UK Home Office Set To Scrap National ID Cards 334
mjwx writes "In what would seem to be a sudden outbreak of common sense for the UK, the Home Office has put forward a plan to scrap the national ID card system put into place by the previous government. From the BBC: 'The Home Office is to reveal later how it will abolish the national identity card programme for UK citizens. The bill, a Queen's Speech pledge, includes scrapping the National Identity Register and the next generation of biometric passports.' The national ID card system, meant to tackle fraud and illegal immigration, has drawn widespread criticism for infringing on privacy and civil rights. However, the main driver for the change in this policy seems to be the 800-million-pound cost. Also in the article, indications of a larger bill aimed at reforms to the DNA database, tighter regulation of CCTV, and a review of libel laws."
Quaint system... (Score:4, Insightful)
To travel to Europe you need to fork out the full fee for a "real passport" rather than the cut-price national-ID card -- most other Europeans can just make do with a national ID card. Or wait -- that might be because Britain is one of the few countries that still does border controls for travel within Europe. Travel north-south from Germany to Holland to Belgium to France to Spain to Portugal and the only thing you notice is the language on the road signs changing, the borders are notionally still there but no checks are done. Im not sure the current system really is that much better.
Re:Quaint system... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course this will leave in place the quaint system thats currently there -- theres no national register of who lives where. So opening a bank account requires you to bring in a random assortment of water bills, phone bills, as proof of address, getting a passport requires you to get the reverse of your passport photograph signed by "a person of standing" i.e. your doctor or a certified engineer or a company director. Hardly waterproof, really.
As compared to what? How did you think they were going to verify who you are for purposes of issing an ID card? You've ruled out anything that evidences your address, you've ruled out passport, you've ruled out testimony of reliable seeming person who knows you. So what's your plan? What is "waterproof"? The whole biometric thing comes AFTER you've established your identity to them, not before.
Not about the cards (Score:5, Insightful)
Scrapping the plan was never really about the cards; most people weren't really bothered about the card itself, it was the vast amount of data that was to be linked to the card via the National Identity Register that was cause for concern - especially as the previous government had a truly shocking record on both data security and large-scale IT projects.
Re:Quaint system... (Score:3, Insightful)
You seem to have forgotten the birth certificate requirement for passport applications.
Re:Mostly why I voted for them (Score:2, Insightful)
Granted, the Tories might well screw up the country - but at least we'll have our freedom.
(Hopefully the Liberals will keep them in check anyway, thanks to the coalition. Couldn't be much better really!)
The last time the Tories took power from Labour they inherited a monster debt too, and managed to re-pay it and hand over a healthy economy to nuLabour who have sold the family silver (and Gold at the lowest price possible remember!). (nu)Labour have never been able to cut funding to all their left-wing union buddies and so have ALWAYS borrowed heavily when in power, whilst I am confident the Tories (and esp. now they have the Lib Dems as their Jiminy Cricket conscience!) will have the balls to cut back where necessary and actually pull us out of this quagmire of debt nuLabour's Bliar and end of boom and bust Clown left us with!
Obviously, once the economy is fixed we have to be on our metal keeping an watchful eye on them to make sure they don't start screwing the pooch again!
As the summary says (Score:3, Insightful)
A big of the reason for doing this was cost, but not the only one. The Conservatives have been opposed to this scheme since forever. Middle England Tories tend to get very hot under the collar about ID card schemes for some reason, though they don't seem to have any problem with CCTV, repressive "anti-terrorism" legislation, or any of the dozens of other ways in which British civil liberties are being curtailed.
As to the current Con/Dem government doing anything about these wider abuses, I remain very sceptical. Previous Tory governments have been equally as big on repressive legislation as the last Labour government was. And as everybody knows, politicians are generally loathe to give up any powers unless forced to by the population.
Re:Quaint system... (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is that once you have an ID card you can just flash it, instead of having to produce all of that documentation just to open a bank account.
It's the database, silly (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:800-Million pound cost (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone get out there and vote YES for AV in the referendum to make this kind of thing more likely in the long-term. Then if we get a referendum on STV, vote YES to it to make it almost certain.
Re:800-Million pound cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Trying to grip the issues involved... (Score:3, Insightful)
The issue was data protection, not the cards themselves.
UK data protection law (I think this is an EU-wide thing now?) says (among other things) thst you can't use personal information gathered for one purpose for another purpose without the consent of the people involved. This means you can't link databases together. The TV licence database can't be linked to the healthcare database or the police database or ... well, anything really.
Two things help enforce this separation. First, it's illegal (heh), and second, it's impossible to do automatically since all these databases have different ways of establishing identity. There's no 'citizen number' that can be used as a common key for a join, and no way to make one (how can you be sure that the JAMES SMITH of 23 Pootle Gardens in the car license DB is the same JIM SMITH of 23 Potle Gdns in the TV license DB?). One of the purposes of the UK ID card scheme was to introduce a robust citizen ID that could be a common way to index databases (and could reduce costs by having a single identity register).
