Amother day, another nail in the coffin of Labour’s increeasingly half-hearted attempts to force the British people to carry ID cards and enrtust their personal details to a national government database. The BBC reports:

Home Secretary Alan Johnson has dropped plans to make ID cards compulsory for pilots and airside workers at Manchester and London City airports. The cards were due to be trialled there – sparking trade union anger. … But Mr Johnson said the ID card scheme was still very much alive – despite Tory and Lib Dem calls to scrap it. He said the national roll-out of

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Welcome to the Sunday outing for The Voice’s Daily View series. As it’s a Sunday, today it comes with a bonus complaint and the easiest quiz question of the week.

2 Big Stories

Could Alan Johnson scrap ID cards?

Gordon Brown’s weakness means there is a set of senior Cabinet members who are now unsackable. If any of them were to take it upon themselves to indulge in a very un-Brownian desire to do something dramatic and decisive, it would be extremely hard for Gordon Brown to stop them.

Step forward then possibly, perhaps, just maybe Alan Johnson. (He is, after all, one of …

Ahh, ID cards. Time was the Lib Dems were alone in campaigning for this new invasion of our privacy by the state to be abandoned. Then that nice Mr Cameron’s Tories decided they were, after all, probably not such a good thing. And now it seems that even David Blunkett – perhaps Labour’s most authoritarian home secretary, and against some stiff opposition, too – has decided that, really, they’re maybe unnecessary.

The Lib Dems’ shadow home secretary Chris Huhne’s response is delightfully withering:

When even the father of ID cards spurns them, the idea is truly an abandoned orphan.”

He continues, equally …

The Government continues to (micro)chip away with its incremental plan to introduce ID cards to all.

The Home Office has formally applied to widen the scope of ID cards for foreign nationals granted further leave to remain in the UK.

Regulations laid before Parliament last week mean that six more categories of applicant would have to provide their biometrics (fingerprints and photo) from 31 March 2009:

• Academic visitors granted leave for a period exceeding six months
• Visitors for private medical treatment
• Domestic workers in a private household
• United Kingdom ancestry (Covers people who are Commonwealth citizens, have a British grandparent …

Anyone from any political persuasion can list things this Government has done that annoy them.

Personally, I was annoyed enough to join millions of others on the march against the war in Iraq – now it’s time to hold them to account.

I’m not so sure how I will react if and when I get the orders from the Government to present myself at the interrogation centre in nearby Derby and hand over more personal information than is currently demanded from sex offenders.  I’m not certain I’m ready to join Simon Hughes in jail for refusing an ID card.

I’ve never …

You may think that this was just another political YouTube film, this one happening to feature Nick Clegg talking about ID cards.

But watch carefully 30 seconds in for the man entering stage left with a piece of string and a banana, eaten. Ten months on, I still have no idea why he would have been doing that:

[youtube]LONA3Acc5js[/youtube]

While you’re wondering about that, why not sign our petition against ID cards?

Here’s another so-terrifying-it’s-funny twist in the ID cards saga. No government likes leaks – as if we need reminding – and it seems our current lords and masters believe that leaks surrounding the ID cards scheme could be especially damaging. A fresh leak has revealed that they are taking precautionary measures against possible leaks (o! the irony) from the five companies currently involved in bidding for work on the ID cards scheme.

The Times has the story:

Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, has suffered fresh embarrassment from a new Whitehall leak disclosing that ministers are

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From this week, the Home Office has announced, compulsory ID cards will be issued to foreign nationals including students and those granted a visa because they are married to a British Citizen.

Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge David Howarth has pointed out the ID card scheme’s implications for the University city:

I am worried about the effect of this move on the economy of Cambridge, which relies on a stream of highly-qualified scientists, engineers and academics from all over the world.

Treating highly-qualified people as potential criminals rather than as welcome guests is not going to put us at the top of their

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Could it be that British summer holidays cancelled by striking pilots will ultimately sink the ID card scheme? Labour’s cardboard coercion may yet be grounded on the runway of Manchester airport; at least, we can hope.

The Indie reports that resistance is growing to government plans to pilot ID cards on, erm, pilots. Staff at Manchester and London City airports, along with overseas students, are among the groups being targeted first for Labour’s laminated gifts of joy.

The British Airline Pilots Association is threatening strikes and the airline bosses, of the British Air Transport Association, are also annoyed that their staff …

The Government’s latest attempt to persuade us of the wonders of its ID cards scheme is Introducing the National Identity Scheme, a publication that sets out the claimed benefits of the scheme but which in fact makes clear that the scheme will open up even more personal data to the mercy of computer hackers.

Sensitive and personal information about you will be available via a simple online login despite the fact that, as even many banks and other financial institutions have discovered, opening up records to online access means hackers will sometimes also get in. As the old saying goes, …

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has launched a site for young people to let her know their thoughts on ID cards.

As you’d expect from any government website, the site is neutral, presents the arguments for and against in a balanced and responsible way, and allows young people themselves to do most of the talking.

Erm… well, it’s not like that at all.

The site is so much in favour of ID cards that it wouldn’t be too much to accuse them of astroturfing.  Clicking on “Info about ID Cards” brings up a page called “Myths about ID Cards” which even to my …

As I blogged about a few days ago, the Labour Party in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election is attacking the Conservative candidate for opposing “making foreign nationals carry an ID card”. As I said then,

The use of the word “foreign” there seems to come with some rather unpleasant overtones in this context, the implication being that ‘ooh, foreigners – they’re terribly nasty aren’t they – so surely you can’t be against keeping tabs on them now, can you?’

But – as Alex has reminded me – there’s more to this than that. Because, you see, making foreign nationals carry an …

An interesting snippet from some of the Labour material in the Crewe & Nantwich by-election: they are attacking the Conservative candidate for the (current, known to have changed a few times) Conservative policy of opposing ID cards.

However, from what I’ve seen of it, they’ve mostly given up on most of the arguments previously used and instead retreated into the following very narrow approach:

Do you oppose making foreign nationals carry an ID card?

The use of the word “foreign” there seems to come with some rather unpleasant overtones in this context, the implication being that ‘ooh, foreigners – they’re terribly nasty aren’t …