British ID register

crackerjack

Well-known member
maybe this shoulda gone in "favorite headlines" but i thought it deserved its own maybe:

Leaked UK government document reveals plan to "coerce" British citizens into national ID register. Yes, they actually advise using "coercion"

if it's for real, which is not really a stretch of the imagination, it's pretty fuckin scary.

Yeah, they got in a stupid tangle a couple of years back trying to explain how the ID cards were still voluntary, even though you couldn't get a new passport without one. Which makes them both borderline compulsory and practically fucking useless all at the same time. Brilliant.

My guess is they will be dropped as soon as it's not too politically embarrassing for Brown (or even by the Tories, after they win the next election).
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
One good thing about all the scandals there have been recently over disks full of sensitive/confidential information on members of the public being lost/mislaid/used as coffee-mug coasters by civil servants is that many people reckon it's effectively blown the whole ID cards scheme out of the water, because the infrastructure to deal with that amount of information securely and efficiently simply doesn't exist. That's without even going into the abysmal record of over-budget, over-schedule computer systems installed in state organisations, such as the NHS and air traffic control.

Three cheers for good ol' British uselessness! :D
 

STN

sou'wester
Earlier this morning the government emailed me to tell me that I had to pay £30,000 for the privilege of living in this country*. I was preparing to shoot myself in the face when they emailed me and said 'actually, no you don't have to pay £30,000 for the privilege of living here'. Three cheers indeed.

*I know this sounds like spam, but it was seriously them.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Earlier this morning the government emailed me to tell me that I had to pay £30,000 for the privilege of living in this country*.

You what? How come? I mean, why would they even think you were liable for that in the first place? Are you some sort of immigrant?

*prepares to release the hounds* ;)
 

STN

sou'wester
Are you some sort of immigrant?

*prepares to release the hounds* ;)

Um, sort of, but then I sent them an email back saying I support England during the cricket and they let me off...

Actually I am a US citizen and were I not domiciled (whatever that is) in the UK I would have to pay said whopping fee.
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
Um, sort of, but then I sent them an email back saying I support England during the cricket and they let me off...

Actually I am a US citizen and were I not domiciled (whatever that is) in the UK I would have to pay said whopping fee.

This must be the new rule Labour nicked off the Tories - the one that's gonna pay for Tristam and Imelda not paying any inheritance tax when their parents die.
 
jeeesus christ. while there is nothing to authenticate it the whole document seems pretty credible:

http://www.anorak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/nis_options_analysis_outcome.pdf

the only trace of socialism in this government is increasingly prescriptive legislation- government as a moral conscience

where to turn? with the whole Blair-Brown transition it's like the rictus grin's gone and now we're just left with the skull underneath. makes me want to join all the other artfag emigres in berlin ;)
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
TGA is hardly always worth reading (his ultra patronising dismissal of AHA, e.g.), but he's spot on here. (And it's a pleasure to be able to read something sensible in the Guardian for a change).

"his ultra patronising dismissal of AHA" is one of the things I like best about him. Better that than the clash of civilisationists trying to exploit her story for their own ends.
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
Oh her, right. Wasn't there some controversy over her lying about her upbringing or something like that?

Edit: something to do with an asylum claim, according to the Wiki article.

She lied on her immigration forms, I think - not about the FGM or anything. But there was a certain irony in a right-wing anti-immigration MP being kicked oout of a right-wing anti-immigration party for lying on her immigration papers.
 

vimothy

yurp
"his ultra patronising dismissal of AHA" is one of the things I like best about him. Better that than the clash of civilisationists trying to exploit her story for their own ends.

I think that's an astonishingly myopic response. How do you feel about his valorisation of Islamist academic Traiq Ramadan, the man who called for a moratorium (!!) on stoning in a televised debate with Sarkozy?

Anyway:

Bruckner noted the peculiarities of Buruma's campaign against Hirsi Ali. He took note of Timothy Garton Ash's contribution to this campaign in The New York Review of Books. And Bruckner offered a philosophical analysis.

Buruma and Garton Ash, Bruckner concluded, had fallen for the intellectual miasmas of the postmodern sensibility, and the miasmas had led, via the errors of relativism and an indiscriminate multiculturalism, to the simplest of philosophical mistakes. This was the inability to draw even the most elementary of distinctions. In the postmodern idea, the Enlightenment has come to be looked upon as merely one more set of cultural prejudices, no better and very likely rather worse than other sets of cultural prejudices--a zealotry that is unable to control its own excesses. From this point of view, someone like Hirsi Ali, who grew up in an atmosphere of Islamist radicalism and the Muslim Brotherhood in Africa and has taken up a new outlook committed to rationalism and individual freedom, has merely gone from one fundamentalism to another--not much different, seen in this light, from van Gogh's murderer.

But this means only that Hirsi Ali's critics have lost the ability to distinguish between a fanatical murderer and a rational debater. Here is "the racism of the anti-racists," in Bruckner's phrase. It is the racism that, while pretending to stand up for the oppressed, would deny to someone from Africa the right to make use of the same Enlightenment tools of analysis that Europeans are welcome to use. Bruckner took note of the nasty personal tone with which Hirsi Ali had been discussed--the masculine condescension, to mention one aspect, which scarcely anybody could have missed in Garton Ash's New York Review essay, where he suggested that Hirsi Ali's literary success must be owed significantly to her looks.​
Also, your "clash of civilisations" jibe is a straw man. Al Qaeda believes that this is a clash of civilisations. Samuel Huntington might believe the same, but for the rest of us (including AHA, IMO) it is a question of a clash of political values: liberalism vs. totalitarianism.
 

vimothy

yurp
She lied on her immigration forms, I think - not about the FGM or anything. But there was a certain irony in a right-wing anti-immigration MP being kicked oout of a right-wing anti-immigration party for lying on her immigration papers.

I think describing AHA and the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy as "anti-immigration" is a half-truth at best.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Is she particularly right-wing? I thought she was basically pretty liberal but worried about immigrants with intolerant views, much like the late Mr. Fortuyn.
 

vimothy

yurp
Is she particularly right-wing? I thought she was basically pretty liberal but worried about immigrants with intolerant views, much like the late Mr. Fortuyn.

It depends on what you mean by "right-wing", doesn't it? If condemnation of Islamism is "right-wing" in your view (as it is in Crackerjack's), if being "basically pretty liberal but worried about immigrants with intolerant views" is "right-wing", then ...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
It depends on what you mean by "right-wing", doesn't it? If condemnation of Islamism is "right-wing" in your view...

I'd have thought it pretty obvious by now that this isn't my view (though I appreciate you are probably being rhetorical).
 
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