Yeah ok
It will be destroyed, except insofar as it helps with the governments nefarious ends.
Home Secretary Theresa May outlined the mechanics of scrapping the ID register yesterday as the bill to scrap the programme moved through the Commons. Speaking at the second reading of the Bill to scrap the scheme, May said the scheme "represents the worst of government. It is intrusive and bullying, ineffective and expensive …
"By cancelling the scheme, the Government remove the income stream but leave the cancellation costs, which the taxpayer will be forced to pay"...
Alan, Alan, Alan. Please realise that it was your last-minute renegotiations of said contracts earlier in the year that force us to pay these cancellation fees - when you fling shit, you ignorant little chimp, be sure in which direction you're flinging it. Now......
...fuck off.
That would be the companies they were planning to sell access to. Those with their heads screwed on all knew this was the one of the eventual outcomes. New Labour will have been planning to sell access to the card verification side of the NIR and probably statistics gathered from it's operation.
If a labour government had remained in power then 5 years from now we would have had to swipe our cards and a fingerprint in supermarkets to buy alcohol as part of a government crackdown on alcohol abuse. 10-20 years from now every purchase, every journey on public transport and every use of a public facility we make would have to be accompanied by a swipe of the card, ostensibly to spot patterns of possible terrorist or criminal activity and to 'improve services'.
Of course businesses would be charged for the legally required equipment and connections, hence the income stream that Alan was talking about. The card fees would have been a drop in the ocean compared to the other schemes that they will have cooked up to monetise ID cards and the NIR.
"That would be the companies they were planning to sell access to"
And where do these companies get the money from to pay for this access. That would be by passing on the charges to their Customers. And who would have been their Customers? Oh yeh. That would be us then.
Not forgetting the 17.5 VAT charge that goes straight out of our pockets...and not forgetting the income tax we would have paid in order to pay for these access charges....and not forgetting the corporation tax that gets paid by these companies who make a profit from charging these access charges.......and so on.
I'm just going for a lie down.
No wonder they regarded this scam as a nice little earner for the Government coffers.
I wonder how many people outside these pages realise just how close we came to that situation, and what a narrow escape we had. That nightmare situation was only a (relatively) few votes away. Whilst I am breathing a sigh of relief that the scheme seems to have died, the cnuts in the Labour party seem to be utterly committed to it, because they clearly believe that there are voters out there that want this monstrous scheme. We still need to be vigilant, and make sure that no-one is allowed to forget that the Labour party regards your information as belonging to them.
There's typical for a Labour guy; that "income stream" isn't a miraculous penalty-free revenue from heaven, it's the hard-earned readies of your actual citizens.
Readies which, if they aren't being spent on the upkeep of the all-seeing NIR, might find their way into some more useful part of the economy. "More useful than the NIR" being near enough anything else at all, of course.
The IDs for foreigners have always been there.
I keep mine somewhere from the days when I was a pesky foreigner for posterity.
Ditto for the register for them and a few other similar schemes.
By the way, I had a similar thought after I was issued the ID in 1998. That was my first thought, the second one was that a kid with some hard boiled egg and glue could falsify that joke of an ID.
If our local ASDA is anything to go by, the answer is probably no. I have seen two incidents over the past few months there where two European students from the local Uni have attempted to purchase alcohol, duly presenting their National ID cards as proof that they were over 18. In both cases a supervisor was called over , who patiently explained to them that European ID cards were not acceptable forms of identification and that they would have to come back with their Passports. The German student rather indignantly pointed out that she did not have a Passport and had travelled to the UK on her German ID Card and could not understand why it was not accepted by the store as proof of age.
I don't know if this is general throughout the UK or even mainland Europe, but it does make one wonder how genuinely useful a UK card may have been on the continent if it had survived the axe.
Has anyone else come across incidents like this?
...my son was refused alcohol on the grounds he couldn't prove he was over 25 (25??). Not only is he almost 40 (and looks it) but the jobsworth behind the counter was a woman he went to school with!
The very next day in the same shop, I saw a serviceman not long returned from Afghanistan refused because his military ID was 'unacceptable'.
Can't say what happened after that - I won't set foot in the place now.
Less a problem of law, I suspect, than of the mindless jobsworth culture that's strangling this country.
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talks a lot of nonsense on this and most other matters. The 'income stream' he talks about was going to come from us, the UK taxpayers, for a card which we didn't need or want. Just because it wasn't funded through the tax system, he thinks it would magically appear. In fact, the same people would have had to pay.
Thank goodness the clueless numpty was the last Labour Home Secretary to foist expensive white elephants like this upon us.
"By cancelling the scheme, the Government remove the income stream but leave the cancellation costs, which the taxpayer will be forced to pay..."
Why does no-one in government ever seem to notice that whatever the government does, the taxpayer pays anyway? Arguing that there is no cost to the tax payer because a project is self-funding from mandatory payments is at best disingenuous and at worst outright misrepresentation.
Let me put this in an easy-to-understand way: whether I pay thirty quid, or whether I'm taxed thirty quid, I'm down thirty quid in either case.
Paris, because even she can understand that.
Remember that the cost for building the system came from taxes, whereas the cost of the ID card was to be paid by the applicant.
Your question ("Why does no-one in government ever seem to notice that whatever the government does, the taxpayer pays anyway?") seems to imply that this was somehow an oversight. It was not: it was a calculated ploy by Johnson, Brown, Darling, and the rest of the morally bankrupt NuLab clique to extract the maximum amount of money from the taxpayer.
