Arthur's Seat

The man on the Clapham omnibus

Trevor Kavanagh, the political editor emeritus of the Sun has a knack of being able to put his finger on the pulse of the British voter, as it were. Here he sets out why he has had a volte face on what used to be his paper's "hang 'em and flog 'em" agenda:

I USED to think ID cards were a good thing. Along with CCTV cameras and DNA databanks. Even, at a pinch, 90-day detention.

What law-abiding citizen could object to these new weapons against terrorists, rapists and murderers?

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear.

Not any more.

Not after the death of innocent Jean Charles de Menezes or the pointless shooting of drunken barrister Mark Saunders by two police marksmen. Not after the inexcusable bugging, strip-searching and futile £1million vendetta by police against journalist Sally Murrer for revealing officers had lost the keys to the local nick – a case which was rightly dismissed last week. And certainly not after the Stasi-style raid by anti-terror police on an MP I know to be above reproach.

Simply scary

Even before yesterday's announcement by the Government that the National Debt would reach levels never before plumbed, it was clear that the UK's net indebtedness was shocking. A colleague has pointed me in the direction of this article from October. This graph is simply scary. Time to emigrate.

Or as the authors of the original post put it:

 In this sense, the UK is just like your friend that spends exactly what they make, or even beyond their means to try and impress his/her friends. This is worse than living month to month – it’s like living a month to two months behind! And now, the UK is accumulating new debt at a faster rate than the economy. If the UK were a private citizen, it might be time for him/her to sell off what they can and move to Panama, or declare some type of bankruptcy.

I am sure that the PM's advisers will remind him that there is a precedent for Brits feigning death and moving to Panama and it isn't a happy one.

We are now into our descent...

Sitting on the 5th floor of our office building here in Dublin as it sways gently in the strong winds racing in from the south-west my mind turns to my flight back to Edinburgh this evening; with this tailwind we'll be back home before we have the undercarriage up.

There is that moment on all flights where the nose of the plane drops and it's all downhill from there. Usually the urbane senior officer comes on to intimate that we have now begun our descent, and then the flight attendants rush round forcing you to down the hot coffee they have only just served in order to get your tray tables up.

It struck me looking at this week's polls that we have reached that point now in New Labour's tenure in office - not just the PM's tenure. The interesting factoid that Labour supporters now believe it is time for a period out of office for reflection chimes with what even diehard Tories were saying after 1994. Yes, there is time for NuLab to turn it around before the next general election, but then there was plenty time for John Major to gets things right after the ERM debacle in 1992. Once the public marks your card there is no coming back. Cabin crew, ten minutes to landing.

No ID here

By round robin email to Seat Towers comes a missive from Frances Stonor Saunders, the author of the Cultural Cold War. It is an impassioned argument against ID cards and deserves publication in full:

You may have heard that legislation creating compulsory ID Cards passed a crucial stage in the House of Commons.  You may feel that ID cards are not something to worry about, since we already have Photo ID for our Passport and Driving License and an ID card will be no different to that.  What you have not been told is the full scope of this proposed ID Card, and what it will mean to you personally.

The proposed ID Card will be different from any card you now hold.  It will be connected to a database called the NIR, (National Identity Register), where all of your personal details will be stored.  This will include the unique number that will be issued to you, your fingerprints, a scan of the back of your eye, and your photograph. Your name, address and date of birth will also obviously be stored there.

There will be spaces on this database for your religion, residence status, and many other private and personal facts about you. There is unlimited space for every other details of your life on the NIR database, which can be expanded by the Government with or without further Acts of Parliament.

By itself, you might think that this register is harmless, but you would be wrong to come to this conclusion.  This new card will be used to check your identity against your entry in the register in real time, whenever you present it to 'prove who you are'.

