The new campaign highlights the voluntary national cards that will be available to residents of Greater Manchester later this year.
Phil Booth, national coordinator of NO2ID, is a killjoy and obvious fashion-challenged radical:
“This latest, desperate attempt to market the ID scheme is patronising hype. Having failed to come up with any convincing benefits, officials are set to waste millions shoving ID cards down the throats of shops, of licensees, and of young people who already have alternatives. The IPS is treating the public and businesses like children if it thinks giving fingerprints smiles will make us all happy to be fingerprinted . . .Let us be clear: anyone signing up for a Home Office identity card has agreed to report to an official database for life, and lost control of their own identity information for ever. It is nothing to smile about.”
Well, sure, but what about the happy fingerprint people, Mr. Booth, what about the happy fingerprint people?
I have testified against national identification cards in this country, here, but that was before I realized that other fingerprints would make fun of my fingerprints. I do not want fingers with inferiority complexes.
Fortunately, the good people at Big Brother Fashions are also planning to roll out a new campaign for “Eager Iris” (the eyeball who wants to be optically scanned) and “Danny DNA” (the genetic code who is lonely outside of the government data bank where all his friends play).
Of course, officials in the United States are above such personification of inanimate objects:
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