According to the BBC, MPs in the British parliament have voted to oblige people applying for passports to be put on the ID card register.
Apparently, identity cards will reduce identity theft, cure all disease, rid the world of terrorists and evildoers, whilst simultaneously earning every bearer a free Nobel peace prize. Wow! With the kind of crap this government is churning out, who wouldn’t want to get one? Not me. Thing is, I’m not a complete moron so I’m able to see beyond this to the police state they want to create in the United Kingdom. Identity cards won’t do anything to remove terrorists and evildoers (they’ll just get fake documents as they always have done) but they will cost citizens very real money that could be spent curing diseases and building world class hospitals. I expect identity theft to increase once there’s a single point of failure.
On days like this, I’m actually almost quite thankful for the (unelected) peers in the house of Lords because they at least seem to see some kind of folly going on here. Too many people have fallen for the terrorism hysteria, so it looks like the UK is going to shortly give in and just throw civil liberties out of the window. Some of the human rights organisations I contribute to (Liberty, Amnesty International) will try to undo this nonsense, as will my political party (the Liberal Democrats) but I fear it’s too late now.
It’s a shame that British citizens don’t have any constitutional rights to speak of. For a country that’s been around as long as this one, it’s very much stuck in the stone age.
[UPDATED] Decided it was about time that I also joined the ACLU.
Jon.