While I agree that it still has to be passed by the House of Commons
I thought they were trying to remove that obstacle (there was some act last year that was half-jokingly referred to as the "Abolition Of Parliament Act") so that the Home Secretary could alter a law without parliamentary approval. I'm not sure what happened with that.
I'm pretty certain it's not perfectly legal to just follow someone around in public all you wanted. While IANAL, I think that could be considered stalking, and I'm fairly certain that's a crime.
If I wanted to hide from the man I wouldn't go for a walk out in public with my face in full view.
So you're a hoodie, who likes stalking people? And you haven't got an ASBO?
Like the Germans were anything compared to combined forces of the British government and British teenagers. One group of thugs might not be so bad, but two?
The roads are actively monitored, and so are tube stations. Occasionally you'll see reports on the news from the monitoring rooms, full of people watching CCTV. I somehow doubt all those people are there just to look good on TV and disappear when the TV crew have left.
FOR A REASON: they don't want to be watched. Nobody does
Except Big Brother contestants, which, of course, has included an MP. I'd think they'd go for something like this, but in 1984 style, really only for "outer party members" and even then it wouldn't be 24/7, with politicians knowing how to get around the monitoring for when they're doing something dirty. It could be sold as a means of "fighting corruption" and even worse, it could be used for white washing - "look, I didn't sell peerages, here are the surveillance tapes".
The public may have the power to unseat them, but it desperately lacks the will to do so.
I'd love to know why. I can only think that either a lot of people are really just not that interested (as long as there's enough "bread and circuses" they don't care who's running the show or what they do), or they tacitly agree with the government (but can't be bothered to vote) or they just "go along with everybody else" (which doesn't require voting, as all you have to do is accept the opinion of the majority of voters). I also think holding elections on weekdays doesn't help. No matter what, it does not make for a functioning democracy.
In an even better system, Labour would only have gotten 35% of the available 35% of all possible seats (as in, the fewer people who vote, the fewer seats available). That what I don't like about most PR schemes - they don't take into account voter apathy, so a party with minimal actual support among the population as a whole get a disproportionate voice in government. "None of the above" should be a choice.
After all the the talk about "Sleeping Walking Into A Big Brother Society", a proper Big Brother is finally being discussed. Big Brother in 1984 didn't give a damn about the "proles" (which is what all the other Big Brother threats up until now were about), all the surveillance was for making sure party members kept in line.
That must be why there has been proposal after proposal for more and more big brother style policies, few if any of which are/would be effective. It was to get to the point where the government could monitor itself, which is far more likely to succeed, as there are a lot less people to watch.
So in 2001, we failed to see 2 years into the future in our crystal balls, that Tony Blair and George W Bush would fabricate false evidence of an imminent threat from Iraq in order to bump us into a war?
It doesn't matter that we didn't know what they were going to do, we are still responsible for their actions. The people are the ones who have the ultimate power (as we're the ones who put them in and out of office) and with that ultimate power comes (sorry for the Spiderman moment, but then you invoked Star Trek) ultimate responsibility. That whole "Government by the people, of the people, for the people" line that a lot of Americans are fond of, that's why we're collectively responsible - it's our government, we put them there. I sure as hell didn't personally put Blair into power, nor did the millions of people who didn't vote Labour, but we are all still partly responsible because the government are our representatives.
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).
Secondly, there's no way to vote against a petition
You could start a counter petition.
Many congested roads cannot be upgraded, so the petitions solution is facile and won't work - financially encouraging people to avoid congested areas (or discouraging them from going to congested areas, depending on your point of view) seems sane to me.
One option that is never mentioned is "not much can be done about it by government". A lot of congestion is self made (ie, everybody having to go to work at the same time) or due to a lack of options (ie, poor public transport) and charging people isn't going to do much. All it will do is force some people who have the option to switch to public transport to switch the public transport - but then this impacts on an already overburdened public transport infrastructure. Everyone else just finds a way to pay the charge, so congestion is never reduced all that much (I think we're now back to the same levels of congestion in London as before the charge was introduced) with the government getting a nice income boost.
So we're culpable because we didn't punish him quick enough?
We're culpable because we put them (Blair/Bush) into the positions of power in the first place. We're culpable, because even after it was shown that were liars we collectively put both of them back into power.
If we were in a dictatorship, the you could argue that it's not our fault. But neither the UK nor the US is a dictatorship - they're both democracies (in the common use of the term), which means that the people are ultimately responsible for both the government and it's actions. Even the actions we don't agree with.
Seeing as the majority of people often can't even be bothered to go out and vote, why would a government ever be scared by the people owning guns? Voting is an easy and generally safe thing to do. Overthrowing the government by force is a fairly active, high risk activity.
