eurealist.co.uk

It looks like the Labour Party is about to get its way, and force ID cards down everyone’s throat, but you may be unaware of some interesting facts about this scheme.

The man we can call the father of the ID card is Michael Howard. That’s right - it’s good old Dracula, the former leader of the Conservative Party. He devised every part of this scheme when he was Home Secretary in 1996, except the biometric bit.

The reason why the Conservatives haven’t opposed ID cards or said they will get rid of them if they are returned to power, is because the whole ID card scheme is actually their idea.

Michael Howard thought a voluntary ID card scheme wouldn’t need any legislation to be introduced. The Treasury went along with it because people choosing to carry the cards would have to pay for them out of their own pocket. The young were a primary target for ID cards, as they are easier to bully into acceptance, especially if they want to buy alcohol or rent films.

A big selling point was to allow ID card carriers easier cross-border travel within Europe, under the Schengen scheme. Meanwhile, the darker aspects of the ID card were to be glossed over.

A strangely-familiar mantra of the benefits an ID card scheme would bring was heard. It included the fight against benefit fraud. Remember the Conservatives obsession with benefit fraud? It got so bad that in the end they couldn’t utter the word “benefit” without the next word being “fraud.” The ID card would also keep foreigners out of free NHS treatment, detect illegal immigrants (another Tory obsession), include details of driving offences, and due to the demands of the police, link instantly every card carrier to the criminal records database.

It was anticipated that people wouldn’t want to carry a card linking them to a massive intrusive database about them, so ways were devised of forcing them to do so. Those choosing not to carry an ID card would have their lives made a lot more difficult than the card carriers.

The police and bureaucrats have a well-documented fascination with intrusive technology, and have come to regard it as a necessary luxury. A senior civil servant summed it up perfectly ten years ago, “ID cards will do nothing to reduce crime, but bureaucrats, busy-bodies and the police will demand their production at every opportunity.”

All the Labour Party had to do was pick the idea off the shelf, add a bit about ID cards being a magic wand to defeat identity fraud (a Labour Party obsession), terrorism and organised crime, include the biometric stuff, make it compulsory, force nearly everyone to pay for their card, then steamroller the legislation through Parliament and violà, the new improved Labour Party ID card scheme.

Who would have believed that Michael Howard dreamed the whole thing up ten years ago?

Thanks, Michael.

Plagarism Lives On In The Labour Party.

By Mr. M.Parker.
15 March 2006

www.thebusinessonline.com

Technorati Tags: british-democracy, conservative-party, id-cards

There’s a story going round that taxpayers already fund political parties through “Short money”, so state funding of political parties would be nothing new. (Another case of the false “we already do X, so we might as well go on and do Y” argument.)

But Short money was only intended to assist MPs outside the governing party in carrying out an officially recognised function - providing an effective parliamentary opposition. It should not be used for extra-parliamentary purposes, such as running a party organisation or political campaigning.

If it is being used in that way, that is an abuse which can and should be stopped. Just as government ministers should not have been allowed to use public resources for the so-called “Big Conversation”, which was not an official government consultation but was only intended to help the Labour Party refine its election manifesto. Notably the Tories had nothing to say about that.

This has come up recently with respect to the government’s rotten idea of providing Short money to Sinn Fein MPs who refuse to take the oath of allegiance and therefore cannot take their seats:

link

Hoon: “Crucially, certain activities will specifically not attract financial assistance. Those include political campaigning and fundraising, membership campaigns, advertising, personal or private business and constituency business.”

Field: “Short money is specifically paid to support functions carried out in the Chamber by members of parties when representing major policies.”

Opik: “This is a key point, because we need clarity. We understand that Short money relates to activities conducted within the House.

May: “Short money is not available to Members who have not sworn the oath because it is designed to offer assistance with parliamentary duties, specifically to assist an Opposition party in carrying out its parliamentary business”.from Dennis Cooper

Technorati Tags: state funding of political parties, short money, Sinn Fein MPs

Member states to approve EU driving licence

EU ministers are set to hammer out a plan to replace the 110 existing types of driving licence with a single document recognised across the bloc, at a meeting on 27 March.

The move comes after member states’ officials agreed a compromise text following months of wrangling over details of the legislation - criticised mainly by Germany and Austria.

Berlin had objected to a proposal that the new driving licence should be valid for only ten years, but under the deal reached last week national capitals can choose between ten and fifteen years for the validity of the documents - expected to be issued from 2012.

German transport minister Wolfgang Tiefensee said “the agreed proposal is a good middle way between a boost to security and bureaucracy,” according to APA agency.

