Longrider

Tomorrow, the Identity Cards Bill gets its second reading in the House of Commons. Despite rising opposition and negative coverage in the press, I don’t expect the Labour back bench rebellion to be big enough to defeat the bill at this stage. The maths are against it unfortunately.

That said, I want to concentrate on an aspect that hit the news over the weekend. Several news agencies reported that the government will be selling information from the national identity register to private companies. I saw it first in an online report from Yahoo News. This however was disputed in an online version of Sky News where Tom McNulty rebutted the claims:

“The suggestion the Government intends to ’sell’ information on the ID cards register is complete and utter nonsense.”

You may - given David Blunkett’s open courting of the private sector late last year - decide that the minister doth protest too much. Anyway, despite the protests by McNulty, the Independent on Sunday and the BBC carried the same story. Those of us with a cynical nature might just be enjoying the government’s discomfort. Even if the story is erroneous the government is subject to the same spin and disinformation with which it tries to impose its authoritarian agenda on the British people - the biter is bit.

Whether the story is accurate or not - and I’m keeping an open mind, you have to ask what the companies will get out of it. The NIR will consist of basic details on each individual: Name, address and previous addresses at its most basic. This information is available through the electoral register, so what will paying for access to the NIR give them that the Electoral register doesn’t? Other information listed in the bill will be those occasions when the NIR has been accessed. Here is likely to be the prize - the audit trail. From here it will be possible to deduce all sorts of information about an individual. These could well include spending habits if large purchases are recorded on the system. Certainly banking will find its way onto the register fairly early on as will employment. How accessible this information is and how useful it will be rather depends on the designer of the database. A well designed relational database will enable information to be queried in a useful and logical manner.

The other issue here is who owns the information and who has rights over it. Commercial companies have to seek our permission to sell personal data - we opt in if we are prepared to let them pass on useful demographic information to their partners for the purposes of contacting us with yet more sales material. Like many, I shield myself from the direct marketers. I use the Telephone Preference Service to block telesales calls and I’ve registered with their direct mailing equivalent to stop the mounds of unsolicited junk mail. I refuse to buy from doorstep sellers and if I see them coming, I don’t answer the door. I never, never, respond to solicitations to answer any marketing survey. Indeed, I do the best that I can to remain invisible to these people. If the stories being published on Sunday are true, then these attempts are for nothing. The direct marketers will be granted an open door by the government. Certainly I see nothing here that mentions safeguards and personal privacy.

Ah, yes, personal privacy. That’s the reason I objected to ID cards in the first place.

Whatever happens, it makes sense to resist this bill. It is bad law. More importantly, it is unnecessary law. No rational argument has been put forward to support the need for Britons to carry an identity card. I’ve seen plenty of circular arguments, obfuscation and plain disinformation - but nothing that gives me any satisfaction as to why we need them. As Paul Vigay points out; we don’t.
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Inspired by a cats blog that no longer seems to be around, I’ve been playing with a blog about our cats - from their perspective. It’s a bit of fun and I’ll see how it goes. In the meantime:

Felix Domesticus

Enjoy

Self-employment consists of a feast or famine existence where I am either manically busy or idle. My line of business; training and development, has a seasonal flavour. During the spring, autumn and winter it tends to be busy - starting in September, trailing off during the run up to Christmas and getting extremely busy during January and February. It starts to trail off again around May. June, July and August are dead months for me. I was warned before I started and the pattern has worked out exactly as predicted. Last year was my first year and I was cushioned by my redundancy payment. This year, I have yet to build up sufficient reserves to see me through the quiet period. Much as I enjoy lazing about with no pressures, I still need to have enough income to pay the mortgage. Hence my reluctant decision to register for temporary work through the summer this year.

The last time I did temporary work was about fifteen years ago - and for the same reasons, to top up my self-employment. It is an odd existence. The temporary worker is a part of an invisible army. While the clients’ personnel are friendly enough, the temp is never there long enough to be worthwhile getting to know, so nobody does. Usually they are just standing in for holiday leave or illness. Here today and gone tomorrow, a fleeting flicker on the consciousness of those they touch so briefly and then vanished; forgotten. You get the vague feeling of being a non-person. That may be an unfair statement, but it is how it feels.

I was called at 07:45 on Thursday morning and asked; could I get into town to take on a driving job? Rule number one of temporary working is never turn a job down. One of the best ways of getting work is demonstrating your willingness to take anything - even if it makes your heart sink and you really don’t want to do it. Herein lies the benefit of temporary working; it is short-lived. You won’t be going back, so you can live with it for a day or two. I was needed to deliver vehicle parts to garages for a couple of days. This was extreme deja-vu for me. I did this type of work twenty years ago. These past two days were a sharp reminder of that past and I didn’t much like it.

