Airline Pilots Double Down: “We will resist”
May 5th, 2009Airline pilots are to become the first group to refuse to take part in the national identity scheme when compulsory trials start at Manchester and London City airports this autumn.
The British Airline Pilots’ Association (Balpa), which represents more than 80% of commercial airline pilots, is to mount a legal challenge to Home Office plans to use “critical” airside workers as the first compulsory “guinea pigs” for the scheme.
MPs are shortly to be asked to approve the powers to compel the pilots and other airside workers at the two airports to register for the national ID card scheme as part of their “pre-employment” checks. The £30 fee is to be waived as an incentive for them to sign up.
The pilots’ union has protested to ministers that the £18m scheme cannot be regarded as voluntary when they are being told they will not qualify for an “airside pass” without them: “ID cards will have absolutely no value as far as security is concerned. This is nothing other than coercion and promises that ID cards would be voluntary have been broken,” Jim McAuslan, Balpa general secretary, has told ministers. “We will resist.”
These behind the scenes preparations and the recent signing of two 10-year contracts worth £650m to get the ID cards programme under way undermine recent speculation that the cabinet is considering axing the scheme as part of the general Whitehall spending squeeze. The speculation took off when a suggestion by David Blunkett, the former home secretary, that the ID card programme should be repackaged as a biometric passport scheme to reassure the public was misintepreted as him turning against the idea.
But the details of the two contracts awarded in the last few weeks show just how far the ID cards scheme has become embedded in the introduction of “biometric” passports. For 80% of British citizens their identity card will be their passport.
The Home Office describes the two contracts as “bringing the large scale deployment of ID cards a step closer”. The first contract, worth £385m and awarded to a US computer company, CSC, will cover processing applications for passports and ID cards and dealing with any subsequent changes in personal details . The second contract, awarded to IBM, and worth £265m, is to build and run the database that will store the digital fingerprints and facial images for the ID scheme and the new generation of passports.
The decision to combine what the Home Office calls the core elements of the ID cards programme and the modernisation of the passports means it will be difficult for any incoming government after the general election to cancel the ID scheme separately.
Two further contracts will be awarded this year for the design and production of identity cards and the next generation of passports to be introduced from 2011.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/04/identity-cards-airline-pilots
So, IBM is at it again:
During the rise of Nazi Germany and the onset of World War II, IBM had relationships and contracts with the German military/industrial technocracy. IBM’s punch card machines were used by Germany to keep track of people who were to be subjected to the Holocaust.[7]
[…]
and
IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM’s strategic alliance with Nazi Germany — beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.
[…]
I’m surprised that no one is pulling up these companies, especially IBM for participating in this absolutely appalling and fascist scheme and of course, there are no companies in the UK who are capable of pulling off this nefarious project.
The grauniad betrays its secret pro ID card stance (not surprising, since they are pure statists in every other way) with this paragraph:
The decision to combine what the Home Office calls the core elements of the ID cards programme and the modernisation of the passports means it will be difficult for any incoming government after the general election to cancel the ID scheme separately.
This is a lie.
Lets try it this way:
“The decision to combine what the Home Office calls the core elements of the ID cards programme and the mandatory barcode tattooing of the British public means it will be difficult for any incoming government after the general election to cancel the ID scheme separately.”
It doesn’t work does it? And it doesn’t matter how much money they have spent, or how the system has been designed; it can be dismantled, and WILL be dismantled. The money they have spent on this project will be written off, and the companies will get compensation for the cancellation of the contracts. GAME OVER.
We have just seen the climbdown on keeping the DNA profiles and samples of innocent people, resulting in the destruction of the information on 800,000 completely innocent people, including children. Do not think for one second that the ID Card system can not be dismantled completely and sanity restored.
The only people who write like that, saying that it will be a fait accompli are those who want to carry these noxious and purely evil documents. It is not an excuse for Alan Travis to say that he is “merely reporting” when he writes this, because it is a lie to say that it cannot be, or will be ‘difficult’ to, “cancel the ID scheme separately”. Difficult by whose measure? Who said this? And if, as it is, it is not the case, why is there no counter argument saying that it is in fact not ‘difficult’ at all to cancel the project…just expensive, which when we are talking about human lives and dignity, means nothing. ‘Expensive’ itself is a relative term; Number 11 can just push the speed of their printing press up to 10.5 from 10 for an hour to pay off IBM and CSC….but I digress.
As for MPs asking for “powers to compel the pilots and other airside workers at the two airports to register” they are just going to further solidify the resolve of the people who they have chosen to attack first. Everyone in the country will get behind them; there is no way that the government can possibly win.
They have already threatened to strike. I hope that the other airport staff are also ready to come out on strike at the same time. Both airports should be completely shut down until the government announces that the scheme is permanently cancelled.