More IDiocy

Last month, when discussing John Kirby’s risible apologia for identity cards, bemoaning the fact that his is now useless plastic junk, I mentioned that I had seen a woman making similar comments on the BBC television news. I since discovered who she is. Writing earlier this month for the Manchester Evening News, Angela Epstein trots out the same lies, misinformation, half-truths and myths that we have seen regurgitated in various forms by ID card proponents during the past nine years.

Angela, in her stupid article, claims that she is going to sue for her thirty quid. Well, good luck with that. She knowingly volunteered for a trial that involved paying £30 for processing. She was processed and therefore got exactly what she paid for. She did this knowing full well that both opposition parties had pledged to cancel the scheme if they won the election. The risk that the trial would result in the cancellation of the scheme was, therefore, not just a risk, but a foreseeable one. For this reason alone – even if one believed in the principle – a reasonable person would have avoided taking part in the trial and paying for the privilege like they would a dose of ebola.

I realise that it is becoming tedious tearing down the paper-thin excuses and assertions put forward by ID stooges, but as they keep repeating the same canards, it is beholden upon us to keep pointing out that they are untrue, so that people really do get it and we are not faced with the prospect of this scheme again.

And as the first member of the public to acquire one of these now collector’s items, I’m deeply disappointed. Disappointed that the scheme, trialled right here in Manchester, has been strangled at birth before it had the chance to prove that ID cards could be incredibly useful as a safe and portable way of proving identity.

Most people don’t need to go around proving their identity and, therefore don’t need an identity card. On those occasions where it is necessary, there are perfectly reasonable alternatives. If someone doesn’t drive or travel abroad, they can apply for one of the privately operated schemes’ cards, should they so wish that does not involve the government and does not involve a database and is, therefore, rather safer. Interestingly, when pushing ID cards as a harmless means of proving identity, the Epsteins and Kirbys of this world never mention the whacking great database, which was the primary objection of opponents.

Instead, our new Government delivered a knee-jerk response and scrapped the scheme, preferring to appease the so-called civil libertarians who hysterically clamoured that the introduction of ID cards was a blow for privacy and further damning proof of an ever encroaching nanny state.

It was not a knee-jerk response. It was clearly stated by both coalition parties long before the election. Again, as Angela does not mention it, the database involved a serious encroachment into personal privacy, demanding 51 pieces of personal information that the holder was obliged to keep up to date on pain of a £1000 fine. So, yes, damn right is was proof of an ever encroaching nanny state.

If this wasn’t a blatantly cynical exercise in tactical popularism then I don’t know what is.

Whereas David Blunkett’s announcement in the wake of the Twin Towers attacks was nothing of the sort. We appear to have a government that campaigned against the scheme, people voted for them and they did what they said they would – and Angela Epstein thinks this is a bad thing?

I won’t re-heat my views on the hackneyed, oven-ready arguments that were marshalled in opposition to ID cards.

As opposed to the hackneyed, oven-ready clap-trap we have had to put up with and counter over and over for the past nine years. Every argument put forward by ID proponents has been systematically debunked as the nonsense that it is. It usually ends with the pathetic bleat that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. They always do, having run out of any rational argument to support their pet project.

Except to say if you were a law abiding citizen you had nothing to lose and everything to gain from something that carried little more information about you than your supermarket loyalty card.

Well, damn me, there it is… The “nothing to hide” argument is the ID equivalent of the Godwin rule. Once they trot it out, they have lost the argument. But the supermarket loyalty thing is a peach. I don’t have a supermarket loyalty card. Supermarkets don’t force us to have them. Still, it was news to me that they demand a face-to face interview, gather 51 pieces of personal information including photograph and fingerprints and fine you £1000 if you fail to keep them updated.

They don’t?

Oh.

So Angela Epstein is lying, then?

They do put you on a database that tracks your shopping habits though, which is why I don’t have one. I’m not aware that Tescos is planning to make registration compulsory.

