Slashdot Mirror
UK's Blair Dismisses Online Anti ID-Card Petition
An anonymous reader writes "Prime Minister Tony Blair has responded personally via email to 28,000 online petitioners opposing the UK's planned identity card scheme, and has closed the online petition. The email reads: 'We live in a world in which people, money and information are more mobile than ever before. Terrorists and international criminal gangs increasingly exploit this to move undetected across borders and to disappear within countries. Terrorists routinely use multiple identities — up to 50 at a time... ID cards which contain biometric recognition details and which are linked to a National Identity Register will make this much more difficult.'"
Link to the actual petition -> here
Slaves,
When your masters gives you something, you take it. I'm giving you a nice
new collar so you can't hide or run away. The global plantation has
grown to such a size we just have to have smart chains and collars.
"The petition calling for the Government to abandon plans for a National ID Scheme attracted almost 28,000 signatures - one of the largest responses since this e-petition service was set up. So I thought I would reply personally to those who signed up, to explain why the Government believes National ID cards, and the National Identity Register needed to make them effective, will help make Britain a safer place." Translation: "Sod the petition. We're not listening to you. You are all wrong." No need to read any further really. I didn't really need to read the rest.
Much like a European way of looking at the world doesn't adequately appreciate how the modern USA came into existence and operates now, your way of looking at Europe is coloured by where you come from and as a result isn't as valid as it could be. Europeans do not concentrate on 'freedom' as much which will be so contrary to your beliefs that you won't understand the ramifications, and you'll dismiss that way of thinking without giving it further thought.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
The point of the petition was that we don't care that the 'Terrorists' COULD POSSIBLY use our ID details to accomplish their nefarious schemes. However, we do object to the DEFINATE invasion of our privacy in order to prevent something that MIGHT happen.
Note the difference.
Ninjas use italics.
The anti-congestion charge one has racked up over 1.5 million signatures, and that too is going to be ignored.
:(
Last week I created a petition asking the government to actually pay notice to the petition service that *THEY* set up, and not just give it lip-service when it suits them... That petition request was rejected.
So much for democracy
Sig out of date
"Prime Minister Tony Blair has...... closed the online petition."
There was a deadline for signatures and it has passed. Blair has responded to the petitioners after the petition was complete. That sounds more like he was pissed of with it and closed the petition. The fact that the prime minister personally closed the petition was the item in this story that pissed me off the most and that wasn't even true.
There's plenty we can moan at Blair for without making things up.
But still not impossible. And those who rely on such dubious activities will still have the opportunity to fake their identities, which leads the whole endeavor ad absurdum, and leaves Joe Average stripped off of a great deal of the little privacy people (especially in the UK, spycams everywhere) still have left in our oh-so-great digital age. So let's just implement it anyways, despite 28K people publicly speaking out against it, because it's such a great idea... not.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
If terrorists justify everything, terrorists are an irresistible weapon for a dishonest government.
In Italy the communist BR have appeared in two occasions lately. Some years ago they killed two people, D'Antona and Biagi, the second one was working on a law on new type of flexible work contracts. Result, the Biagi bill gets passed with nobody daring to make a discussion. Same kind of laws in france wrecked the government caused unrest.
Ten days ago a police operation finds terrorists who were plotting against berlusconi et al. Media start talking about terrorism again and a national demonstration in Vicenza against the planned increase of american military presence in the nearby base, having a sizable percentage of leftists, becomes a terrorist threat.
People who started protesting because their city, Vicenza, is already too crowded first get commies using the occasion to burn flags, then they are looked upon the police as potential terrorists. Checkmate.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
It's really easy to say, "Terrorists routinely do this." I suspect there is some truth to it in this case, but I don't like the whole "Take my word for it. The terrorists are always doing this." being a justification for whatever the fuck rights they wish to trample.
