large-scale ID card rollout

Manchester is one of several areas being considered in the UK to act as a test bed for the rollout of ID cards to UK citizens.

Thousands of people living in the pilot areas, likely to be major UK cities, will be able to get ID cards from November this year.

The Ministry of Truth will lobby banks, retailers, councils and universities in these "beacon areas" to allow the cards to be used with their services, such as opening a bank account or proving age when buying alcohol.

Because of course at the moment it is impossible to open a bank account or buy alcohol. Unfortunately the industries don't seem to be on-message.....

Banks: ID cards 'have been stripped of useful features'

But not to worry, it all helps to keep your identity and your data secure - after all, if you can't trust the state to look after your data, who can you?

Home Office guilty of data breach

Hey ho. I'm sure a review of procedures and policies will ensure the falied procedures and policies will be rigorously adhered to in future.

[Awol]

V for Vendetta. Bring it on.

[drat01]

Need any sort of ID in Oman Jon?

[Gringo]

Apologies to AWOL for replying on his behalf, but on page 1 of this thread:

Most countries in Europe have them and no one I know has a problem with that.

Keeping up with the jones' is not the best motive for directing policy. The question should be is if it is a good thing or not, not whether everyone else is doing it.

[drat01]

Isolationist views - seems to be a common theme to your replies and that of certain political voices

I'm sure Jon is big enough to answer the question - and maybe he can tell us first hand of what civil liberties he is losing by being part of a system that uses them

[Gringo]

Isolationist views - seems to be a common theme to your replies and that of certain political voices

Yup - I'm the isolationist who has has lived and worked in six different countries across three continents, and nag about why the UK hasn't incorporated the schengen agreement of free movement.

I'm sure Jon is big enough to answer the question - and maybe he can tell us first hand of what civil liberties he is losing by being part of a system that uses them

Apologies to AWOL. But maybe his opinions are also splattered across the early pages of this thread.

[Gringo]

The horror of the ID card system

From the evidence I've received, those having to deal with the UK Borders Agency find it inadequate, incompetent and costly

All the waste and incompetence of the ID card scheme becomes plain when you hear people's stories about their contact with the new UK Borders Agency. This one comes from an acquaintance, who would prefer to remain anonymous, chiefly because he fears retribution if his name is known.

It started when his wife, a foreign national, applied under the new laws for her card, which was then issued with a mistake. He writes:

In early January, my wife and I visited a UK Border Agency office and paid £595 for their 'premium' service to take her biometric data and process her foreign national ID card.

We waited for hours as they had lots of computer problems, until finally a staff member admitted to us that the 'ID system was down' and had been the previous day also. We were eventually told that the details had been taken and we should just wait for her ID card to arrive by post.

When the card finally arrived we soon discovered that they had got her nationality wrong. She is a US citizen and on the back of her ID card it said 'American Samoa'! We reported the problem and were told to post the ID card back to them in a Freepost envelope.

Weeks later the UK Border Agency sent my wife a letter saying that she needed to send her passport, as they could not correct their mistake without her passport.

My correspondent makes the following points. The agency had already recorded the passport details and scanned it. His wife has paid for a 'premium' service (£595) appointment at UK Border Agency where she was fingerprinted, photographed and filled in forms so that she would not have to send her passport by post. When she phoned UKBA twice to report that "American Samoan" was a mistake, she spoke to two people, who told her to send the incorrect ID card only and did not mention sending a passport. She explained that she would need the ID card back soon in case she had to travel abroad.

He says that the letter received from UKBA instructed - "Please send your passport to the Freepost address as above".

There was no Freepost address shown anywhere on the letter, or on the envelope. He continues:

After a very long phone queue, I spoke to a nice lady on the UKBA helpline (0300 123 2412) who was highly amused at the 'American Samoa' mistake, but said that unfortunately, yes, we would need to send her passport by post, but that we should also phone another UKBA number regarding a possible refund of part of our 'premium' fee.

Another long phone queue ensued and he spoke to what he describes as an unpleasant man at the UKBA immigration enquiry bureau (0870 606 7766) regarding a possible refund:

He was very irritable, dismissive and patronising, but then he admitted it was not his decision to make and gave him an address for UK Border Agency complaints at Lunar House in Croydon. When I heard the name Croydon I said to him: 'Oh, we heard about the Croydon office when we were waiting at the UK Border Agency Offices for hours during your system crash in early January, we heard the Border Agency staff talking about it.'

The man conceded that there was systems crash and hurriedly hung up.

As of writing this, my wife is still without an ID card and now doesn't have her passport either.

I am passing this story on because I have had my first taste of what a state with ID cards would be like, and I have found it very depressing and actually much more scary than I thought I would. The reality of this apparently secure and efficient ID card system is that it is wide open to human error, technical failures and abuse.

A mistake on an ID card will take a very long time to correct, and their mistake becomes your problem, your responsibility. It is a very disempowering and depressing process where a citizen becomes a cog in a vast machine.

This is not just your video club membership, or your supermarket loyalty card ... this is your citizenship and identity, allowing you access to services and allowing you to leave and enter the country.