Guns are banned (in the UK - and even then, the ban isn't total) not because the government is scared by guns, they're banned because a large percentage of the population are scared by guns and they want the government to "do something about it".
Yes he's good a deceiving people, again, just because I was deceived does that make me culpable, or just gullible? If a con-man cons a victim, are they liable too? I don't think they are.
By May 2006, it was fairly obvious that lies were told. I'm also somewhat surprised anybody ever really believed them to begin with and I think had the occupation gone smoothly, then all the WMD/Al-Queda nonsense would have been quietly forgotten. Am I personally responsible for what the government does? No. Are we collectively responsible? Yes.
"Then how come it's so often called "Americas War, that we were dragged into"? "
Did I say that? Nope.
Did I say that you said that? Nope. It is, however, how the war is now often portrayed. Britain was no more dragged into the war than America was dragged into it. You could say that both the people of the US and UK were dragged into it by their politicians, but we put them in the positions of power to do the dragging in the first place.
If the cards aren't linked to a computer network, how do you know that the cards are valid? How do you stop an 18 year old buying alcohol for his underage mates?
Also, what's the point of checking everybody's age? It's fairly obvious that most people are over 18 (I certainly don't look underage) or well under. There is a small grey-area percentage of the population where it's hard to tell if they're overage or not - for them, there are already ID cards available. What you really need is for pubs and off licences to better enforce the current rules - but then, if I was a lone shop keeper and a group of hoodies walked in the door, I think I'd rather just sell them the drinks so they leave rather than confront them.
Underage drinking isn't the cause of problems with young people in the UK - it's a symptom of deeper problems.
They "weren't sure" about it when the idea was first proposed, but it didn't take them that long come to the conclusion that it was a really, really bad idea. It's been a conservative policy for awhile.
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.
There's already some linking between store cards and government databases. I bought a TV in Tesco, and instead of having to fill in a form stating my name and address (for the TV licence people - something I remember doing in the past) they just used the details from my clubcard.
That does assume that Gordon Brown is seen as sufficiently different from Blair, and that his term as PM goes well (he'll have 3-4 years, it'll be interesting to see if he can shake off the memories of Blair in that time)
Also, you have to wonder just how much it was Brown, and not Blair, who didn't screw up the economy as Chancellor. A lot will depend on how good Brown's successor as Chancellor is.
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?
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.
I think there's a belief that people living in a welfare state will put up with more crap from their government than people who depend less on their government.
There might be something to it - if the people constantly call on the government to solve all of societies problems, then the government is going to have an easier time getting more power.
But then there's the UK, where the welfare state has been mostly dismantled and replaced with a nanny state - so the government will tell you to eat your vegetables, but won't do much to help you pay for those vegetables if you can't afford them. But a nanny state still runs on people telling government to solve all of society's ills, so this leads to the government calling for greater powers - "we need to invade your privacy, but it's for your own good", which pretty much sums up Blair's email.
I don't understand what's wrong with national ID cards as such
It will be astoundingly expensive, as it's basically a massive IT project run by a bunch of people (ie, the British government) who have shown themselves time and time again as incompetent when it comes to IT projects. Ever since Charles Babbage, UK government IT projects have pretty much always failed, and the few projects that didn't fail were late and over budget.
It's also an invasion of privacy that's liable to be abused.
I guess fundamentally, the problem with National ID cards is what's wrong with government - liability to be corrupted, incompetently run, overpriced and generally untrustworthy.
As you said, ID cards are a matter of Authentication, but it's not much of a method if you don't trust authenticating entity.
GP's post was an accurate statement of how many of us feel about Blair right now, it happens to be the majority view of Britain. It may be harsh the way he put it, but its accurate.
It may accurately reflect the view, but the view is wrong. Either the UK is a sovereign state (I'll ignore the EU for the moment), that made the decision to go to war and has to accept it's share of the guilt or it really is just a satellite state in an American hegemony - in which case people should stop complaining and have the UK become a full state of the US - that way instead of just complaining about US foreign policy, we'd actually have a say (after all, had the population of the UK had a vote in the US presidential elections, Bush would probably not be president).
Much as it might make for a great way to transfer guilt and shame, Bush did not just tell his lapdog what to do. Blair was in the military intervention business years before Bush even came to power, so I doubt he would have been anything but supportive. We have elections in this country, and yet Blair & co still were re-elected at the last election, which after the war started (and I somehow doubt the Americans had much to do with that).
Until people in the UK grow up and start taking responsibility for the actions of the government that we elected (and stop blaming America), the government will continue to take unpopular actions.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree that it still has to be passed by the House of Commons
I thought they were trying to remove that obstacle (there was some act last year that was half-jokingly referred to as the "Abolition Of Parliament Act") so that the Home Secretary could alter a law without parliamentary approval. I'm not sure what happened with that.