The e-petition to "scrap the proposed introduction of ID cards" has now closed. The petition stated that "The introduction of ID cards will not prevent terrorism or crime, as is claimed. It will be yet another indirect tax on all law-abiding citizens of the UK". This is a response from the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
The petition calling for the Government to abandon plans for a National ID Scheme attracted almost 28,000 signatures - one of the largest responses since this e-petition service was set up. So I thought I would reply personally to those who signed up, to explain why the Government believes National ID cards, and the National Identity Register needed to make them effective, will help make Britain a safer place.
The petition disputes the idea that ID cards will help reduce crime or terrorism. While I certainly accept that ID cards will not prevent all terrorist outrages or crime, I believe they will make an important contribution to making our borders more secure, countering fraud, and tackling international crime and terrorism. More importantly, this is also what our security services - who have the task of protecting this country - believe.
So I would like to explain why I think it would be foolish to ignore the opportunity to use biometrics such as fingerprints to secure our identities. I would also like to discuss some of the claims about costs - particularly the way the cost of an ID card is often inflated by including in estimates the cost of a biometric passport which, it seems certain, all those who want to travel abroad will soon need.
In contrast to these exaggerated figures, the real benefits for our country and its citizens from ID cards and the National Identity Register, which will contain less information on individuals than the data collected by the average store card, should be delivered for a cost of around £3 a year over its ten-year life.
But first, it's important to set out why we need to do more to secure our identities and how I believe ID cards will help. We live in a world in which people, money and information are more mobile than ever before. Terrorists and international criminal gangs increasingly exploit this to move undetected across borders and to disappear within countries. Terrorists routinely use multiple identities - up to 50 at a time. Indeed this is an essential part of the way they operate and is specifically taught at Al-Qaeda training camps. One in four criminals also uses a false identity. ID cards which contain biometric recognition details and which are linked to a National Identity Register will make this much more difficult.
Secure identities will also help us counter the fast-growing problem of identity fraud. This already costs £1.7 billion annually. There is no doubt that building yourself a new and false identity is all too easy at the moment. Forging an ID card and matching biometric record will be much harder.
I also believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice. They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register. Another benefit from biometric technology will be to improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders.
The National Identity Register will also help improve protection for the vulnerable, enabling more effective and quicker checks on those seeking to work, for example, with children. It should make it much more difficult, as has happened tragically in the past, for people to slip through the net.
Proper identity management and ID cards also have an important role to play in preventing illegal immigration and illegal working. The effectiveness on the new biometric technology is, in fact, already being seen. In trials using this technology on visa applications at just nine overseas posts, our officials have already uncovered 1,400 people trying illegally to get back into
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
All 9/11 hijackers had a proper ID with no prior criminal record. I don't see how biometric ID would have solved anything besides making airport security more confident in letting them through. Known terrorists like Bin Laden would rather stay in their air conditioned caves and let grunts do all the work.
He's just doing the kiddie lie thing of telling a half truth. Of course such a system may/will make what he said harder for terrorist and the other boogey men - I don't doubt that in the same way that I don't doubt that if it is hard for me to breathe in a room due to lack of air a terrorist would also find it hard to breathe. If those things become difficult for everyone who isn't 100% "simon-says" follower then the terrorists will not be exempt.
However, and I may just be misguided and paranoid, I find myself a lot more afraid of a large governments with massive databanks, financial caches, and military assets powered by men trained to be unquestioning soldiers (for better or worse) that some pissed off and somewhat oprressed (some might say cursed) terrorist.
So yah I see much more potential for bad than potential for good - from what I hear we as Earthlings have a greater chance of Aophis destroying us than terrorist.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
An online petition has absolutely no effect! Film at 11!
On the face of it I agree with you however there are numerous problems with the scheme as proposed which are why I don't support it.
1) You don't currently have to have a passport and I believe you can travel in the EU without one.
2) You will be forced to have an ID card which you will need to pay for yourself and pay for its renewal every 10 years or so
3) A huge database will be created linked to the ID cards which will be accessible to every branch of government and even private companies such as banks etc. The government refuse to say what kind of information will be in this database but it will be extensive
4) ID cards cannot be shown to help in the fight against a) immigration, b) terrorism, c) crime, d) benefit fraud
5) All of this will be very very expensive, a nuisance to deal with and useless in most practical terms.
