Orwellian Nightmare Becoming Reality in Great Britain

Stepping over to the UK there is word that George Orwell's nightmare of humans constantly under surveillance by the government is one step closer to actuality with Prime Minister Tony Blair's recent win on national ID cards for Britons.

Full story (New York Times)

A Bit of Good News for Blair: ID Cards for Britons Advance
By ALAN COWELL
LONDON, Feb. 13 — The government of Prime Minister Tony Blair faced down its opposition on Monday in a politically charged vote in the House of Commons on a plan to introduce mandatory national identification cards. The vote moved Britain closer to the use of such cards but did not make clear precisely when that would be.

Despite a rebellion by about 20 members of Mr. Blair's own Labor Party, the government won the vote, 310 to 279. A defeat would have been Mr. Blair's fourth humiliation in Parliament since the general election last year — and since taking power in 1997 — raising doubts about his authority in his third term of office.

In the May election his majority was cut to just 64 votes, meaning that a relatively small number of dissident Labor legislators can derail his legislative plans. By surviving the challenge on Monday, Mr. Blair was seen as scoring a qualified victory.

Mr. Blair was not in the Commons for the vote because engine failure grounded an airplane that was to fly him back from South Africa.

The vote was the first of two major challenges this week. The second is expected Wednesday in a further vote on counterterrorism legislation.

In the vote on Monday, the Commons rejected an amendment from the House of Lords that would have made optional, instead of mandatory, a plan to require Britons to be given national identity cards when they apply for passports. But in a compromise worked out among the legislators, Parliament will have to pass another law to make the new rules binding.

The government argues that the biometric information in both the new passports and the ID's, like fingerprints and iris scans, will help the police fight terrorism, organized crime and identity fraud.

The House of Lords, which has often challenged the government on civil rights issues, will debate its proposal again and could provoke a constitutional stalemate if it refuses to accept the Monday vote in the Commons.

Mandatory identity cards are part of a package of measures that Mr. Blair's government is seeking, saying Britain needs to tighten its internal security procedures, particularly after the attacks in London in July, in which four bombers killed 52 travelers on subway trains and a bus.

But Parliament has thrown out some proposals, like one to increase the permitted period of detention without charge or trial to 90 days.

Before the vote on Monday, Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer and Mr. Blair's heir apparent, said at a meeting, "We should do all in our power to prevent you or I having our identity stolen or abused, and to ensure that, for each of us, our identity is secure and protected."

Charles Clarke, the home secretary and highest law-enforcement official, said the proposal from the House of Lords would undermine the whole program for a "sensible, phased introduction" of mandatory ID's, which are common in many European countries but unfamiliar to many Britons.

"We've always been clear that the identity-cards scheme has been designed and is intended eventually to become a compulsory scheme for all U.K. residents," he said.

Opposition to mandatory cards has come from the opposition Conservatives and from civil rights groups.

David Davis, the opposition spokesman on home affairs, warned legislators that they might "sleepwalk into the surveillance state" by building a national database from information on identity cards that could produce "the most attractive possible target for every fraudster, terrorist, confidence trickster and hacker on the planet."

"These people will be able to lift data out, put viruses and false data in," he said. "Far from protecting the public, the government will put the individual citizen at risk," he said.

Another Conservative official, Edward Garnier, said requiring people to apply for identity cards when they renewed their passports was "compulsion by the backdoor." Bill Cash, another Conservative, said the law proposed by the government contained the "building blocks to George Orwell's Ministry of Truth."