No, it isn’t a rethink, it isn’t a U turn. This is simply another marketing exercise designed to get us all on the national identity register one way or another.
The government has set out changes to its planned identity scheme – including allowing people to use passports or driving licences instead of ID cards.
So much for the idiot Blunkett’s gold standard, then…
Most people will not now have to give their fingerprints when getting a passport until 2011/12 – three years later than had previously been planned.
Hopefully, by then, this iniquitous bunch of fascist bastards will have suffered a humiliating defeat that makes John Major’s fall from number 10 look like a minor slip. One hopes, anyway.
And plans to force passport applicants to get an ID card have been dropped.
It isn’t about the cards, though, is it? Clearly the home secretary thinks we are as stupid as she and her predecessors are. We are not. The database, the tracking of our very lives, is still there, lurking like a monster under a child’s bed, waiting to pounce once the lights are turned off.
The exception will be airport and other workers in security-sensitive jobs who will need an ID card from 2009.
It is reasonable to presume that airport staff already have some sort of identity badge that allows them air-side. If not, why not? And, if so, why do they need another one?
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said students would also be encouraged to get identity cards from 2010, as part of plans to let “consumer demand” drive take-up.
That is “encouraged” in the same way that New Labour twisted the word “voluntary” to mean something entirely sinister.
God, but I hate these evil bastards with every fibre of my being…