Today, we read an irrational nauseating and completely wrong headed Defense of what amounts to ID Cards through the back door, delivered uncritically by the incorrectly named ‘Liberty Central’, which is in fact, Fail Central when it comes to your rights and defending them:

ID cards: gone for good
Scrapping the costly ID card scheme will be just the first act of this coalition to stop the state stealing people’s liberty

The title of this piece is false. ID Cards are not ‘gone for good’, since foreigners are still compelled to hand over their fingerprints and be registered in an NIR Lite®.

When the second reading of the Identity Documents bill takes place in the House of Commons later today, the coalition government will meet its commitment to scrap the ID card scheme. This bill is the first step the government will take to reduce control by the state and hand power pack to the people. It is not the job of government to collect and store vast amounts of biographical and biometric data belonging to innocent people.

We agree with this entirely.

It is not the job or proper role of government to do this to innocent people, no matter where they come from or who they are. That is the qualification missing from this correct statement.

People do not want the state keeping information on its citizens for some ill-defined and unproven benefit. Fewer than 15,000 people have bought an ID card since last November – and around 3,000 of those were issued free to workers at Manchester and London City airports.

When has what people want had anything to do with the proper role of government, or what it decides to do or not do? This is window dressing, and as for ‘ill-defined and unproven benefit’, you, Damien Green, fall into this trap yourself in this very article.

Many claims have been made in recent years for supposed benefits of the identity card scheme – from tackling terrorism and fighting organised crime to preventing identity fraud. I don’t believe these have, or ever would have, materialised. This is incredible given that the scheme, while delivering no increase in public protection, would also erode hardwon rights and freedoms and requires huge spending.

We have been talking about this for years. All the claims made for ID Cards were completely disproven by us and many other people. Which makes what Mr. Green says later quite astonishing.

The estimated spend of £835m in costs over ten years on the scheme is a significant amount of money, not “diddly squat” as Alan Johnson, the former home secretary, has publicly stated.

What do you expect from a communist post man? In any case, what the liars in New Labour said is now irrelevant. The bills have been put on the table and they need to be paid and repealed.

This huge sum would have been extracted from all of us one way or the other – either because we would have been forced to buy the wretched cards or through taxation.

And the issue of money is an entirely separate issue from the basic immorality of the project.

With the introduction of the Identity Documents bill, the coalition government has acted swiftly to turn back the increasing tide of government bureaucracy. We want to dismantle the scheme at minimum cost to the public and see early destruction of the personal data held on the national identity register and of the register itself.

You may be turning back the tide, but the country is still flooded up to the neck in laws that violate the rights of everyone who lives in Britain. Until you have drained all the leech filled waters completely, you cannot make any claim that the work is finished.

Now we come to the nasty, ridiculous, irrational, illogical, xenophobic clap trap…

Some campaigners have criticised our decision to continue issuing biometric residence permits while scrapping the ID card for UK citizens. This is misguided because the documents are very different.

No, they are not different at all in nature. Foreigners will be compelled to hand over their fingerprints and be registered on an NIR Lite® which will be subject to all the same vulnerabilities as the full NIR. It is discriminatory and xenophobic since it targets only one group of people – foreigners. It is illogical because anyone who does not look the part will be subject to investigation as we have detailed over and over instantly legitimising the need for a National ID Card of the type you are rejecting. It will create confusion, suspicion, division, disharmony and hatred; the complete opposite of what any mandated interfacing with the state should produce.

These biometric residents permits offer no advantages over the traditional ones, just as biometric ID Cards do not offer any benefits to anyone. If they are going to be brought in, as was the case with ID Cards, Damien Green needs to explain in detail, with evidence to back up his claims, how these residence permits are going to deliver the benefits he lists. I note that he does not do this in this article, because he knows full well that this system is being kept on solely to placate the vendors who are having their NIR related contracts cancelled.

We are required by European Union law to provide biometric residence permits to non-EU foreign nationals.

This is the Nuremberg Defense. “I was only following orders”. All the people who committed serious crimes and who used this defense were hanged.

If something is immoral, you have no option as a moral and ethical person but to reject and refuse to impliment it. You cannot lay the blame elsewhere for your crimes of violation. If you are acting as a public servant, you cannot engage in acts of violence against anyone on behalf of your masters, under the same principle that covers your behaviour in the Nuremberg Defense.

This excuse simply does not hold water, and there are any number of EU laws that could be enacted that are offensive to liberty that I could list, where I might say, “if X law was passed would you be obliged to obey it?”. The UK opted out of the parts of the Shengen Agreement that were not to its liking. There is no reason whatsoever that this too should not be immediately stopped.

They are issued under entirely different legislation.

This is the sort of argument a child makes. Whatever the legislation is, you should not be implementing it, period.

They are not “ID cards for foreign nationals”, as the previous government called them.

That is exactly and precisely what they are. As we describe, anyone who does not look the part will be made to identify themselves against the National Biometric Identity Service (NBIS) system, to which the police will have access so that people can be fingerprinted in the street, like criminals.

This is completely indefensible.

