IDiocy

I make no bones about the fact that I oppose the Government’s national ID card scheme. It is massively expensive and with the Government’s track record on protecting personal information, I have no confidence in its confidentiality or security. The Government’s own initial figures suggested a cost of £5.6bn but Conservatives have claimed that the real figure is likely to be around £20bn.

The first cards have now been issued to foreign nationals but are almost completely useless as no police or immigration staff have the equipment to read them. They are still having to rely on conventional methods to establish someone’s identity. No doubt the readers will be installed in due course but for now the cards are not serving their stated purpose.

A little noted fact about today’s resignation of former HBOS Chairman Sir James Crosby, is that he was the advisor who was requested by Gordon Brown to conduct an investigation into the National Identity Card Scheme. Early last year Crosby recommended that the cards should be “provided free” and should not include digital images of fingerprints, in order to try to win public support for the scheme.

Beleaguered Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has ignored his recommendations and is still pressing ahead with the ID Card scheme at an individual cost of £93 for a passport and ID card with biometric data.

If you want to know more about this expensive waste of money, have a look at the NO2ID website.

Musings from Marx

A further example in the series of interesting quotations:

“Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more expensive goods, and houses, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until debt becomes unbearable.
The unpaid debt will lead to the bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to Communism.”

Karl Marx, 1867

UPDATE: A fantastically prescient quotation except that apparently it isn’t true! It appears that despite this doing the rounds amongst the City and bankers for the last couple of months it is a fabrication. I thought I had better ‘fess up!