Blair ID claims 'fact-free'
19 February 2007
Tony Blair has written to everyone [1] who has signed an anti-ID cards
petition on the notorious Number 10 website, reiterating claims that have
been refuted many times over [2], and trying to sell the system on the basis
of 'feature creep' which ministers promised Parliament would never be
allowed to happen.[3]
Phil Booth, NO2ID's [4] National Coordinator said:
" '70% would be spent anyway' is a fabricated figure. Mr Blair is repeating
an arbitrary piece of creative accounting as if it were meaningful. The
truth is that passports are only being re-engineered in this hugely
expensive and bullying fashion in order to provide cover for the ID scheme.
"The PM's claims on this subject are not exactly lies, so much as fact-free.
Endlessly repeating a fabrication doesn't make it real, Mr Blair."
-ENDS-
Notes for editors:
1) The full text of Tony Blair's e-mail is reproduced on NO2ID's forums,
here: http://forum.no2id.net/viewtopic.php?t=15378
2) Other pseudo-facts used by the government in ID propaganda include:
* £1.7 billion as the annual cost of 'identity fraud' - see Andrew
Gilligan, Evening Standard, 20/6/05:
http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/2005/06/evening_standard_andrew_gillig.html or
Silicon.com, 2/2/06:
http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39156140,00.htm
* 900,000 crime scene marks (which might be multiple, or indistinct
– leading to false ‘matches’) are misrepresented as separate crimes.
* Changes to the passport are required due to "international
obligation". UK passports are already ICAO-compliant, and continue to
qualify for the US Visa Waiver scheme, due to the inclusion of RFID chips
and machine-readable data on the photo page. The NAO reports that the total
cost of this 'upgrade' was just £61 million.
The government refuses to detail how it intends to spend £378 million per
year ("70%" of its current 10 year estimate for the Home Office costs of the
ID programme, divided by 10) for the next 10 years on 'improvements to the
passport' - let alone the 'additional' £162 million per year that it implies
is for stand-alone ID cards. If these changes are required anyway, what is
it hiding?
3) Tony McNulty, then Home Office minister for Immigration, Citizenship and
Nationality, clearly stated in Standing Committee D on 6 July 2005: "There
are safeguards not only against state agencies, for want of a better phrase,
*going fishing in the database* but against misbehaviour and abuse of the
database by those who manage the system." - reported in Hansard:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmstand/d/st050706/am/5070
6s07.htm
but clearly no longer the case, since the Prime Minister's e-mail directly
contemplates 'fishing expeditions' and both data-sharing within UK
government and passing information on citizens to foreign governments.
4) NO2ID is the non-partisan national campaign against ID cards and the
database state. NO2ID is affiliated to by the National Union of Journalists:
http://www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=1595 Scroll down NO2ID's front page
http://www.no2id.net for a list of 'database state' initiatives that the
campaign is working to actively oppose.
For further information, or for immediate or future interview, please
contact Phil Booth (National Co-ordinator, national.coordinator@no2id.net)
on 07974 230 839, Guy Herbert (General Secretary,
general.secretary@no2id.net) on 07956 544 308, or Michael Parker (Press
Officer, press.officer@no2id.net) on 07773 376 166.
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