What’s more, this was always a voluntary scheme, which I personally embraced because it suited my life.

Every home secretary from David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, John Reid, Jacqui Smith and finally Alan Johnson has clearly stated that the scheme was always intended to be compulsory. The trial was voluntary as a means of getting people on board. Over time, documents such as passports would become designated, forcing holders onto the database by default. There was nothing voluntary about this scheme and to suggest otherwise is to lie.

I never wanted to be a poster girl for the ID project – as much as the cards vociferous opponents would have you believe.

Yet you write articles in the Manchester Evening News extolling this totalitarian project. Another lie, then.

Above all, I never had any kind of evangelical wish to make other people register for an ID card.

By taking part in the trial, you did just that. Another lie.

Yet, detractors of the scheme were crowing that I shouldn’t have one. If someone was manipulating Big Brother’s controlling hand, it certainly wasn’t me.

More lies. Detractors were perfectly happy for you to have a card if you so wished. What they (we) were opposed to was a scheme that was always intended to be compulsory, that involved an intrusive database and was a massive encroachment into people’s privacy. You could, if you so wish sign up for a citizen card and not one detractor would complain.

But before we consign ID cards to history, or rather until another Government is brave enough to re-embrace the scheme, there is a small matter of house keeping to tidy up.

Namely the fact that 15,000 of us paid out £30 for our cards.

Tough shit, frankly. The rest of us have contributed via our taxes, against our wishes, rather more than Angela’s thirty quid. Perhaps we should be demanding a refund of all that wasted money from the stooges who bought into the scheme, eh? Fair’s fair, after all.

That’s £450,000 of public money swirling around parliamentary coffers that doesn’t belong there.

No. It. Isn’t. It’s a paltry recompense for the millions squandered on this white elephant.

And it’s time we got it back.

We should, you shouldn’t.

Of course, I was never immune to the possibility a new Government would get rid of ID cards – though mainly because they perceived it to be a vote winner. What I didn’t expect was they would also be dishonest enough to hang onto the proceeds they had made so far.

Cockwaffle. An incoming government does what it said it would do and Epstein doesn’t like it? That is the price of living in a democracy. The alternative is a totalitarian oligarchy where citizens are tagged and monitored by the state; something that appears to be appealing to the likes of Epstein and Kirby. There is nothing dishonest in what has happened. The stooges paid to be processed. They were processed. They got their money’s worth. End of.

Sure the scheme and its infrastructure cost around £257m to set up.

But for that, we takers are not accountable.

Yes, you were. You chose to enable this scheme. The wiser heads among us chose not to. You have no cause for complaint, we do. You and the other stooges willingly went along with something that would ultimately have been forced on all of us against our will. For that you are accountable and for that, I despise every one of you almost as much as I despise the control freaks who devised it.

We ID card holders have paid for something the Government will no longer deliver.

You paid the previous government for something that the new government has no obligation to deliver. It was a trial what part of “it was a trial” do you not understand?

It will not even reassure us that the  life span of existing cards will be honoured. So I want my money back. Otherwise, it is simply tantamount to theft.

No it isn’t. You got exactly what you paid for. If the card itself is no longer of any use, look upon the £30 as a tax on your gullibility.

Epstein then goes onto compare this with the expenses scandal and as such is a waste of further effort. She and the other 14,999 people who volunteered for this scheme are guilty of enabling the control freakery of the Labour government that devised it. As such, they get no sympathy from me; not least when they still regurgitate the tired lies first peddled by the appalling David Blunkett and revised and reissued by each of his equally dreadful successors. Epstein, Kirby et al are either idiots or knowing collaborators in a totalitarian device intended to secure government control over personal information. Either way, their loss is well deserved and should be an object lesson. For those like Epstein who try to get their money back, I do hope they go ahead and try. The outcome is likely to be another – rather more expensive – object lesson in stupidity. Bring it on.