The biometric data is not kept on the national identity register

No, it is kept on the NBIS database, which is for all intents and purposes, identical to the NIR. To use these words as as a balm to reassure the public that the danger is really over is pathetic, childish and shows that Damien Green is falling into the same traps that New Labour fell into when they were trying to sell the snake oil of ID Cards. They start by using childish thinking, illogic, diversions, mischaracterisations and end up lying through their teeth to save face.

, and there is no legal obligation for foreign nationals to carry their permit with them,

This is a New Labour style misrepresentation and fact omission. Everyone and their dog now knows that in a biometric system with a central database, your fingerprints are the card. Once you give over your fingerprints, they can be checked anywhere at any time, instantly. You do not need a physical card; this is the sinister nature of biometric identity systems, and it is why the NIR had to be destroyed. The NBIS is no different, and anyone who says so is either:

1. Computer illiterate
2. A liar

so no one should ever be stopped and asked to produce the card.

Firstly, we all know that the anti terror laws have been abused beyond imagination and all reason. No one SHOULD have been abused under these laws, but they WERE and CONTINUE TO BE abused.

If this requirement for foreigners remains, then reflexive xenophobic forces WILL come into play and people WILL be abused. That is an absolute fact. And whilst no one will be asked for their card, they will be forced to put their finger on a scanner to be identified.

First, this will happen to brown people. Then, there will be yet another toothless outcry of racial profiling from the usual suspects, and then to make up the numbers, ‘white’ indigenous people will be targeted at random for street fingerprinting and fingerprinting down at the police station, so that the police can demonstrate that they are not using racial profiling, and being in the new Orwellian doublethink of the day, ‘fair’.

Think about it carefully. If they need to prove that they are not racially profiling, they will need to fingerprint (at any place and any time) the indigenous British, and then record their details along with the fingerprint that they took for the purpose of gathering statistics. That data is going to have to be stored somewhere.

Are you starting to get the picture yet?

ID Cards for foreigners will by their very existence, bring into being ID Cards and an NIR for the entire population.

We must also bear in mind that it only takes an act of Parliament to make the carrying of foreigner ID Cards compulsory. The word of one decent, if slightly confused man in a single article in a Marxist newspaper is no Defense against the future abuses of a rogue Parliament and the totalitarian beasts who man it.

Unlike the identity card for British citizens, this card serves a purpose by helping foreign nationals easily prove they have a right to live and work freely in the UK.

This is a claim that biometric resident permits have a utility greater than the residence permits that were being issued previously. Damien Green has not said how this is so, but I can tell you that proving you have a right to “live and work freely in the UK” means that you will, at a minimum, be required to produce your foreigner ID Card to a potential employer.

Any employer who does not ask for this card, could open himself up to prosecution. Any person who does not look or sound the part will be asked for this card. If an employer asks a person who does not look the part but who is British, could find himself being prosecuted for discrimination.

Once again, the only way a system like this can work is if everybody has a card showing their status; a National ID Card, which the coalition have conceded is unacceptable to decent people living in a free country.

What they must now admit is that the foreigner ID Card is also unacceptable for the same reasons, and more, since it will create the need for the very thing they have railed against so eloquently.

This government wants to bring to an end the practice of the state gathering data for the sake of it. It is imperative the government is held accountable to the people it represents and does not abuse its position in key areas of personal freedom and liberty.

If that is the case, then they should not be gathering the fingerprints of anyone, since doing so serves no purpose but to line the pockets of IBM.

This government represents not only the indigenous people of Britain, but of all people who enter this island legally for whatever reason. By mandating that foreigners are to be fingerprinted, this coalition government aligns itself with the worst abuses of places like Dubai, where workers are routinely abused.

The coalition is setting up a system of second class persons, just as the Apartheid government did, through its system of pass laws. This is anathema to all moral people.

The Identity Documents bill is a major step on that road. Making the repeal of ID cards bill the first to be brought before parliament by the new government demonstrates how serious we are about creating a free society and reducing expenditure.

This is simply not true.

In a free society, you do not fingerprint and catalogue one section of the public, whilst leaving the remainder at liberty. Liberty is for all, no exceptions, no compromises and no excuses.

Cancelling the ID cards scheme and abolishing the national identity register is a major step in dismantling the surveillance state, but this bill is just the first step. It will be followed by a series of reforms to restore British freedom to our citizens.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/jun/09/id-cards-damian-green

The British are not YOUR citizens. Someone who believes in liberty would never use the possessive pronoun to describe human beings; you, Damien Green are THE SERVANT, not the OWNER or THE MASTER.

You have NO RIGHT to fingerprint ANYBODY, British Citizen or not.

You are NOT making the first step unless the NBIS is abandoned permanently; in fact, yo are TRIPPING YOURSELF UP with this absurd and illogical retention of an immoral and inhuman Apartheid system, that is sure to grow like a cancer that will impede the recovery of the healthy liberties of Britain.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 11:25 am and is filed under Idiocracy, Insanity, Justice, NIR, No no no!, Politricks, Someone Stupid Said, TC TI KB, Told You So.