documented down like rats

"My chief weapon is Lies. Lies and Control. Control and Lies. My two weapons are Control and Lies...and Ruthless Inefficiency. My three weapons are...wait...the National Audit Office says I can only count to two..."

Here is Charles Clarke, Home Secretary of Surveillance Nation, with his personal arsenal which he hopes will afford him protection from the Real World.

Mr Clarke's plan, which he inherited from fellow non-resident of the real world, David Blunkett, is this: He would like a nice list of everyone living in this country. He would like our fingerprints, scans of our irises, our names and addresses, and all our...er...previous names and addresses, which he would like to keep in a monstrous central database with another 45 bits of personal info so he can sell our identities to - basically - anyone prepared to pay for them. Oh, and he'd also like to us to pay for it. Don't like it? Tough. We will be required to register for processing in one of 70 centres where our fingerprints and iris scans will be forcibly taken from us. Don't want to go? Well, we'll get a non-negotiable, repeatable fine. That'll be £2,500 for nice smiley Charles 'Sweaty Baboon' Clarke and his zombie army of Home Office automatons. Mr Clarke clearly thinks the entire nation is populated by criminals, dissenters, terrorists, tax-dodgers, illegal immigrants, health tourists, gangmasters and people who laugh at him. He'd like all our fingerprints so he can tell how many thousand of us are instant suspects.

This is what the Labour government calls 'voluntary'. This noxious little scheme will, apparently, be 'initially voluntary' for people renewing their passports from 2008. What Mr Clarke really means is it will be compulsory. His time as Secretary of State for Education has obviously not served him well, as he believes this is as lucid as a cloudless sky. Because, he says, "no-one is forced to renew a passport." Unless you want to go abroad. Unless you want to open a bank account or do a hundred other things which require ID.

Using Clarke's horribly specious reasoning, it is also 'voluntary' to breathe, to eat, to pay taxes (you don't have to have a job), to pay your bus fare (you don't have to travel).

What he is saying is "you don't have to go on our Stasi database, but if you don't submit, you can't leave the country - then we'll get you in five years' time"

The whole thing is stinkier than the stinkiest stinky cheese. Unfortunately, in a galaxy far, far away, the residents of Planet Labour have no sense of smell.

Join NO2ID.

a larder full of all the good things

Back in the 80s, the now defunct Smash Hits - in between Five Star lyrics and double-page spreads of Morten Harket - had an annual poll, one of the categories of which was 'Most Very Horrible Thing'. I can only remember two winners: 'spiders' and 'Thatcher'.

Also back in the 80s, as a ten-year-old, I was perpetually hungry, mainly for the reason that the number of foods I would eat could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and probably on the fingers of one of Jeremy Beadle's hands. This hunger led me to eat, as secretly as possible, things which I was evidently Not Supposed To Eat: dog biscuits, jelly cubes, icing sugar, cardboard and jam, burnt wood, the flowers of fuchsia bushes and so on. As a culmination, I once ate some veterinary pills, of some antiquity, flavoured with a chocolate substitute and probably meant for dogs with gout.

On one occasion this hunger led me to a suspiciously food-like substance in the form of a small conical pile of white powder sitting on the kitchen draining-board. My experience of white powder until that moment had been confined to a) sherbet, b) icing sugar, and c) more icing sugar. Therefore, not unreasonably, I decided it must be one of these. So, I dipped my finger in it and tasted it.

In fact, it was Vim. Since then, I have been very wary of undefined substances on draining boards.

Now, at lunch on Friday I had an unfortunate Vim flashback. Having forgotten to bring my nice healthy lunch with me, I had to buy my own - which is where the ten-year-old in me took over and bought me a packet of the preposterously-named Smarties 'Big Flavas'. These are apparently normal Smarties, though a bit larger, but with 'fruit' flavour shells.

Vile.

If Smash Hits was still running, and if it still had its poll, then top of my Most Very Horrible Thing list would be Smarties 'Big Flavas'. It's only through bitter experience that I know they taste exactly like veterinary chocolate dog pills mixed with Vim. Stay away.