ID cards are doomed to fail
Alasdair Palmer writes in the Sunday Telegraph:
The long-dreaded day has finally arrived: Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, revealed the first UK identity card last week.
I have to admit that it didn’t look particularly threatening. It was just an ordinary piece of plastic, the size of a credit card, with the holder’s name, date of birth, immigration status, and a chip that holds fingerprints and a digital facial image.
As civil libertarians like to remind us, one of Hitler’s first acts as chancellor was to impose compulsory ID cards on every German citizen. If the smiling Ms Smith’s ID card was the beginning of the totalitarian state in Britain, it came not with a bang but a simper.
September 28th, 2008 at 10:24
I can see Labour’s social agenda of the future for Minorities. Stop and search them left right and centre. Then introduce ID cards for “non – EEA nationals” or the remaining few minorities whose fingerprints and DNA aren’t already in the database. In addition,police can, on suspicions that you look foreign, ask for an ID card and arrest you if you haven’t got one. Have any lessons been learned from the “old” Germany? Maybe so by Labour. For me personally, I do not see ANY reason to have ID schemes for non-EEA nationals apart from a back door entry for ordinary Brits who oppose them.