So the concern was that ID cards were a prelude to the more-or-less complete loss of data protection, at least as far as data held by government went. Moves were already being made last year to grant large data protection exemptions to government.
The ID database would no doubt have crept into the private sector too and be used to identify people for bank accounts and internet services and all that stuff as well. It's easy to imagine a future where data protection no longer really exists at all, where even minor government officials (perhaps under an 'anti-terrorist' banner) could browse almost every piece of information held anywhere on any UK citizen.
Anyway, the loss of the national ID register makes this, at least technically, much more difficult.
How naive. (Score:5, Insightful)
When Augusto Pinochet came to power, one of the first things he did was to round up the offices of the Socialist party and get their membership records.
With that list they just went, knocked to the doors of their political oponents, and dealt with them with the brutality characteristic of right wing extremists (when Pinochet died Chilean youngsters saluted the departed leader with Neo Nazi salutes, how ironic that Maggie Thatcher was such a good friend of this bastard).
Europeans, having experienced totalitarian regimes in the last 100 years ( Stalinists in most of Eastern Europe, Fascists in Central and Mediterranean Europe, Ultra Nationalists in the Balkans) one would have thought would be the most reacious people in the world to any form of such political control (which is what it is: no ID, no services. Neat.)
With all its faults, the UK, one of the few countries that escaped totalitarian regimes in recent history, has a sizeable amount of the population with whom this kind of policy seats uncomfortably, even if that means a bit less conveneince during dealing with official business of any kind.
It was only the prominence of Labour (many of its ministers former Left Wing nutcases, i.e. proponents of an overpowering overview of the state of everything) what permitted the idea of ID cards being a good idea. One or two of them actually became closely associated with companies with interest in promoting ID cards after they left office in disgrace.
There is no reason you should not have a number to access your services, the problem is it being unique and the government, not you, having control about who can access the personal information associated to it.
Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, you know, the Tories could have put the measure on the back burner for three years and eventually announced that the situation had changed and the ID scheme was suddenly vital for national security.
Just because it's in their manifestos does not mean they have any intention of doing it. It just means it's something they thought would help get them elected.
Re:Shame (Score:3, Insightful)
Not officially, but there's nothing stopping any business or person from accepting it as proof - it's just unlikely that anyone will.
Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Trying to grip the issues involved... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:wow (Score:3, Insightful)
AV isn't about proportional representation! It's about removing the frustration of tactical voting.
It will probably still result in a more representative parliament though, and it is a complete lie to say it is 'less proportional the FPTP'. FPTP is about the worse voting system possible.
Re:How naive. (Score:2, Insightful)
You see, all Pinochet needed were the party's memebership records, as you say. Do you think parties in the UK don't keep membership records with addresses and phones numbers? A Brit Pinochet wouldn't need a National ID card database to exterminate the opposition.
Therefore, your argument about totalitarian regimes is weak and pure paranoia.
Re:Trying to grip the issues involved... (Score:3, Insightful)
The Finnish government is based on proportional representation and coalitions, so my Finnish mother tells me, which I imagine means less scope for governments to sieze tyrannical power without someone to keep them in check. The country is indeed also very socialist, but somehow it works and you don't appear to piss money up the wall on stupid things in the same way that Britain does.
I'd move to Finland in a heartbeat if I could learn the language and persuade my wife and kids, and the political system is one of the reasons.
The dangers of bad Home Secretaries (Score:5, Insightful)
For all the problems of Blair and Brown, I think a lot of the lasting damage done by the Labour administration was caused by a succession of bad Home Secretaries, each more authoritarian, more fear-mongering, and less connected with real life than the last, whose distorted world views could direct affect everyone. Smith followed Straw, Blunkett, Clarke, and Reid, remember.
Re:800-Million pound cost (Score:2, Insightful)
Because governments provide funding for thousands of different causes and projects, EVERY individual project, when taken in percentage terms of the total, will appear to be tiny and trivial. The argument 'why cancel it when it saves so little money' is therefore a fallacy. See also: Standard CO2 Reduction Counter-argument ("$activity only produces $smallpercentage of total CO2 emissions therefore why bother trying to reduce it further").
Re:Very sad (Score:1, Insightful)
...an unnatural, unhealthy distrust for government.
No such thing.. but I think you're trolling, so I'll leave it at that..
Re:Very sad (Score:3, Insightful)
I always found this strange as we'd been fighting terrorism for some decades before the ID card scheme was started and had managed without them. This is especially impressive as for most of those decades the terrorists were well funded, well organised, well equipped professionals that came within a hair's breadth of killing the Prime Minister and cabinet. Modern day "terrorists" are nothing but a random assortment of malcontent God botherers and yet they will, apparently, destroy British society if not tamed with the leash of identity cards.