WRITTEN ON November 15th, 2006 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Identity

Have a listen to this short extract from BBC R5’s phone in with the Home Secretary’s PPS Siobhain McDonagh and Phil Booth of No2ID.

Siobhain states that the national ID register will ask us just for three things: name, address and date of birth.

She accuses those who think otherwise of paranoia and wrong priorities, and also alleges that Tesco knows far more about us. Well, two points Siobhain luv:

1. Those of us who find Tesco loathsome choose not to shop there
2. Tesco is VASTLY more customer-focussed in how it goes about what it does than supposedly “transformational” government is. Just check it out.

Tesco may be awful but a great deal better than public services. Do you start to get it?

So to set it out side by side, Siobhain tells us the NIR will ask for:

name, address, DoB

to make us feel better and soothe our paranoia.

Phil Booth, spokesman for the intellectual pygmies, takes the more paranoid view that the register will hold something more akin to (see Rigged Charts (comment 12)

full name, pseudonyms, date and place of birth, “his gender” (all the entries refer to a man, in an offensively authoritarian-lagalistic way) , all addresses, photo, signature, fingerprints, other biometric information”, nationality, entitlement to remain in the UK, National Identity Registration and card number, national insurance immigration document and passport number, non-UK ID cards numbers, ref number about permission to enter or to remain in the UK, work permit, driver number, the number of any other designated document, date of expiry, right of abode in UK or EU, immigration document, registration card, driving licence, information previously recorded, changes, date of death, the date of every application or change, reasons for omissions in the entry , details of every ID card issued to a person (one will be too many) and whether it’s in force, details of countersignatories, lost, stolen or damaged ID card notifications, times the Home Secretary asks you to surrender your ID card, information provided with any applicant, any steps taken to ID the applicant or verify the data, any PIN, password or other code, questions used to verify identity at application or on changes, particulars of every occasion, person and other detais about whan all that data above is shared.

Siobhain sweetheart, what’s happening here. Are your advisers giving you the mushroom treatment? Or are you bought into this whole thing and lying to us because you think we wont notice and it will make our valid and principled objections go away?

If you are being kept in the dark and fed bullshit then there is a host of us happy to help, to provide useful, dispassionate and relevant information to what you’re trying to do. And if that’s the situation then I’ll stop calling you luv in this patronising, disrespectful and evidently insincere way (sweetheart also, luv). But to me it feels like you treat us with contempt, you have no respect for our valid concerns and you owe us an apology. If you could see your behaviour through fresh eyes you’d change it to preserve your self-respect.