I'm pretty certain it's not perfectly legal to just follow someone around in public all you wanted. While IANAL, I think that could be considered stalking, and I'm fairly certain that's a crime.
If I wanted to hide from the man I wouldn't go for a walk out in public with my face in full view.
So you're a hoodie, who likes stalking people? And you haven't got an ASBO?
Like the Germans were anything compared to combined forces of the British government and British teenagers. One group of thugs might not be so bad, but two?
We don't actively monitor
The roads are actively monitored, and so are tube stations. Occasionally you'll see reports on the news from the monitoring rooms, full of people watching CCTV. I somehow doubt all those people are there just to look good on TV and disappear when the TV crew have left.
FOR A REASON: they don't want to be watched. Nobody does
Except Big Brother contestants, which, of course, has included an MP. I'd think they'd go for something like this, but in 1984 style, really only for "outer party members" and even then it wouldn't be 24/7, with politicians knowing how to get around the monitoring for when they're doing something dirty. It could be sold as a means of "fighting corruption" and even worse, it could be used for white washing - "look, I didn't sell peerages, here are the surveillance tapes".
The public may have the power to unseat them, but it desperately lacks the will to do so.
I'd love to know why. I can only think that either a lot of people are really just not that interested (as long as there's enough "bread and circuses" they don't care who's running the show or what they do), or they tacitly agree with the government (but can't be bothered to vote) or they just "go along with everybody else" (which doesn't require voting, as all you have to do is accept the opinion of the majority of voters). I also think holding elections on weekdays doesn't help. No matter what, it does not make for a functioning democracy.
In an even better system, Labour would only have gotten 35% of the available 35% of all possible seats (as in, the fewer people who vote, the fewer seats available). That what I don't like about most PR schemes - they don't take into account voter apathy, so a party with minimal actual support among the population as a whole get a disproportionate voice in government. "None of the above" should be a choice.
After all the the talk about "Sleeping Walking Into A Big Brother Society", a proper Big Brother is finally being discussed. Big Brother in 1984 didn't give a damn about the "proles" (which is what all the other Big Brother threats up until now were about), all the surveillance was for making sure party members kept in line.
That must be why there has been proposal after proposal for more and more big brother style policies, few if any of which are/would be effective. It was to get to the point where the government could monitor itself, which is far more likely to succeed, as there are a lot less people to watch.
So in 2001, we failed to see 2 years into the future in our crystal balls, that Tony Blair and George W Bush would fabricate false evidence of an imminent threat from Iraq in order to bump us into a war?
It doesn't matter that we didn't know what they were going to do, we are still responsible for their actions. The people are the ones who have the ultimate power (as we're the ones who put them in and out of office) and with that ultimate power comes (sorry for the Spiderman moment, but then you invoked Star Trek) ultimate responsibility. That whole "Government by the people, of the people, for the people" line that a lot of Americans are fond of, that's why we're collectively responsible - it's our government, we put them there. I sure as hell didn't personally put Blair into power, nor did the millions of people who didn't vote Labour, but we are all still partly responsible because the government are our representatives.
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).
Secondly, there's no way to vote against a petition
You could start a counter petition.
Many congested roads cannot be upgraded, so the petitions solution is facile and won't work - financially encouraging people to avoid congested areas (or discouraging them from going to congested areas, depending on your point of view) seems sane to me.
One option that is never mentioned is "not much can be done about it by government". A lot of congestion is self made (ie, everybody having to go to work at the same time) or due to a lack of options (ie, poor public transport) and charging people isn't going to do much. All it will do is force some people who have the option to switch to public transport to switch the public transport - but then this impacts on an already overburdened public transport infrastructure. Everyone else just finds a way to pay the charge, so congestion is never reduced all that much (I think we're now back to the same levels of congestion in London as before the charge was introduced) with the government getting a nice income boost.
So we're culpable because we didn't punish him quick enough?
We're culpable because we put them (Blair/Bush) into the positions of power in the first place. We're culpable, because even after it was shown that were liars we collectively put both of them back into power.
If we were in a dictatorship, the you could argue that it's not our fault. But neither the UK nor the US is a dictatorship - they're both democracies (in the common use of the term), which means that the people are ultimately responsible for both the government and it's actions. Even the actions we don't agree with.
Seeing as the majority of people often can't even be bothered to go out and vote, why would a government ever be scared by the people owning guns? Voting is an easy and generally safe thing to do. Overthrowing the government by force is a fairly active, high risk activity.
Guns are banned (in the UK - and even then, the ban isn't total) not because the government is scared by guns, they're banned because a large percentage of the population are scared by guns and they want the government to "do something about it".
Yes he's good a deceiving people, again, just because I was deceived does that make me culpable, or just gullible? If a con-man cons a victim, are they liable too? I don't think they are.