The paranoia is not with the ID Cards per se, but with the UK government's obsession with linking them to every single piece of personally identifiable information known to every government and non-government agency in the country. There was even talk at one point to linking it to things as ludicrous as Store Cards for places like Tesco, for ease of use, apparently.
Ignoring a petition from 27thousand out of a population of 60million ish is hardly a big deal IMHO and says more about how little people understand the issue and care either way than it does about democracy in action.
If one were to look for a better example of democracy being stifled, it was the "sinister" road tolls petition - http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/traveltax/ with a total of 1.6 million people signed up. The original government response was more or less "who cares how many people sign it, it's still not going to make a difference to policy. I wonder how that one will end.
So my question is, why would you put this site up for people to raise petitions, if you don't plan to pay any attention to the petitions people put on it?
No one ever questioned if this could be useful for the governments.
Just like no one ever questioned if DNA registers could at least theoretically be useful.
This is not what the petition is about. It's about the fact that all registers can and will be mis-used "for the better".
And that's an awful lot of lets-be-afraid-of-terrorists mumbo-jumbo. I'd say, let's understand what makes terrorists do what they do. Let's analyze and talk about that. Perhaps is it linked with the gigantic abuse of poor people in poor countries led by todays imperialistic crusades.
Nothing surprising about this move. The petitions were only allowed for the same reason that public enquiries are allowed. They create an illusion of consultation, but because they usually come to the attention of only a few particularly interested people any opposition to the government view can be safely ignored. What the government failed to consider with online petitions are that they can be easily filled in by people once they have been informed of their existence by the same medium - the internet. This is why government sources described the person who came up wih the idea as an idiot last week (I'm not joking).
In this particular case the comnpanies that stand to make a fortune from government contracts to bring in the ID card are the same companies providing directorships to former ministers, MPs and civil servants. The so called "revolving door". As the right dishonourable Tony Blair MP is soon to be out of a job he's more than likely to go the extra mile to keep these companies happy. He needs a job after leaving office, as his mortgage commitments are astronomical (again, I'm not joking).
We don't trust the government -- simple as that.
The reasons for implementing this may be noble now, but laws change and what will the data be used for then?
We don't need you to patrinise us by attempting to explain why we are wrong My Blair. What many of us are trying to say to you is that we fully understand your viewpoint so you can stop explaining it to us. What we are saying to you is that you are wrong. Wrong because you don't have a very good understanding of security. Wrong because you have no ability to clearly judge the value this scheme will give us. Wrong because you have the terror threat out of proportion. Wrong because you are wasting our money on something we don't want or need.
Your job is to represent our views, not to decide what is best for your self and explain to us why you think it is right.
Honestly, I don't think you have the understanding of security issues to grasp why biometriecs are a very bad choice for personal security, nor do I think you have the imagination to forsee the abuses that could come of this. Combine these two things with your governments record on large scale IT projects and anyone can see that we are heading for disaster.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
No2ID, the UK's leading campaign against the National Identity Card and the Database State, realised even before this petition was launched that the site exists only to encourage "fire and forget" activism from people. People signing up to No2ID are encouraged to subscribe to a fortnightly e-mail newsletter which keeps them up to date with the latest news on ID Cards in Government and across the country.
The No2ID campaign has encouraged a 30% swing in public opinion against Identity Cards, has encouraged councils and other organisations across the country to oppose the Government's plans, and formed a wide alliance of political parties and unions from all sides of the spectrum in opposition to this scheme. It's unlikely that the Tories would have come out against ID cards (albeit in a half-arsed way) without No2ID's influence.
If people want to make a difference, joining and supporting No2ID is the best way to do so. There are local groups nationwide, which can always benefit from more supporters.
