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.

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