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Stalker State Comes to Manchester

Thu, 29/01/2009 - 11:16pm — davepage

PRESS RELEASE
Date: 29th January 2009
For Immediate Release

Stalker State Comes To Manchester

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is on a low-key visit to Manchester today to try and flog the discredited ID card scheme to Wythenshawe school children. This is part of the Government's attempts to extend the National Identity Database to 14 year olds [1].

This is a U-turn on assurances given to MPs and the public when the legislation was passed, but there are powers buried in the Identity Cards Act that would allow the Home Secretary to do it by regulation.

Manchester NO2ID Co-ordinator Dave Page said, "If the Home Secretary is in Wythenshawe, why doesn't she pop down to the airport to talk about how she's planning to force airside workers onto their new insecure database? Is it because she knows that it won't make our airways safer, and that the air workers don't want them?

"The Government can only promote their farcical intrusive waste of billions of pounds by avoiding the very people it will affect first. Eventually, of course, we will all be victims of the database state."

Phil Booth, NO2ID National Coordinator said:

"How desperate have they become to start picking on children? What started life as Mr Blunkett's essential tool against terror is now being pitched by a junior minister as a glorified proof-of-age card.

"Having failed to convince the unions, the airline industry or the public at large, the government is now seeking any soft targets it can."

-ENDS-

Notes for editors:

For more information or interview, please contact Dave Page on 07982 814 441, or via e-mail at manchester@no2id.net

1) This was first suggested by Meg Hillier, Minister for Identity, speaking at a "No ID No Sale" fringe meeting at Labour Party conference in 2008: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7630088.stm

2) NO2ID is the UK-wide non-partisan campaign against ID cards and the database state. See http://www.no2id.net/dbstate.php for a list of 'database state' initiatives that NO2ID is actively opposing.

3) The TUC has voted to oppose compulsory ID cards for airside workers, and the much-vaunted introduction of 'ID cards for foreign nationals' has been downscaled to just 50,000 cards issued before April 2009: http://www.printweek.com/business/news/847818/TUC-vows-fight-discriminat...