Well, it’s starting…
Interviews for first-time passport applicants will be “vital” in helping crack identity fraud, officials say.
The Identity and Passport Service has defended changes which mean that from April first-time adult applicants will be called to a face-to-face interview.
Some 69 centres are being set up across the UK, with round-trip journey times for applicants of up to two hours.
We can’t say that we weren’t warned, of course. This has been looming on the horizon for a couple of years. Watching the breakfast programme this morning, I noted the BBC trotting out government propaganda as if it was truth – so, again, they offer no reasonable challenge to the lies. Actually they offer no challenge whatsoever, which is reprehensible. Again, the usual hot buttons are pressed “identity fraud” and “safety” in Aunty’s usual Fisher Price reporting style. All this surveillance is necessary if we want to be “safe”.
Nonsense. A passport no matter how technologically advanced will do nothing to enhance our safety. It is a travel document, nothing more. It does not and never will prove that the person holding it is who they say they are – even with these face to face checks. People lie, people sell on passports obtained legitimately, people steal passports obtained legitimately and people forge passports.
Unless, of course, the government has come up with the ability to completely eradicate theft, illegal selling and forgeries…
The problem of identity fraud costs the UK an estimated £1.7bn a year.
Jesus H Christ on a fucking pogo stick, there they go again! No, no and thrice, no! Identity fraud does not cost £1.7Bn per year and it never has; not even close. Yet again, those fuckwits at the BBC trot out lies on behalf of government. How many times must this fraudulent figure be exposed as a lie before these epsilons get it?
The Identity and Passport Service said while the new system, which will affect hundreds of thousands of applicants, was an inconvenience it was vital to the battle against the growing fraud problem.
Translation; it is an inconvenience and cost to us in order to make mass surveillance for them more convenient. This is not about what is good for us, it is about what is good for the apparatchicks of government and their obsession for watching us, cataloguing us and controlling us. The “for our own good” is simply an excuse, the for our safety is simply a button that ensures blind obedience in the “elfansafety innit” culture.
Radical as it might sound, what is in our own best interests is, in fact, best decided by us, not them.
Questions in the interviews will centre on information like previous addresses and bank details.
None of which is any of their fucking business.
It is hoped the measure will make people think twice about committing passport fraud, about 75% of which is believed to involve first-time applicants.
What it did, was make me and others like me think about renewing early – that way I avoid this until 2016, by which time I will have worked out a strategy for avoiding it entirely – even if that means renouncing my British citizenship. That would be a shame, but more of a shame is having citizenship in a totalitarian state. I am becoming increasingly ashamed of what is happening to this country; a once proud nation that cherished liberty now lurches closer toward the regimes of Brezhnev and Andropov. Churchill will be spinning in his grave and Hitler will be chuckling in his.
However, some experts argue that the test may deter “chancers”, but that “hardcore” passport fraudsters will not be put off.
You’d have to be a fool (or a BBC presenter) to think otherwise. All that will happen is that forged passports will become more expensive.
Perhaps, most worrying of all is that this generation has become so used to the nanny state that they cannot think outside of it. People will welcome it, having swallowed whole the old “war on terror” nonsense.
They have become so used to government having the solutions to their problems, so used to crying for government to do something when things go wrong, so divorced from the concept of personal responsibility, that I despair of there being a way back.