Admitting it for all to see on his BBC blog. Very brave of him:
Past horrors and mistakes do not seem to have weakened a servile belief in the ultimate benevolence of the state and a willingness to grant it unlimited powers.
In this country, if you start to blame the system itself – and the men right at the top – you tend to get into all kinds of trouble.
Unsurprisingly though, he’s talking about China and not the USA or the United Kingdom.
“We are extremely concerned at the ongoing culture of secrecy endemic in the planning of the identity cards proposals. The Home Office has conducted most of its work in a covert fashion, refusing to disclose information that would inform debate, and conducting negotiations in a closed environment. This process is inimical to the creation of trust. This situation also makes further research on the proposals impossible.”
The London School of Economics has published their latest Identity Project Status Report concerning the governments Identity Cards Bill 2005.
The last report was immediately damned by the Government at every turn in what can only be described as behaviour of the intensely insecure. Why are the Government so insecure about the details of their Bill?
Just a reminder that the UK National ID card threat has not gone away. The government is still planning to get this piece of police state legislation implemented. The whole scheme is going to cost an estimated £19 billion. That’s over £300 per card. And it won’t make us more secure. It won’t prevent the majority benefit fraud. The technology doesn’t even work. It seems to achieve nothing but invade our privacy and provide fat contracts to private technology firms.
The world is not a different place since 9/11. The “rules of the game” have not changed. Reject the ID card.
Read more at “Our World Our Say” and No2Id.
Please donate something to the “Our World Our Say” campaign against ID cards. They have various projects to raise awareness and are currently raising money for an advertising campaign.
Our beloved government are planning new measures to combat terrorism. These new measures break Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to a fair trial. These measures of course apply to everyone in the UK, not just terrorist suspects. They include a “whole range” of measures they call control orders. Control orders could include house arrest, electronic tagging, denied access to communications (phone, Internet etc.) and denial of association with unspecified people. All of this without having to present any actual evidence to a court.
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obviously an old and often reused quote, but I’d like to publish it here:
“…it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. … All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” – Hermann Goering, founder of the Gestapo and one of the main architects of Nazi Germany.
Our governments have just replaced the threat from communists with the threat from terrorists. They only needed to change six letters and already here I am exposing the country to danger.