ID cards, still a live issue

I see that:

"Residents in Manchester will become the first people in Britain to be able to apply for ID cards.

They can now directly apply to attend appointments from November 30 to have their photograph and fingerprints taken for the £30 cards at Manchester's passport office.

Junior Home Office Minister Meg Hillier said the cards would be particularly useful for students and young people as they would "save the cost and hassle" of getting into clubs and bars.

Anyone over 16 in the city with a UK passport can apply for a card.

Ms Hillier told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Really for a lot of people it's a day-to-day convenience thing.

"For a lot of young people ... they often take their passports to prove their identity in nightclubs and bars and the Passport Service sweeps these up every week. So for a lot of people it'll save the cost and hassle of taking your passport, risking losing it and instead you've got this very convenient little credit-sized card. I've got one and it's very useful.""

Do read the whole piece and wonder if anyone will fall for the crap that Labour ministers still insist on spouting about the ID card scheme. Remember that Gordon Brown's announcement to the Labour Conference that "in the next Parliament there will be no compulsory ID cards for British citizens" was the same misleading line that ministers have been spewing for years. The ID card scheme was designed so as to force people to "volunteer" for a system that they can never then leave. Be under no illusions that before long you will be forced to register for an ID card when you apply for a passport or, before too long, for any officially-designated document.

The National Identity Register is still a target of the Labour government, a government that will not be happy until we are all traceable 24 hours a day. Our every move, our every action, our every piece of correspondence and interaction recorded, stored and retrievable by the State and its functionaries. The Stasi would have loved to have had just 10% of the information that our new rulers will have about each and every one of us.