This is a bit out of order. I thought the old system worked just fine for you guys for decades.
It worked so well that the UK scrapped Id cards in 1953 (introduced during WW2; y'know, when there actually was a clear and present danger to the UK), as they were not needed and had actually eroded public trust and co-operation with the Police.
It's a sticking plaster manifesto promise, claiming to deliver the world yet not even able to provide a cost estimate. We have Labour citing £30 on the basis of
only the Home Office implementation costs, and failing to even contemplate the fact it might run over budget as every other government IT project has in the history of everything (literally). A London School of Economics report comes out, and the government tries to dismiss it as biased rather than directly address
any question. Then they release a statement, a few weeks ago, that Id theft costs '£1.2bn' per year - citing it as a reason for Id cards when not only are the figures blatantly wrong (the cost including the likes of how much it costs to launch police raids on asylum seekers and deporting them; the actual figure directly related to the territory of Id cards was £390-490m, less than the governments wildly optimistic pricings for the running costs of an Id card scheme), but it makes the entirely bizarre and unsupportable assumption Id cards would eliminate this type of fraud (for example, ignoring forgeries, the likelihood of Ids being remotely read as with the Dutch system, and internet fraud). and when the Dutch passport problems were mentioned (the Dutch launched a biometric passport using an RFID chip -as with the ID card scheme - which was promptly cracked, allowing peoples' entire identity data to be stolen by people up to 10 feet away), the governments response was to dismiss it as a test (which it obviously bloody well failed, didn't it), and then claim it wouldn't happen because they were better (how? they never said......). Not to mention failing to mention that ID cards will have an aforementioned RFID chip, and using wooly language to obfuscate that fact (referred to as a 'contactless readable' card by the government, lest the plebs realise they're to be fitted with a radio tracker).
And that's ignoring the civil liberties implications, or the government planning unlimited powers to extend or add to the data within the ID cards. Or the technical stupidity of the design, like giving pre-op transsexuals
two legal identities - a card for male and female.
I'm truly disgusted. (Quite seriously) If it wasn't financially impossible for me, I'd be looking to leave the country.
This is where we hope the lords kick it back out again.
Great, innit? The sole hope for democratic Britain is a bunch of unelected old farts; we're being saved by the (in theory) least representative part of the government. I guess not being accountable to the voters means you can afford to have such unpolitical things like principles and a backbone.
