Turning law-abiding subjects into law breakers
February 28th, 2006
Compulsory ID cards are nothing new in the UK. They were issued to all British civilians during World War II. That is until one ordinary man said no.
Clarence Willcock, a 54-year-old dry cleaner from suburban north London, must rank as one of the unlikeliest Davids ever to take on a Goliath.
Mr Willcock was stopped on December 7 1950 while driving his car along Ballard’s Lane by uniformed police constable Harold Muckle, who demanded to see the motorist’s identity card.
Mr Willcock refused. Pc Muckle told him to produce the compulsory card at the local station with 48 hours. “I will not produce it at any police station,” Mr Willcock replied.
With this act of defiance, Mr Willcock brought crashing down a giant bureaucracy which had, since the outbreak of World War II in 1939, forced an identity card on every civilian in the UK – man, woman and child.
When Willcock v Muckle eventually reached the High Court in 1951, Lord Chief Justice Goddard said the continuation of the wartime ID card scheme was an “annoyance” to much of the public and “tended to turn law-abiding subjects into law breakers”. […]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3129302.stm
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A BLOGDIAL post from April 24th 2004
And I add today, from the same article:
“Let us have the credit for ‘setting the people free’,” wrote one Treasury minister in 1952, though he was really gleefully looking forward to “the consequential staff economies”.
The demise of the system was forecast while the fight against Hitler was still fierce. In October 1944, Registrar General Sir Earnest Holderness said that he did “not believe that public opinion will stand for the retention of [national registration] in its present form”.
Sir Ernest reasoned that once law-abiding citizens no longer needed to provide details of their address to ensure their ration allowances, they would not bother to keep their ID cards up to date merely because the government asked them to.
And what, my dear friends, is the difference between the British of 1952 and the British of 2006? Just what is it that they have been putting in the water that has turned a population of real people into sheeple?
How did they do it?
How much lower can they all sink before they are literally turned into cattle?
Everything says “this should not be happening” but it is, and…I can’t wake up!