Every place that sells alcohol or cigarettes, every post office, every pharmacy, and every Bank will have an NIR Card Terminal,  (very much like the Chip and Pin Readers that are everywhere now) into which your card can be 'swiped' to check your identity.  Each time this happens, a record is made at the NIR of the time and place that the Card was presented.  This means for example, that there will be a government record of every time you withdraw more than £99 at your branch of NatWest, who now demand ID for these transactions. Every time you have to prove that you are over 18, your card will be swiped, and a record made at the NIR.  Restaurants and off licenses will demand that your card is swiped so that each receipt shows that they sold alcohol to someone over 18, and that this was proved by the access to the NIR, indemnifying them from prosecution.

Private businesses are going to be given access to the NIR Database. If you want to apply for a job, you will have to present your card for a swipe. If you want to apply for a London Underground Oyster Card, or a supermarket loyalty card, or a driving license you will have to present your ID Card for a swipe. The same goes for getting a telephone line or a mobile phone or an internet account.

Oyster, DVLA, BT and Nectar (for example) all run very detailed databases of their own.  They will be allowed access to the NIR, just as every other business will be.  This means that each of these entities will be able to store your unique number in their database, and place all your travel, phone records, driving activities and detailed shopping habits under your unique NIR number. These databases, which can easily fit on a storage device the size of your hand, will be sold to third parties either legally or illegally. It will then be possible for a non-governmental entity to create a detailed dossier of all your activities. Certainly, the government will have clandestine access to all of them, meaning that they will have a complete record of all your movements, from how much and when you withdraw from your bank account to what medications you are taking, down to the level of what sort of bread you eat - all accessible via a single unique number in a central database.

This is quite a significant leap from a simple ID Card that shows your name and face.

Most people do not know that this is the true character and scope of the proposed ID Card.  Whenever the details of how it will work are explained to them, they quickly change from being ambivalent towards it.

The Government is going to COMPEL you to enter your details into the NIR and to carry this card.  If you and your children want to obtain or renew your passports; you will be forced to have your fingerprints taken and your eyes scanned for the NIR, and an ID Card will be issued to you whether you want one or not.  If you refuse to be fingerprinted and eye scanned, you will not be able to get a passport.   Your ID Card will, just like your passport, not be your property.  The Home Secretary will have the right to revoke or suspend your ID at any time, meaning that you will not be able to withdraw money from your Bank Account, for example, or do anything that requires you to present your government issued ID Card.

The arguments that have been put forwarded in favour of ID Cards can be easily disproved.  ID Cards WILL NOT stop terrorists; every Spaniard has a compulsory ID Card as did the Madrid Bombers.  ID Cards will not 'eliminate benefit fraud', which in comparison, is small compared to the astronomical cost of this proposal, which will be measured in billions according to the LSE (London School of Economics). This scheme exists solely to exert total surveillance and control over the ordinary free British Citizen, and it will line the pockets of the companies that will create the computer systems at the expense of your freedom, privacy and money.

If you did not know the full scope of the proposed ID Card Scheme before and you are as unsettled as I am at what it really means to you, to this country and its way of life, I urge you to email or photocopy this and give it to your friends and colleagues and everyone else you think should know and who cares. The Bill has proceeded to this stage due to the lack of accurate and complete information on this proposal being made public.

Together & hand in hand, we can inform the entire nation if everyone who receives this passes it on.

No ID (continued)

I'd apply for a passport now if I were you - even if their Noble Lordships succeed in getting HMG to back down, who knows what further plans the Safety Elephant has for us.

Graft in high places

Police investigating complaints about secret loans to [the ruling party] say they have not ruled out extending their inquiry into claims of corruption.

Liberia? Uganda? Belarus? No, NuLabour's Britain.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
RW Emerson

So this is how we get to a £16bn surplus

The Chancellor was at it again yesterday - his budget speeches have the same cadency as a Church of Scotland minister reading from one of the more challenging parts of Leviticus. We are assured that the public finances will be back in surplus by the end of this economic cycle - and to get there, the light fingered Chancellor has been spring cleaning the nation's cupboards. Having already sold off our gold and defence assets he is left with bits of British Energy and those parts of the spectrum not already taken by the mobile operators.

