ID cards ‘to be UK institution’
Liam Byrne has been speaking about ID cards at a conference at Chatham House. The BBC reports:
The identity card scheme will become a “great British institution” on a par with the railways in the 19th Century, Home Office minister Liam Byrne says.
He said it was “time to get on with it” and predicted that the National Identity Scheme “will soon become part of the fabric of British life”.
But plans to “multiply the uses” of the ID scheme, would mean there should be stronger accountability to Parliament.
The full text of his speech is here.
June 19th, 2007 at 14:58
Mr Byrne fails to mention that this ID card, which he insists will become crucial to my daily life, will not belong to me, and that the Home Secretary reserves the right to take it away from me completely at any time.
Even when I have “my” ID card, the Home Office expects me to have to put it into card readers at doctor’s surgeries, post offices, banks, shops and hospitals in order to verify my entitlement to carry out daily transactions. If the Home Office central computer says “No”, I will not be allowed to carry out that transaction.
This effectively gives the Home Office a day-by-day, case-by-case veto on many of the actions essential to my daily life.
Here’s the crucial question everyone should ask themselves – Do you believe that you will control “your” ID card? Or will it instead come to control you?
June 19th, 2007 at 16:10
[...] Mr. Byrne. (Not so much the card, but the database which is a compulsory aspect). Update: No2ID have spotted this story too [...]
June 19th, 2007 at 19:13
What a pompous twat Byrne shows himself to be.
The only institution this scheme resembles is The Thousand Year Reich,but given that regime was also run by a meglomaniac who nobody had the courage to stand up to,is it any wonder!
June 19th, 2007 at 21:32
Byrne’s comments are pure puffery and we should pay them no mind. No doubt similar confident predictions were being made by Thatcher acolytes in the run up to the Poll Tax. And we all know what happened to that.
June 20th, 2007 at 07:53
Jon Henley’s diary in The Guardian has an entertaining comment on Mr Byrne’s railway analogy:
We find ourselves more than usually perplexed by immigration minister Liam Byrne’s curious assertion yesterday that the government’s planned national identity card scheme will, in no time at all, become a “great British institution” comparable to “the railways in the 19th century”. Leaving aside the fact that the analogy is manifestly unjust to the wondrous state of our nation’s railways in the 21st century, if the minister means in some way to imply that the birth of the ID card will also be attended by dodgy parliamentary dealings, catastrophic technological failures and frequent financial disaster, we can’t help feeling he’s some way wide of the mark. Poor show!
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/backbench/comment/0,,2106945,00.html
June 20th, 2007 at 10:30
His speech doesn’t make sense even in its own terms: “The great risk of laissez-faire identity systems is the risk that they could exclude people deliberately – or price them out of secure access to things. That is why we have to keep costs down. Once in operation, the National Identity Scheme will be self-funding through fee income. It will not use funds intended for any other Government purpose.”
If the scheme really is “self-funding”, then card holders will have to pay more for “secure access to things”, not less.