For the UK though, i'd resist such a system. The government has a long history of ignoring the desires of the public (which kind of undermines my understanding of democracy) and enacting laws under spurious premises. Basically, i don't trust them.
Fuck you all.
We know best, and you know how to pay for it.
Sincerely,
HM Government.
If only that happened in the UK!! Here you get to vote for a party once every five years nationally , local government more often. Problem is UK politics loves to force "ideal" solutions. There is some discussion in the media to pay lip service to democracy and if the govt has an overall majority they steam role ahead with their ideas. The USA has a similar system to Switzerland where if you have enough signatures you can get a ballot going. If you have enough of a gripe you can do something about it. Thomas Jefferson had the right idea and designed US politicial system to be constantly compromising so that no one view could be forced. Hung parliaments and small majorities create good politics as they make politicians have to please the people. Look how Bush has changed his tone now the democrats are running things. US Presidents look with envy at the "efficiency" of UK politics. UK Government is using terrorism as a tool to force its oppressive nanny state agenda. This is a very safe country compared with Iraq or Afganistan or downtown LA. This government is making more fuss about terrorism than at the time of the IRA threat which I remember clearly. We have about as much chance being blown up by terrorists as winning the lottery. I would rather risk my life daily that lose my freedom and privacy. Driving a car is more dangerous!
We're at war with terrorists. We've always been at war with terrorists.
The Party is never wrong.
Big Blair is always watching you.
This won't work for two reasons :
So searching for matching biometric data won't detect terrorist keeping low profile and is at risk of harassing innocent people who had the bad luck to very much look alike some criminal idiot at the other side of the country whom they've never heard about.
ID cards proponents should stop pushing it as "the" miracle solution to terrorism, and only present it as what it is : a ID which is marginally more difficult to abuse compared to previous solution, and which will be handy (in countries lacking one before) as a quick solution for everyday usage when you need to show someone else your identity (like giving your age before entering in a night-club, before buying alcohol, while using a credit card, when going to the administration, etc.) A single standarised card is more convenient than having tens of different type of picture ID and seeing the one you handled refused because "Sorry, I don't know the ID. I can't determine if it wasn't tampered with. Do you have any other ID ?". But I'll never magically remove terrorism
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If you're a UK citizen and can see what a bad implementation of a disastrous idea this is going to turn out to be, please join no2id.org and help in a practical way, as well as moaning about it on Slashdot! :)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Downing Street to send Blair emails to 2 million road pricing protesters
Furious minister resists policy concessions
E-petitions site creator hails changing democracy
Will Woodward, Patrick Wintour and Dan Milmo
Wednesday February 14, 2007
The Guardian
Downing Street will respond to a surge of support for a petition on its website condemning its road pricing plans, which could reach 2m signatures by next week.
With Douglas Alexander, the transport secretary, resisting concessions, No 10 sources acknowledged they had to deliver a gesture to the protesters. That is likely to take the form of an email to each signatory from the prime minister, explaining the pricing plans in greater detail.
Two million people, in a country of 60 million, sign the petition. Discount the children, the elderley who haven't voted, and consider the demographics and percentage of people in the UK who don't use a computer or wouldn't generally use one to sign a petition.
This is why we think Blair = Bliar
It's not about the card. Not really. It's the NIR database - an automated system for recording where you go, what you buy, your interactions with officials and (some) of what you do. This takes a lot of smaller databases, many of which already exist, and integrates them into a single database, which (in theory) gives an accurate record of your entire life in a single place. Then the NIR database is updated whenever you use your card (or something linked to it).
Concerns include:
1. Records might not be accurate.
2. People might commit crimes using other people's identities.
3. Records might be used to build criminal cases against people when the police have little evidence (see 1 and 2).
4. Records might be data-mined for "patterns of suspicious activity" to detect criminals. This might produce false positives.
5. People might end up having to prove their own innocence, rather than the onus being on the authorities to prove guilt.