To make Johnson's remark clear: The taxpayer (we) pay for a system that will then be used to extract additional cash from us. This way, the government was planning to make a profit. The hight of cynicism was to openly admit this and to unashamedly call it a "revenue stream".
So you would have been taxed maybe three hundred quid (for the system) and ON TOP OF THAT would have had to pay thirty quid for the ID card.
Given the choice between these guys and a dose of the clap I know what I'd choose. I prefer getting laid to getting screwed.
That a Government is actually doing something which is actually popular with a lot of people - scrapping the ID cards and promising a repeal act to get rid of a few of Labour's crazy/intrusive/expensive/hairbrained laws and schemes - I begrudgingly give them a thumbs up...!
Although I can't help but think they're just softening us up, ready for dropping a massive bombshell on us.
@Mr Jolly
It ought to be very popular!
With English-speaking people, those of the UK, US, Canada, Australia, NZ etc., keeping 'The State' in check has been a fundamental doctrine that goes back to Magna Carta (if not earlier to the Charter of Liberties).
DO NOT FORGET THE STATE IS OUR SERVANT -- IT IS NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND AS SO MANY INCORRECTLY ASSUME.
If we ever forget this important principle of freedom then totalitarianism will enslave us. Mealy-mouthed apologies for an unpopular and wrong decision made by 'The State' are unacceptable. If it's wrong then it's wrong and it must be corrected!
In recent years, for many it has become acceptable to believe that 'The State' has the best interest of its Citizenry at heart. This is ABSOLUTELY WRONG unless 'The State' is in the complete hands of its Citizenry.
Unscrupulous power-hungry politicians, too many international and corporate interests, propagandists and lobbyists have been systematically trying to destroy democracy by various means--divide-and-rule for instance. By dividing the Citizenry over issues, they are the ones who gain and control the power. Thankfully, they have not totally succeeded but they have significantly skewed power in their own interests.
The scrapping of this ID bill goes part way in redressing that power skewing but there is still much to be done before a proper balance is restored.
It might be a corny old line but eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. It applies just as much to 'The State' as it does to an external enemy.
____
NOTE TO ALL REDNECKS AND LAZY LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES: What I am saying is not for one moment carte blanche to fraudsters and terrorists. These problems must be addressed but in ways that do not undermine fundamental freedoms and liberties of the people.
I wonder what the case is for identity cards for foreign nationals -- presumably the benefits of having these cards for identifying people only matters if shops, businesses and institutions have the card reading equipment to do the biometric fandango. But for the sake of a few tens of thousand foreign nationals in a population of 61m, it hardly seems worth it.
Foreign nationals are just ordinary people. If the case doesn't stand up for national identity cards, then how can it stack up for foreign nationals.
Unless of course, you just don't like Johnny Foreigner and you want to irritate them using pennies from the public purse.
...and failed miserably to get a result (probably the horrid new backgrounds distracting me), but read recently that maintaining a register of resident non-EU nationals is a mandatory EU directive for all member states. No need to do the same for (foreign) EU nationals, mind.
As it says at the end of the Reg article, there was already an equivalent scheme in place before the ID card system was set up, and the former was simply rolled into the latter. That is quoting a politician though, so it might turn out to be a porky.
Of course all those thousands of people that were writing to Jacqui begging for an ID card can form their own club/face slap group called. ....'ID Cards R us'
they could have little meetings were everybody has to show their ID cards and pretend to be all official and everything. Oh then they can drink ginger beer and go frolicking in the woods and have lashing and lashing of fun!
For all the venom and bitter words Alan Johnson hurled across the chamber at his successor, the former home secretary also announced that his party would not be opposing the passage of this bill through the commons.
Nothing like going down fighting for a cause you believe so passionately in.
"A bit shocking really... #
That a Government is actually doing something which is actually popular with a lot of people - scrapping the ID cards and promising a repeal act to get rid of a few of Labour's crazy/intrusive/expensive/hairbrained laws and schemes - I begrudgingly give them a thumbs up...!
Although I can't help but think they're just softening us up, ready for dropping a massive bombshell on us."
Cameron was interviewed in the free Metro paper soon after he became leader (the interview was something like 2007 IIRC) and part of it went thusly*:
Metro: We have heard a lot about you proposing to scrap ID cardsa s a priority if you are elected. Are you really going to promise to scrap ID cards?
Cameron: Yes
M: Yes? you mean yes without any prevarication or provisos?
DC: Yes.
I agree there may be some massive bombshells coming, but to his credit Cameron always promised to can ID cards and it looks like he will keep at least one promise.
*I like the word thusly.
"This will not be a literal bonfire of the last Government's vanities, but it will none the less be deeply satisfying."
I don't have a particular soft spot for the Tories or for Theresa May but her smug dig at Alan Johston filled me with mirth. Well done gal, couldn't have put it more succinctly!!!
Now, trot along Alan, there's a good boy.
"Given the choice between these guys and a dose of the clap I know what I'd choose. I prefer getting laid to getting screwed".
At least with the clap you get a shot from the doc, wash your willy, and it's all over and done with in short order.
Whereas the harmful effects of any legislation introduced by Liebour lasts for generations.
Paris because I'm sure she has no relationship to the Liebour Party.
It's nice to have a bit of good news on a Friday.
This stupid bit of Blair/Bush/911/David Blunkett and Alan Johnson are idiots legislation was doomed from the start!
Waste of money. Good riddance. Only sorry to hear that we are still going to have to pay a load of American waste of space consultancy companies to go away!
Anyway, I should be having a happy weekend knowing that ID cards are dead and buried (for the moment).