The Austrian EU presidency has indicated that the compromise version has the informal backing of both the European Commission and the European Parliament, which should secure its speedy adoption.

The old types of driving licence are expected to completely disappear by around 2032.

The new document will have the form of a credit card with a regularly updated photo and some anti-falsification measures - possibly a microchip.

Drivers will only be allowed to hold a single driving document which should prevent cases of “driving licence tourism” where drivers get new licences from other EU member states if they have been banned from getting one in their own country.

Technorati Tags: Driving, ID Cards, licence

Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan writing in the Telegraph 

Two years from now, the European constitution will be in force. The Eurocrats have worked out a deft way of getting around them. Around 85 per cent of the text can, with some creative interpretation, be implemented this way.

True, there are one or two clauses that will require a formal treaty amendment: a European president to replace the system whereby the member nations take it in turns to chair EU meetings; a new voting system; legal personality for the Union.

These outstanding items will be formalised at a miniature inter-governmental conference, probably in 2007. There will be no need to debate them again: all 25 governments accepted them in principle when they signed the constitution 17 months ago.

We shall then be told that these are detailed and technical changes, far too abstruse to be worth pestering the voters with.

The EU will thus have equipped itself with 100 per cent of the constitution, but without having held any more referendums. Clever, no?

Hannan implores us “Don’t take my word for it: listen to what the EU’s own leaders are saying.”

Wolfgang Schüssel,  "The constitution is not dead."

Angela Merkel,     “We are willing to make whatever contribution is necessary to bring the constitution into force."

Dominique de Villepin,  “France did not say no to Europe."

Hannan makes the point that even our own “Europe minister, Douglas Alexander, repeatedly refused to rule out pushing ahead with the bulk of the text without a referendum.”

But “For the purest statement of the Eurocrats’ contempt for the voters, however, we must turn to the constitution’s author, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

"Let’s be clear about this," pronounced Giscard a couple of weeks ago. "The rejection of the constitution was a mistake that will have to be corrected."

Although after the French and Dutch rejection the ratification process was halted in order to prevent a domino affect, and a period of reflection was called, Hannan makes the point that “Since the French and Dutch "No" votes, three countries have approved the text and three more - Finland, Estonia and Belgium - look set to follow in the coming weeks, which would bring to 16 the number of states to have ratified.”

It is therefore clear that those who would suggest that the constitution is dead, are simply not looking at the evidence. 

“The European Commission has launched a massive exercise to sell the constitution to the doltish national electorates.

Their scheme goes under the splendidly James Bondish title of "Plan D". I forget what the D stands for: deceit, I think, or possibly disdain.”

“While all this is going on, the EU is proceeding as if the constitution were already in force. Most of the institutions and policies that it would have authorised are being enacted anyway: the External Borders Agency, the European Public Prosecutor, the External Action Service, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the European Defence Agency, the European Space Programme.

The text is not, as the cliché of the moment has it, being "smuggled in through the back door"; it is swaggering brazenly through the front.”

Being fair to the "Project" Hannan says it has always advanced in this way. “First, Brussels extends its jurisdiction into a new field of policy and then, often years later, it gets around to regularising that extension in a new treaty.

This, indeed, is how the EU was designed. Its founding fathers understood from the first that their audacious plan to merge the ancient nations of Europe into a single polity would never succeed if each successive transfer of power had to be referred back to the voters for approval.

So they cunningly devised a structure where supreme power was in the hands of appointed functionaries, immune to public opinion.

Indeed, the EU’s structure is not so much undemocratic as anti-democratic in that many commissioners, à la Patten and Kinnock, have been explicitly rejected by the voters.

In swatting aside two referendum results, the EU is being true to its foundational principles.”

Of Britain’s stance Hannan says “we are carrying on as though the French electorate had killed off the constitution, and so spared us from having to think about the European issue at all.

Once again, we are fantasising about the kind of EU we might ideally like to have, rather than dealing with the one that is in fact taking shape on our doorstep. Will we never learn?”

Well many of us have already learnt, but Douglas Alexander, repeated refusal to rule out pushing ahead with the bulk of the text without a referendum, is a clear indication that our elected representatives do not share our views. I do not for one second belive that people like Alexander cannot see what is  happening across the channel, they simply do not want an open debate until it is too late. Which fact flags the real problem, it is not the EU, the problem starts at home, we have our own political elite who are more concerned with keeping in with their Continental colleagues in the European project, than  they are for truly representing the wishes of the British people. 

Technorati Tags: eu-constitution, further-integration, political-elites, referendum-process