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Date Posted:14:28:58 05/03/04 Mon Author: Safe Club Sunil Subject: National ID cards
The home office have asked for people’s opinion on the National ID card. Add the words ‘consultation response’ in the subject line and email them here.
identitycards@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk
Maybe they’ll start reconsidering if enough people start emailing in saying that they will never vote for a government who bring in National ID cards. They might reconsider it even more if people say they will not consent to getting a National ID card and will go to jail for it.
Here’s a great site that lays out the anti-National ID card argument completely.
http://www.trevor-mendham.com/civil-liberties/identity-cards/
This from http://www.privacyinternational.org/issues/idcard/uk/
What else could we buy for the £6 billion* cost of a national ID card?
Following the Prime Minister's announcement that a compulsory ID card is likely to be introduced swiftly, Privacy International proposes a "Top Ten" list of alternative ways to spend the £6 billion*.
1. Building 600 new schools @ £10 million each
2. Building 30 new hospitals @ £200 million each
3. Paying for 10,000 more police for the next ten years
4. Giving each of Britain's poorest 6 million pensioners and families a £1,000 windfall gift
5. More than doubling the total UK Gift Aid to charities and voluntary organisations
6. Increasing the total investment in new technology by a quarter over four years
7. Paying 75% of the funds required for urgent rail track upgrades
8. Doubling the combined budget for medical research and research & development within the NHS for five years
9. Doubling the budget for the Sure Start early education and childcare programme for eight years
10. Indefinitely halving the cost of Top-Up fees
*This figure is based on the proposed £77 per card for 60 million people plus compliance costs, card replacement costs, back-up system costs, enhanced visa application and "non standard" biographical footprint checking that the government did not include in its estimates.
This from http://www.charter88.org.uk/id_cards/simpson.html
ID Cards: Arguments Against
Alan Simpson MP (Labour MP for Nottingham South)
The lurch towards national identity cards has everything to do with national insecurity and nothing to do with national security. Terrorism could hardly ask for a more entertaining reward; to get society to define itself as the enemy.
You do not defend the open society by turning it into a closed one. Nor do you make any of us safer by looking for sanctuary within a technology fix that may bring with it more ills and imperfections than it would claim to remove.
…
Fundamentally, ID cards are about intrusion not inclusion. They carry a potential to divide and undermine that is far greater than any ability to protect. Security, as a construct, is more likely to be found in the ways we work together and support one another, than in the technologies of surveillance. ID cards are to be resisted, not just because they have nothing to offer to the big 'security' questions of our time.
National ID cards
