ID Cards: A foreigner speaks
A migrant, living in the UK, has this to say about the latest stunt dreamt up by the a government desperate to find a justification for their ID card plans:
[Y]our Labour Party has taken my biometrics and will force me to carry the papers my grandparents destroyed when they fled the Soviet Union. In living memory, my family has been chased from its home by governments whose policies and justification the Labour Party has aped. Your Labour Party has made me afraid in Britain, and has made me seriously reconsider my settlement here. I am the father of a British citizen and the husband of a British citizen. I pay my tax. I am a natural-born citizen of the Commonwealth. The Labour Party ought not to treat me — nor any other migrant — in a way that violates our fundamental liberties. The Labour Party is unmaking Britain, turning it into the surveillance society that Britain’s foremost prophet of doom, George Orwell, warned against. Labour admits that we migrants are only the first step, and that every indignity that they visit upon us will be visited upon you, too. If you want to live and thrive in a free country, you must defend us too: we must all hang together, or we will surely hang separately.
The migrant in question is Cory Doctorow, a Canadian author who is supporting himself but is no threat to anyone.
Much has been said about what is wrong with the government’s ID card scheme – it’s overly complex, unnecessarily intrusive, not properly costed and horrendously expensive. And for what? Why are the government so keen to introduce these things?
It’s a serious question, and one for which I have so far seen no answer: What does the Labour Party expect to achieve by introducing ID cards?
Saturday 27 Sep 2008 | Paul | Civil Liberties and Human Rights, People, Politics
