Charles Clarke has drawn howls of protest from his constituents after stating in Norwich’s Eastern Daily Press that "the Big Brother society is already here and my job is to control it."
Around 200 people signed letters protesting against the Home Secretary’s comments.
While it is refreshing to see such frank talking from the Home Secretary, this comment like many others before it reveals how little the government understands or cares about the issues involved.
Lashing out at "ridiculous" civil liberties arguments, he said: "People's names are already on a large number of databases," he quotes, "Most of us have dozens of cards in our wallets with our identities on. We already have a Big Brother society."
It is quite correct to say that our personal details are often spread far and wide across commercial and public sector databases.
But it is because they are not centralised that this information presents no temptation for government agencies to trawl the details of law-abiding citizens.
Nor do they place all our eggs in one basket, providing a single point of failure for criminals to acquire priceless personal information in one swoop.
Dr Emily Finch, criminologist and reader in law at the University of East Anglia, in an address to the British Association in Dublin on 7th September will tell how her studies have shown that biometric identity cards are more likely to exacerbate identity theft and fraud.
The only argument for ID cards and databases boil down to population monitoring and control, as the Home Office now admits
Phil Booth, National Coordinator of NO2ID, said:
"There may indeed be a lot of databases containing our data, but they are quite rightly kept separate and constrained by law. Giving the Government control of all of them by creating a single index would be both unprecedented and dangerous. It is nothing like any other ID system in Europe.
"ID cards can do nothing to prevent most ‘identity fraud’. The claim that they will is itself fraudulent. They could easily make it worse."
Capping the cost of the card will not make the wholesale removal of British public's hard-won rights and freedoms any more palatable. Whether from our pocket or from the public purse, the cash that will pay for this ludicrous scheme is all ours, and must not be squandered on this dangerous project.
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