ID Cards dead in the water!!!! Yippee!!!!

That's not how I'm reading that article, Darat.
It says there's no change to the plans to roll it out - only that in this initial trial there's been a change in whether the cards are compulsory or not.
 
I doubt it. Other than the realisation that a highly unionised bunch of workers were a really bad group to carry out the initial testing on I don't see any change.
 
Agreed Chill. They are just trying to make it look more acceptable. You are still going to have to give the data if you want a passport: maybe if you want a driving licence. They are aware of the opposition but this is not an acceptance of that: it is just delay
 
Sorry I disagree this is the end of the scheme as an actual ID card; this is just a way to try and minimise the political flack of backing out.
 
I sincerely hope you are right Darat. But it is going to cost a helluva lot of money and I do not think they are going to give up on it.
 
So now they have wasted all the money on it, they are making it voluntary so that when it fails to deliver any of the made up benefits that they claimed it would deliver (knowing full well it never would) they can say that it would have if only it had been compulsory.

They have wasted billions of our money for no benefit and are going to blame it on us.
 
It is hard to find out how much they have spent

http://www.politics.co.uk/interviews/legal-and-constitutional/analysis-anatomy-of-an-id-card-$1305365.htm

Some very limited information there

The home office estimate for the whole scheme is about £5 bn but I cannot find anything to say how much has already been spent

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3127696.stm

How much will the scheme cost the taxpayer?
The Home Office has estimated the scheme will cost £5bn, but the London School of Economics says the true cost will be between £10bn and £20bn. The Conservatives say scrapping the scheme, as they plan to do if they win power, will save between £1bn and £2bn as they would keep biometric passports and much of the money for that scheme has already been spent. They have written to firms warning them not to sign long-term contracts for ID card work. The Home Office says about 70% of the costs are operational and will be recoverable from fees.
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From a campaigning group: as you see the costs are conflated with the passport costs so it is all very misty

http://www.no2id.net/news/pressRelease/release?name=Deceptive_rebranding

It is a forward-looking estimate only and completely ignores the £250 million+ already spent on the scheme [2].
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Jaggy Bunnet said:
So now they have wasted all the money on it, they are making it voluntary so that when it fails to deliver any of the made up benefits that they claimed it would deliver (knowing full well it never would) they can say that it would have if only it had been compulsory.

They have wasted billions of our money for no benefit and are going to blame it on us.
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I like your operational definition of government!
 
One more reason to be happy today.

If not for the "orwellian" overtones.

But it is not over yet. Labour still plans to issue them in the near future. In the next election, my vote will go to the tories or the Lib Dems.

Gordon Brown is also dead in the water.
 
And the national identity database is to remain. With a £1,000 fine if you don't tell them when you change address.
 
Which is presumably why wee 'Ec has told them they'll get bugger all Government support up here, not that it'll stop them. Daft eejits (i.e. Labour).
 
Fiona said:
It is hard to find out how much they have spent

http://www.politics.co.uk/interviews/legal-and-constitutional/analysis-anatomy-of-an-id-card-$1305365.htm

Some very limited information there

The home office estimate for the whole scheme is about £5 bn but I cannot find anything to say how much has already been spent

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3127696.stm




From a campaigning group: as you see the costs are conflated with the passport costs so it is all very misty

http://www.no2id.net/news/pressRelease/release?name=Deceptive_rebranding
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Thanks for that.
 
Alan Johnson wrote an article justifying the continued use of ID cards this week, so I don't think we are going to see the scheme killed off just yet. It is interesting to note however that the justification for the scheme was framed entirely in terms of protecting Britons from identity theft, with nary a mention of terrorism, immigration or general crime fighting which previously had formed the backbone of the governments argument for the cards and associated database.

As more than a couple of posters pointed out on the comment is free messageboard, the best way to protect people from identity theft is to make sure that identity information isn't all kept in one place, so that lots of people only know a little bit about you. Why do we have such a gutless prime minister? Scrap ID cards and scrap Trident. If he wasn't such a gutless wonder he would actually have the balls to make big decisions rather than constantly hiding behind triangulation equivocation and interminable inquiries. And who knows? He might actually breathe some life into the rotting carcass of the Labour Party. Of course he won't however. Roll on 2010 and parliamentary oblivion for the neoliberals of new Labour.
 
andyandy said:
Of course he won't however. Roll on 2010 and parliamentary oblivion for the neoliberals of new Labour.
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As much as I want to see the back of a Labour government, I do hope that they put up enough of a good showing at the polls whenever they finally decide to go to them so as not to make the next government a landslide.

Either that or fall away so far that the LibDems put up a decent oppositoin in their place.

Landslides are not good.



and YAY for death of ID cards, if you would be so kind as to stop wasting our money on things that provide little to no benefit to us taxpayers that would be cool.
 
geni said:
Getting rid of trident would require to make a real commitment to national defence which would cost far more.
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I would respectfully disagree, we could quite easily live under the American nuclear umbrella (which most of the world's 200 countries manage to do quite acceptably) without suddenly necessitating any Maginot line national defences to replace them. But by all means we could use some of the billions saved on Trident on better arming our troops serving in Afghanistan and on countering the terrorist threat to the country (both through greater counterterrorism resources and through greater foreign diplomatic resources). But this discussion is probably best reserved for its own thread ;)
 
Alareth said:
Are these the same ID Cards talked about here:

http://www.dailytech.com/66B+British+ID+Program+Has+No+Card+Readers/article14175.htm
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yep,

Britain's ID card program has become the poster child for problems of the weird variety. The program seemed very promising, with the intention of putting a wealth of information at law enforcement's fingertips and making it harder for criminals to enter or exit the country. The carding program, run by the Identity and Passport Service (IPS), cost $6.6B USD (£4.7B). The IPS offered cards with a wealth of data including biographical data as well as facial and fingerprint scans.

While such information would certainly be helpful to law enforcement efforts, there was one critical problem. British officials forgot to buy readers for the cards.

A news site, Silicon.com, submitted a FoI (Freedom of Information) request to the IPS, which responded by revealing that currently no police stations, border entry points, or job centers have readers for the card's biometric chip. Without readers, the card essentially becomes just a photo ID; no more or less secure than a standard drivers license, albeit at a much higher cost.
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Britain, leading the world in digital incompetence. :rolleyes:
 
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