YESTERDAY Home Secretary, Smith was having a go at presenting the introduction of biometric identity cards as a matter of personal convenience, and even individual freedom, not as a capitalist police state security measure, in tandem with the increasingly national DNA database, to criminalise the whole working class and middle class.
She said: ‘This is not a debate confined to government alone, but one which now affects almost every aspect of our daily lives as citizens and consumers.’ This is another way of saying that the government, and the ruling class intends to police and have control over your daily life.
She added: ‘It is essential for all of us to be able to lock our identity to ourselves and to protect its integrity.’ The ‘lock’ and key image suggests a state that actually intends to put people into a surveillance prison.
Identity theft by the army of swindlers, conmen and thieves that are part and parcel of modern capitalism is made out to be the issue.
However she soon got down to business declaring that ‘Today I want to set out how the Government’s National Identity Scheme can support and extend the two main benefits of identity assurance: firstly, to protect the integrity of the information held, in the interests of both personal and national security, thus reducing the risk of fraudulent activity; and secondly, to offer the convenience of being able to quickly prove who we are when accessing services in the public or private sector.’
Identity cards are to be a central plank to protect the security of the state at a time when capitalism is heading for economic and political disaster and fears the masses, and ‘secondly’ provide the means to deprive all ‘illegals’ of access to healthcare and other state services, as well as monitoring people every time they use these services.
However, there is a massive historically deep-rooted opposition in Britain to an all powerful state. This dates back to Magna Carta, and the defence of basic rights against Charles 1. It created the historic link between the masses of the people and concepts such as Habeas Corpus and innocent until proven guilty.
Smith therefore has to declare ‘the premise that the National Identity Scheme is a public good,’ that will be brought in gradually.
Smith revealed the current plan is that a person’s name is to be linked by their fingerprints to a unique entry on the National Identity Register.
She added that ‘In the last 18 months, Identity and Passport Service has issued ten million British passports that include a small chip containing an encrypted digital version of the holder’s personal details and photograph – the first time we have stored biometrics in this way on a passport.’
Smith added: ‘Within three years, all new applicants arriving in the UK will be issued with a card.
‘The first foreign national identity cards will be followed next year by the first identity cards for British citizens. . . .
‘We plan to start with people working in our airports. . . . Alongside these groups, we will start to make identity cards available to young people on a purely voluntary basis in 2010.’ She singles out students in particular.
‘We will begin to offer cards to anyone who wants one later in 2010. . . This means that we can now aim to achieve full roll-out by 2017 – two years ahead of previous plans.’ It is to be a creeping police state, smothering liberty with capitalist state control as it spreads.
Britain already has tens of millions of CCTV cameras, has millions of people on the police DNA data base, and now is to have millions more being openly controlled and monitored by the state apparatus’ ID cards.
Clearly capitalism in its death agony cannot trust a single member of the working class or the middle class. The ruling class is fearful that an end to its rule over society is fast approaching.
In fact, the only way forward to a human existence is through a socialist revolution that strikes a blow for human liberty by smashing and breaking up the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state to go forward to socialism.
The lower stages of socialism, with the ending of class antagonisms, will see a withering away of the power of the state as a classless society emerges where people contribute to society what they can and take from it what they need.