My wife has been unable to travel since early January because of this mistake by UKBA. We are hoping no family emergencies occur before UKBA get around to returning her passport and ID card.

I still have a slight worry that if we complain publicly then someone within UKBA may have the power to vindictively sabotage my wife's future leave to remain in the UK ... not something I have ever feared before in this country. I also don't want my wife to end up being deported to Samoa by mistake!

I reproduce this story at length because it captures the anger and helplessness experienced when you become ensnared in a system that is flawed, contemptuous of individual needs and entirely pointless.

At the time of the vote, many people were rather ambivalent in what choice the govt made as we all knew they'd never manage to implement an IT system to run this fiasco, and lo and behold they can't - but that won't stop them enforcing these wrong laws.

[Gringo]

Scaremongers ahead of the game

There's no time to crow over the government's loss of 25 million people's details; no time to rejoice at the obvious mortification of Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, his sidekick, Andy Burnham, Jacqui Smith and Harriet Harman.

These people will not be deterred by the calamity of last week. They are shameless. In a month or two they will bounce back. The ID card scheme will be relaunched and Jacqui Smith will continue with her plans to demand 53 pieces of information from people before they travel abroad. The Children's Index, the Children's Assessment Framework, the National Health database, the ever-expanding police DNA database will all continue to scoop up information. Why? Because the control of the masses is coded in the deepest part of Labour's being.

Spy centre will track you on holiday

THE government is building a secret database to track and hold the international travel records of all 60m Britons.

The intelligence centre will store names, addresses, telephone numbers, seat reservations, travel itineraries and credit card details for all 250m passenger movements in and out of the UK each year.

The computerised pattern of every individual’s travel history will be stored for up to 10 years, the Home Office admits.

The government says the new database, to be housed in an industrial estate in Wythenshawe, near Manchester, is essential in the fight against crime, illegal immigration and terrorism. However, opposition MPs, privacy campaigners and some government officials fear it is a significant step towards a total surveillance society.

Chris Grayling, shadow home secretary, said: “The government seems to be building databases to track more and more of our lives.

“The justification is always about security or personal protection. But the truth is that we have a government that just can’t be trusted over these highly sensitive issues. We must not allow ourselves to become a Big Brother society.”

Some immigration officials with knowledge of the plans admit there is likely to be public concern. “A lot of this stuff will have a legitimate use in the fight against crime and terrorism, but it’s what else it could be used for that presents a problem,” said one.

“It will be able to detect whether parents are taking their children abroad during school holidays. It could be useful to the tax authorities because it will tell them how long non-UK domiciled people are spending in the UK.”

The database is also expected to monitor people’s travel companions.

Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, defended the plans. “The UK has one of the toughest borders in the world and we are determined to ensure it stays that way. Our high-tech electronic borders system will allow us to count all passengers in and out and targets those who aren’t willing to play by our rules.”

[Gringo]

The Moral Maze - Radio4 tonight at 8pm (ish)

Anything to declare?

The government this week revealed plans for another database, this time to store and monitor the international travel records of all British citizens.

The aim is to fight terrorism and illegal immigration and it's in addition to the Home Office plans for another system to keep details of every phone call and email that is sent and the national identity card database.

We're rightly concerned when this data goes missing, but a House of Lords committee goes further, saying the monitoring of the everyday activities of innocent individuals was becoming "pervasive'' and "routine''.

How worried should we be if the government knows more about our private lives? Are the claims that Britain is becoming a surveillance society the cries of paranoid obsessive’s who haven't noticed that many thousands of people are happy to post very detailed information about themselves on the internet?

Where should we draw the line between the private and the public and the state's right to know?

PANEL: Michael Buerk (Chair) Melanie Phillips; Claire Fox; Michael Portillo; Kenan Malik

[bickster]

shoukd be an interesting listen, just hope reception is decent in the car tonight

[Gringo]

(Scottish) Ministers reject ID card roll-out

The Scottish Government has told Westminster it remains "completely opposed" to its plans to roll out identity cards across the UK.

In a letter to the Home Office, Community Safety Minister Fergus Ewing said the cards posed an "unacceptable threat" to civil liberties.

He was responding to a consultation on a code of practice relating to the scheme, which is a reserved matter.

The rules must be in place before the first cards are issued to UK citizens.

Mr Ewing told junior Home Office minister Meg Hillier that money allocated to the scheme would be better spent on more "worthy" causes, such as schools and hospitals.

He said: "Given the current financial climate, the UK Government should have better uses for the vast sums of money being spent on this scheme, which presents an unacceptable threat to citizens' privacy and civil liberties, with little tangible evidence to suggest it will do anything to safeguard against crime and terrorism."

[Awol]

^ UK Population Statistics 2012:

England - 5 million*

NI - 2 million

Wales - 500,000

Scotland - 52.5 million

*Could not be rescued from the matrix.

[snowychap]

^ UK Population Statistics 2012:

England - 5 million*

NI - 2 million

Wales - 500,000

Scotland - 52.5 million

*Could not be rescued from the matrix.

:crylaugh:

Excellent.