In addition, any database specialist will be able to suggest concerns about the security of the system, especially as it will have a large number of users, throughout the civil service and private business.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
In US terms this is the pork barrel to end pork barrels, and a way to ensure a continued revenue stream to Blair Inc when he leaves office. Because I'm sure that:
He will be "advising" those companies for a fee
She, as a human rights lawyer, will be deriving fee income from (a) civil liberties groups challenging aspects of the scheme and (b) Government departments on the other side.
This is a wonderful earning opportunbity for the Blairs, and they will not let it go without a huge fight.
Pining for the fjords
Welcome to modern western reality, no one remembers suffering or servitude or living under a real dictatorship. Liberals and conservatives both wish to rape our freedom for their own causes and while taking different roads the end results are essentially equivalent. All hail big brother, just hope your propaganda poster doesn't have a fly on it or its off to prison for you (cookie if anyone gets what book I'm referring to loosely).
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." If its not people forget about it, they ignore it and the threat is no longer real to them. People have always been more than willing to give up freedom for security, imaginary or temporary or even false. Most either don't see or don't care about the threat of doing so, the inevitable loss of security that they will suffer in the long term.
We are a blind, greedy and irrational species. Maybe after another dozen centuries of dictatorships, monarchies, torture and servitude we will again fight for true freedom.
Because they are experts at spinning things like this. Look at Blair's reply, he quotes a survey which found that a majority were in favour of ID cards - he's saying "you got 27000, I've got 27000000".
The public don't help themselves on sites like this. Look at the number of frivolous petitions that get requested - all nicely displayed on the site to show they are listening, to everyone and no-one.
Notice also that the petition to bring back Fox Hunting currently has 30000 signatories. Puts the ID card petition in another bad light (IMO).
The only "petition" that matters to a politician is an election.
rt
Even if all the petitions are rejected they still have value: Your prime minister has taken a stand on the issue and his opinion is in your mail box in writing. We (Finland) don't have any way of getting an opinion out of our prime minister at all.
In the news the politicians never comment on issues like this - we have an election coming and all I see is how everyone will magically give me more money if I vote them. The worthless press never ask politicians questions that the politicians actually have control over. Instead we get questions like: Will you give more money to starving college students? [YES] Will you sneak Finland in to NATO agaist the opinion of the population? [NO] Will you get more jubs for unemployed people? [YES]
So if the petitions are just a way of telling the polititians what the people are most concerned about and getting a response, it is still valuable. At least they cannot believably claim ignorance after that. Neither can they say that it was a decicion for someone else if they have commented on it.
Don't we already understand? I mean, I don't think they could be any clearer about their intentions (demands, desires, substitute your preferred word here) when they go bombing crowded places or knocking buildings down.
I'm not suggesting that they're the "good guys," just that they are at odds with much of the world not because of a lack of communication or understanding, but of capitulance, and I really don't think any amount of diplomacy is going to change that. They are not negotiating. They are demanding.
The "War on Terror," however, is a farce. Terrorism works because people allow themselves without reason to be terrified. If you took away the fear, terrorism would lose a lot of its effectiveness.
Personally, I suspect that to a rag-tag bunch of men running around in the desert, it's really not about how many of us they can kill. It's about reducing our quality of life. And they're doing an admirable job of that.
Not that I agree with Blair on this, though. Knowing who people are only goes so far. And biometric ID systems, as he claims, make it extremely difficult to fake your identity. The only remaining problem arises from the words "extremely difficult." It's not impossible. And once you DO have a new fake ID, it becomes impossible to identify who you really are. And if you should manage to successfully duplicate somebody else's biometric data, identity theft takes on a whole new meaning.
Blair already plans to misuse the data. Suddenly he regards a measure that was meant only to stop terrorists and illegal immigration as a means to solve every open crime of the last 50 years!
Compared to Tony Blair, Big Brother was a piker.
Some guy has already submitted a petition to reopen the "scrap Id card" petition. [ReopenIDpetition]
I'm sorry, when did I vote on that? I don't recall ever being asked!
