The government’s plans to introduce identity cards were dealt a body blow last night after it emerged the true cost of the scheme could top £18 billion, more than triple the official estimate.

The figure has been calculated by experts at the London School of Economics, who have spent months producing one of the most authoritative analyses of the scheme.
(Source: The Guardian)

Eighteen BILLION?

Remember when I said that there’s always money for war? Well, apparently Blair and his cronies also think it’s fit to waste huge swathes of our money on unworkable ID schemes.

Will ID cards reduce fraud or illegal immigration? Nope. If anything can be manufactured, it can also be forged. All ID cards will do is create a lucrative new business for organised crime, churning out fakes at presumably the same prices as they now charge for passports. Any biometric data can be copied or hacked, perhaps with greater ease and less traceability than forging banknotes.

ID cards will serve only one purpose: to tighten this government’s increasingly repressive grip on its citizens. We’re already the most watched populace in Europe thanks to the increasing intrusion of CCTV cameras, ID cards will just knock another chip off our liberty:

The scheme, which will see some 44 million people issued with a card containing personal details including their name, date of birth and address, is considered controversial because personal details on the central database can be accessed by public sector organisations, without the individual’s consent.
(Source: The Guardian)

Do you want people able to snoop on your most personal details without even having to ask your permission? Do you want this information passed onto the agencies of foreign governments that our government is pally with?

This is an attempt to control us, to lock every aspect of our lives (healthcare, taxes, work, education) into a centralised bureaucracy that will track our every move. It will be made impossible for people to exist outside of this system, unless they’re willing to live at the level of an eighteenth-century peasant.

I see ID cards as a lose-lose proposition. If they work as advertised, they will reduce our liberty and freedom to an extent never before experienced in Britain. They will be plastic Big Brothers, snitching on us from our wallets and purses. And we will have paid for the privilege!

If they don’t work as advertised, they will have been a waste of billions of pounds of our money. Money that could actually have been spent on making our lives richer and easier rather than more limited and oppressed.

But, as always, there’s no question when government wants to throw our money down the drain on nuclear weapons, the phony “war on terror” or schemes like the ID card. The political will is there so the money magically appears.

Where’s the money for us? Money that could have been spent on schools, hospitals, public transport?