Know Your Place
Thursday, April 20
The problem is this: less than three weeks ago, on 30th March, the Identity Cards Act 2006 became law. For some reason, there was no rioting in the streets, though it would have been appropriate, for this is the biggest and most draconian step yet in Britain's long march away from liberty and towards autocracy.
Exaggeration? Pah. This law will create the biggest state database of information on private individuals anywhere in the world. Once on the National Identity Register (NIR), you will be required to tell the government where you live, what you do and what your movements are. Your irises and fingerprints will scanned onto a national database. Every time you move house or change job, you will be required to inform the government. They will know where you are, and what you are doing, anytime they want to. And if that isn't the beginning of the end of liberty, what is?
Now that the Act is law, this is coming our way very soon. There is one way that you can at least delay your numbering, however, and that's to renew your passport. The new law lets the Home Office turn your passport into a ‘designated document’ for its ID card scheme, which means that it will refuse to renew your passport unless you attend an official interview and agree to be fingerprinted, scanned and relieved of your personal details.
Well, fuck them. Their law is not yet in force, and this gives us a loopphole - renew your passport now, and you won't have to put yourself on the database for ten years. With any luck by that time either we will have seen sense and abolished the whole thing, or the world will have ended, thus making it all seem rather trivial anyway.
I've just this minute renewed my passport online, which you can do here. You should also visit this site for more on this scheme, why it matters and what the implications of passport renewal are. Do it now, or get numbered for life.
Posted by Paul at 2:24 PM 
5 Comments
I am beginning to think that we are living in 1984. We are already the most monitored people in Europe if not the world, (Think of a public place in the city that isn’t monitored by CCTV) dissent has already been criminalised through the serious organised crime act, the exclusion zone around parliament not to mention anti-terrorism legislation. (How long until people are arrested for heckling The Party, instead of simply being excluded from their conferences?) We are now in a perpetual war with “terrorism” and already have our own versions of Room 101. I’m not sure what more we need to complete the set.
If the apocalypse doesn’t start soon I’m going to have to move abroad to escape this madness. Maybe France, at least they riot there, most people here are too docile for their own good. Kris
Posted by: 
at 11:48 AM
Rest assured people will riot here as soon as they run out of food.
Just before Xmas I saw people panic buying food in quantities that looked as if they were hoarding for a famine, and Tesco was only closed for two days. I reckon we're about two day's petrol shortage away from serious depletion of Tesco's stock as they have a "Just in time" method of re-ordering, also known among staff as the "not in time to stop whole shelves being empty half the bloody time" method - it's a big supermarket but they often have NO bread, or the entire milk section will be empty, etc.
If the delivery lorries are out of action for more than 24 hours the entire enormous supermarket will be empty, and hoards of angry people will shoot each other and smash up cars as soon as the mood feels right. We had some practice a few years ago where I live with the "race riots".
Alice x
Posted by: at 12:44 PM
Check out the full list of details to be contained on our cards!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4630045.stm
Posted by: at 12:56 PM
Thanks for the shout Paul, I just got my application in. The online passport site is closing Friday 28th for upgrading! Plugging the loopholes perhaps?
Ken