One nationalised utility that cries out for privatisation - in fact, probably the only remaining asset in state control after this current fire sale - is Scottish Water. The Scottish Executive has "no plans" to change that situation.

A slap in the face for Gordon

The result of the Dunfermline and West Fife by-election is a shot in the arm for the Liberal Democrats, and a blow for Labour; but, it was not unexpected. West Fife - and Dunfermline in particular - is no longer an outpost of industrial Labour. Over the last decade the constituency has morphed into a large suburb of Edinburgh, home to thousands of people working in the capital's service sector.

This by-election was fought and won not in the villages of the Fife coalfields, but in the "Eastern expansion" of Dunfermline, where the families in avenue upon crescent of "Executive homes" turned out in droves to vote LibDem. The roots of Labour's loss of this seat are as much in the decline of manufacturing in West Fife, as they are in the decision of the council's planning department back in the early 1990s to grow Dunfermline eastwards.

Equally, the LibDems have done in Dunfermline what they succesfully did down the M4 and M5 corridors in the south and south-west of England. Surely and steadily they built strongholds out from Yeovil, capturing seats from the Tories as that party lost its way under John Major. In Fife, the Liberals have built on the formidable rock that is Menzies Campbell's base in the east. Commanding 51% of the vote and all but one of the local government seats in that constituency the party has reached out to take council wards across the region. They now lie in second place in the council, and come the 2007 elections will be well placed to unseat Labour as the largest party.

What is also clear is that the LibDems continue to benefit from being in government in Scotland. For years "voting Liberal is a wasted vote" was an easy refrain. No longer - voting LibDem means keeping them in office, and voters seem happy to do so - even when this by-election was for Westminster and not Holyrood - and where one issue which got voters upset - local transport - is a LibDem portfolio.

This is why it was, in hindsight, unwise for the Tories to play the "I'm Dave Cameron - I'm a liberal Tory" card. By doing so they made it easy for floating liberal - conservative voters to float to Willie Rennie rather than to the Conservative candidate, Carrie Ruxton. If Tory HQ is saying that there is little difference between the LibDems and the Tories, then why not vote LibDem and unseat the Labour party. It would have been different if the Tories had been in second place, (where they were in this seat as recently as 1992), but not now.

Whither Labour and the SNP? For both parties an uncomfortable night. Labour must now worry that they are vulnerable in next May's Scottish elections to the LibDems in seats like central Edinburgh. Labour's tenure of Fife and Edinburgh councils must also be running into its final days. The result is also a personal slap in the face for the Chancellor, who showed uncharacteristicly flat feet in the management of the campaign. The Iron Chancellor has feet of clay. This is a seat that new Labour should appeal to - aspirational young families in new-build housing working in Scotland's burgeoning financial and professional services firms. But, chronic transport, education and health inefficiencies brought about by years of local Labour administration undermined that party's appeal. If they had hoped that the LibDem advance in Scotland in last year's general election was an Iraq-inspired one-off, they must now be worried that it is part of a longer and much more damaging trend.

The SNP did see an increase in their share of the vote. That, however, is about as much comfort as they can take from this result. If Alex Salmond aspires to lead the next Scottish administration, let alone lead Scotland to independence, he needs much, much better results than this. Scotland's demographics are not in his favour. In seats across the central belt like Dunfermline it is the LibDems and not the SNP that voters now turn as an alternative to Labour.

The Tories had a depressing evening - they must have hoped that the Dave Cameron effect would have pushed them to around 15% of the vote. Instead, it made it easier for their voters to shift to the LibDems. They were victims of a classic by-election squeeze. The Scottish Conservatives cannot rely on the Cameron coat-tails to return more Tory MSPs at next year's Scottish elections. They have to create their own reasons to persuade the electorate to look at them again. A good place to start would be to replicate the Policy Commissions that have garnered so much publicity - and momentum - for the party in England. Otherwise, Dunfermline will be the shape of things to come.

Springtime for Cameron

One poll doth not a momentum make, but more than one...

The strange death of Liberal England (II)

Enough said