June 2001. The year Labour were returned to power. And again in May, 2006. We don't get to vote for single issues.
The little shit will go, or the people will remove him
As though Gordon Brown is particularly innocent? The people didn't remove Blair in 2006, and while Labour might loose the next election (which will probably not be until 2011), it's far from guaranteed. If they're not removed, then we'll have much the same as before. Worse, even if they are removed, the people most likely to replace them are exactly the same - they just wear different colour ties.
Not America
Then how come it's so often called "Americas War, that we were dragged into"? The government, that we elected, was not dragged - they wanted to go in. And we voted the wankers back in. It's as much our war as it's America's, whether we like it or not.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
...OR, they didn't cock up the domestic economy as badly as the last lot.
Negative equity trumps any conservative:liberal argument, especially in the UK which has one of the highest home owners per capita in the world. It's not "greedy" to want to be able to clothe your children AND keep your home. CF. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
So long as Blair doesn't cock up the economy, he'll have pretty much a free hand to do what he likes. One of those two things will have to change before Labour are voted out; either Blair going away, or the economy failing. Blair has already said he's going to quit sometime this year.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
If it had anything to do with welfare he would say that he needs it so he can make sure that if anyone doesn't deserve welfare (namely, everybody who either works and therefore doesn't need it and everybody who doesn't work and therefore is too lazy to live) he doesn't receive it.
Umm, isn't that exactly one of the proposed "benefits" of the ID card - that it will reduce benefits fraud?
what is he going to do, shooting all tourists?
Not all tourists, only Brazilians.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
The problem is the whole idea of petitions is flawed.
Put bluntly, if I were PM I'd either shut down or ignore such petition sites and try and arrange a decent forum (slashcode based?) for online debate instead. The quality of insight into an issue (and peoples feelings) I derive from discussions on Slashdot is way higher than from reading a random bunch of petitions ... and when I check the facts behind peoples comments I generally find them to be accurate. At least, more accurate than a typical petition justification.
Mr. Blair, rights and freedoms cost, not just on the battlefields of our nations' wars, but in the daily lives of our citizens, and when we no longer have the strength to support our rights, when we become too cowardly to accept those costs, we can have no rights or freedoms.
How many British citizens are there today? And how many will there be over time? How many British citizens have died due to terrorism? A vanishingly small number in comparison. Rights and freedoms destroyed now from fear are deprived to all through time.
You may say that one life lost to terrorism is one too many. I say, no right or freedom can survive the save-the-last-life philosophy. A frenzied alteration of freedom and rights to save the last life or catch the last criminal will surely destroy those freedoms and rights, but it can never save every life, or destroy crime. Furthermore, the destruction of rights and freedoms by a government out of fear, frustration, or mere convenience is severely disrespectful of the those preceding generations who sacrificed so much personally to create those freedoms and rights. It proves a government faithless.
Mr. Blair, you disingenuously say that the information required for a national identification card is little more than that required for a department store card. Maybe true, but a department store does not have the force of a government behind its card. It has no police. It has no prisons. It has no chains. It has not the instruments of coercion, and correctly so. What a national ID card does is turn every citizen into a probable criminal who has to constantly present his "papers" to a representative of the government to prove he is not.
As an American citizen I'm concerned at what I've seen in recent years as a cowardly fear growing in Great Britain, a fear of your own rights and freedoms. I'm concerned because recently rights- and-freedoms-destroying mindsets are making their way across the Atlantic and infecting my own government. I know that government, naturally jealous of its citizens' rights and freedoms, constantly tries to gather them to itself, but, until recently, under cover of opposing terrorism, I've not seen so much success by government at doing so. A little "Battle of Britain" defiance of those who would steal freedoms would be much appreciated I think by many on this side of the Atlantic. We're watching.
E Proelio Veritas.
I suppose this is what the "10 Downing Street" E-Petitions site is all about: not only they know who you are (and probably where you live), but they can write back to you to tell you how good war, surveillance and tyranny really are.
