ID

I know I should at long last finish my take on the nation state in reaction to Lenin's great post, but now I am in the contrarian mood, Britain-focused and want to be short.

It is said the same number in every databank gives total control of your data to the government.

I don't think so. If the government (or some other evil force) wants to control all your data, what it needs is access to all databases. Whether it is your name, address, or ID number the databases will be scanned for to find your data is in this issue irrelevant.

As someone who lived with an ID card all his life, I could even argue for some advantages, but won't here - none of the purported reasons to introduce it are among them. Instead, I sound my suspicion that the Bliar government more wants the ID card as another shiny happy media-present nothing-of-significance NuLab potemkin-crap that won't achieve anything but may also hide some really important nasty steps off the media limelight; in this instance, they want to demonstrate that they are getting tough on crime/immigrants (crime=immigrants), while they make some (more) moves to permit themselves to look into all kinds of databases unhindered. Moreover, with police state advocates all around the EU recently voting for the inclusion of fingerprints on ID cards (as if those couldn't be faked just like photos) there is some true ID card idiocy around to fight.

I think overall the No2ID campaign is (was?) a good thing, but the fact that 67% of Britons support the emerging police state is even more depressing considering the focus on NuLab-hyped-up superficialities by the opposition.