By May 2006, it was fairly obvious that lies were told. I'm also somewhat surprised anybody ever really believed them to begin with and I think had the occupation gone smoothly, then all the WMD/Al-Queda nonsense would have been quietly forgotten. Am I personally responsible for what the government does? No. Are we collectively responsible? Yes.
"Then how come it's so often called "Americas War, that we were dragged into"? "
Did I say that? Nope.
Did I say that you said that? Nope. It is, however, how the war is now often portrayed. Britain was no more dragged into the war than America was dragged into it. You could say that both the people of the US and UK were dragged into it by their politicians, but we put them in the positions of power to do the dragging in the first place.
If the cards aren't linked to a computer network, how do you know that the cards are valid? How do you stop an 18 year old buying alcohol for his underage mates?
Also, what's the point of checking everybody's age? It's fairly obvious that most people are over 18 (I certainly don't look underage) or well under. There is a small grey-area percentage of the population where it's hard to tell if they're overage or not - for them, there are already ID cards available. What you really need is for pubs and off licences to better enforce the current rules - but then, if I was a lone shop keeper and a group of hoodies walked in the door, I think I'd rather just sell them the drinks so they leave rather than confront them.
Underage drinking isn't the cause of problems with young people in the UK - it's a symptom of deeper problems.
They "weren't sure" about it when the idea was first proposed, but it didn't take them that long come to the conclusion that it was a really, really bad idea. It's been a conservative policy for awhile.
They could rent or move.
Where? Have you seen what house prices are like in the UK? Renting's worse as your paying somebody else's mortgage plus some profit.
getting free holidays from rock musicians and dubious foreign politicians (not sure in which category "Sir" Cliff Richard falls.)
Dubious rock musician
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.
There's already some linking between store cards and government databases. I bought a TV in Tesco, and instead of having to fill in a form stating my name and address (for the TV licence people - something I remember doing in the past) they just used the details from my clubcard.
That does assume that Gordon Brown is seen as sufficiently different from Blair, and that his term as PM goes well (he'll have 3-4 years, it'll be interesting to see if he can shake off the memories of Blair in that time)
Also, you have to wonder just how much it was Brown, and not Blair, who didn't screw up the economy as Chancellor. A lot will depend on how good Brown's successor as Chancellor is.
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.
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.
What does this have to do with the Welfare state?
I think there's a belief that people living in a welfare state will put up with more crap from their government than people who depend less on their government.
There might be something to it - if the people constantly call on the government to solve all of societies problems, then the government is going to have an easier time getting more power.
But then there's the UK, where the welfare state has been mostly dismantled and replaced with a nanny state - so the government will tell you to eat your vegetables, but won't do much to help you pay for those vegetables if you can't afford them. But a nanny state still runs on people telling government to solve all of society's ills, so this leads to the government calling for greater powers - "we need to invade your privacy, but it's for your own good", which pretty much sums up Blair's email.
I don't understand what's wrong with national ID cards as such
It will be astoundingly expensive, as it's basically a massive IT project run by a bunch of people (ie, the British government) who have shown themselves time and time again as incompetent when it comes to IT projects. Ever since Charles Babbage, UK government IT projects have pretty much always failed, and the few projects that didn't fail were late and over budget.
It's also an invasion of privacy that's liable to be abused.
I guess fundamentally, the problem with National ID cards is what's wrong with government - liability to be corrupted, incompetently run, overpriced and generally untrustworthy.
As you said, ID cards are a matter of Authentication, but it's not much of a method if you don't trust authenticating entity.
GP's post was an accurate statement of how many of us feel about Blair right now, it happens to be the majority view of Britain. It may be harsh the way he put it, but its accurate.
It may accurately reflect the view, but the view is wrong. Either the UK is a sovereign state (I'll ignore the EU for the moment), that made the decision to go to war and has to accept it's share of the guilt or it really is just a satellite state in an American hegemony - in which case people should stop complaining and have the UK become a full state of the US - that way instead of just complaining about US foreign policy, we'd actually have a say (after all, had the population of the UK had a vote in the US presidential elections, Bush would probably not be president).
Much as it might make for a great way to transfer guilt and shame, Bush did not just tell his lapdog what to do. Blair was in the military intervention business years before Bush even came to power, so I doubt he would have been anything but supportive. We have elections in this country, and yet Blair & co still were re-elected at the last election, which after the war started (and I somehow doubt the Americans had much to do with that).
Until people in the UK grow up and start taking responsibility for the actions of the government that we elected (and stop blaming America), the government will continue to take unpopular actions.
Before the UK went to Iraq, there were demonstrations with up to 2 million people
But then, after we went to war, the Labour party got re-elected. If we're slaves, it's our own fault.