I won't bore you with Tony's entire missive -- here are just a few interesting lines:
(my emphasis)
Last time I was offered a store card was at Marks and Spencer's. I accepted the offer (although I've never used it again) because it reduced the cost of the suit that I was buying. I don't remember having my fingerprints taken. Nor were my irises scanned. And, as far as I remember, they didn't threaten to put me in prison if I didn't accept it.
You didn't vote for a Labour government though. ~35% of those who bothered voting (I don't vote by the way, I blow up police stations) voted for labour. ~32% voted for the Conservative and ~22% voted LibDem. In a decent electoral system, Labour would have received ~35% of the seats, they got ~55%. The Conservatives would have received ~32% of the seats, they got ~31%. The LibDems just under 10%.
You haven't got a democracy in the UK. You have First Past the Post. It doesn't matter who you vote for. Your vote won't get counted. Fuck that for a system.
I wank in the shower.
but then transfered to a microchip on the card itself.
..
Which sound like something fairly easy to fake - once it's broken, teens will be lining up for fake IDs.
the Police will know the kids had to have got it from an adult and that's where they can direct their enquiries, so it'll be easier to police than today.
How does it make it easier? All the police will know is that some random adult was involved. Just walking down the street I get asked by random teens to buy them alcohol or cigarettes - so the kids may have no who bought them the drink, nor is it in their interest to give an accurate description.
I know a lady who lost her job
She shouldn't have - if the DTI sent somebody in, who deliberately looked overage then she did nothing wrong. If the DTI wanted to really sting the guilty, then they should send somebody in who is obviously underage.
Think about the other side of the coin too. i.e. those people who look younger than 18 but aren't. Physical appearance is unreliable so why should they by penalised?
But they can already get "proove it" ID cards from the portman group, assuming they don't have a student ID, a passport or a drivers licence.
There isn't a single positive benefit to letting underage kids drink. It's usually very destructive, both for them and the people around them.
I don't think there's much benefit from cracking down on them either. The more you make them feel like criminals, the more they're going to tend to criminal behaviour. Also, how do you explain why it's so destructive to go drinking on my 17th birthday, but not destructive (at least, not considered destructive enough to warrant being illegal) on my 18th or any birthday thereafter? I never found drinking to be destructive, either before I was 18, or after. What I did find destructive was certain people or groups of people - who tended to be destructive, whether they were sober or drunk (though a lot of them mellowed out when stoned).
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
However, most of the incentive to (binge-)drink is because of the taboo around it. The harder it gets for them to get drink, the more 'cool points' they'll get for doing so. Making it harder to get access to the drink won't stop them, it'll actually encourage them even more. The proof of age cards are already as good as they can be. Using ID cards instead wouldn't help at all. There's no way to stop it completely - at the very least they'll be able to just hang around outside an off-licence until they convince/bribe an adult to buy it for them.
I agree it doesn't do them any good, but the long term way to solve it's to solve the problems that are making them drink, not to make it harder to get access to it.
To be fair he hasn't appropriated it. Others refer to him as such - particularly those from countries where an equivalent position is a title and not a post. I agree he hasn't gone out of his way to correct that but I am unaware of any direct effort by TB to use this as a title.
:o)
Most (good) news media in the UK at least seem to refer to him as "the Prime Minister, Tony Blair" or "mr Blair" as you have suggested.
Caveat: this does not mean I like his policies of course.
Right. Problem #1 for both the UK and the US is fixing the bent electoral system. Until you fix that, you won't get any substantial change.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Government to English Translation:
Dear crackpot,
We're the government and we've decided to do this. A bunch of other countries are doing it, so it can't be so bad, can it?
Screw everybody who signed this petition. We don't care what the people want or that half the planet thinks we're out of our minds. We've made up our minds, and no amount of facts are going to change our planet's descent into fascism, so you might was well get used to it.
Sincerely,
Tony Blair
There already is a petition in support of ID cards: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/idcard/
Currently 25 signatures.