The van had seen better days. It had five forward gears and one reverse. Selection was somewhat random; there were a total of six in there, so I was bound to get one of them and I was always successful. Overtaking in such an underpowered vehicle was likely to be fatal, so I quickly learned not to. I also had to recall my geography from all those years ago - fortunately I have a good memory and navigation is one of my strong points. For the second day I took my Garmin Navigator as I was in unfamiliar territory and it is easier than using printed maps. The satellite navigator is a boon of modern day living that I would not be without.

These two days reminded me why I stopped driving commercially. While some find being out on the road liberating, I find it tiring and stressful. An accident on the motorway meant trying to find an alternative route or risk falling way behind schedule. Trying to tie the schedule in with personal needs also became difficult. The destinations often meant going nowhere near where I could get food and drink, so I had to make detours. Then there is the little matter of where automotive businesses choose to be located. Why is it that they are always along tiny alleyways choked full of vehicles parked in a random manner almost designed to make navigating delivery vehicles difficult if not impossible; where there is precious little room to park, let alone manoeuvre a large van? On two occasions I had to solicit help with manoeuvring or risk taking someone’s paint off. For someone who loves travel, it might seem odd that I dislike commercial driving so much. However during my first experience, I discovered that it is because I enjoy travel so much that commercial driving is unattractive to me. Riding a motorcycle without having any need to be anywhere at any particular time (ferries excepted), to stop when I want, where I want and for how long I want is nothing like the pressure placed on the commercial driver. I realised that if I didn’t stop driving commercially, it would forever spoil my love of leisure riding and driving.

During the past two days, I earned a sixth of the money that I do delivering a training course over the same period and worked far harder for it. I was reminded of the army of invisible people doing this on a daily basis, working far harder than we give them credit for and earning a pitifully low wage into the bargain. Fortunately I have a training course booked in late July, so some of the pressure is eased a little. However, I will still need to do more temporary work before the summer is finished - as I really need two courses in a month to make a decent living.

What have I learned from my foray into my past? That there was a reason I gave up this kind of work - I much prefer the relaxed (almost easy) world of training and development. Also that a lesson in humility is no bad thing from time to time.

I’ve been out photographing the cats again.

My sister emailed me earlier this afternoon. My mother has taken her cat, Peter, home today. A week after the road accident that left him with a cracked pelvis and a broken jaw, he is finally off the painkillers and back in his home environment. He will need turning regularly while he rests to avoid muscle wastage, but otherwise he is mending fast.

This is a remarkable recovery and I’m impressed at the healing abilities that animals can demonstrate. If my father had not found him when he did, it is unlikely that Peter would have survived, yet survive he has. This little ginger and white cat lives to fight another day.

I dread to think what the veterinary bill looks like.

Updated to add - £550, which is a lot of money. But… how do you put a value on such a thing as the life of a companion?

And here’s mother with her kittens:

Every so often something is presented in the news that seems at first glance to be perfectly reasonable. One such is the government’s announcement regarding a smoking ban in public. In the UK many workplaces have become smoke free as a result of successful civil lawsuits in the nineteen-nineties following illness claimed to have been contracted through passive smoking.

It all sounds so reasonable. After all, smoking is hazardous to health. Nicotine is a deadly poison, so why imbibe it? And more crucially, why allow people to force others to imbibe it? However, the issue of passive smoking is not really pertinent to the point I’m making here. The crucial wording used by the government in its announcement is this:

Caroline Flint, the public health minister, confirmed that the policy would be vigorously enforced with the assistance of informers from the public.

“I don’t think we are talking about brigades of people out on the streets,” she said. “What we are talking about is an intelligence-led approach to enforcing the law.”

If that doesn’t send a chill down your spine, then you have learned nothing from 20th Century European history. How did the Gestapo manage to catch so many dissidents? It certainly wasn’t because they were all-powerful, they lacked the personnel to be fully effective during the early days of the Nazi terror. Rather they used informers; people who, fearful for their own safety, would report their neighbours for crimes against the state, whether real or imagined. More recently the Stasi ran a similar operation using approximately 300,000 informants. The collapse of the Berlin wall and the old East German state was supposed to be an end to the Stasi but their spirit lives on, it would seem. Perhaps we will be seeing local committees for public safety being created. I’m sure the treasury could find some set-up funding.

You might be inclined to think that this is modern Britain we are talking about, not the police state that existed in East Germany or for that matter, post revolutionary France. Well, that’s true enough. And smoking is a trivial matter. But so is long hair on men but north Korea is making use of it to enforce conformity with what the state decides is right and proper. The British state has decided that smoking is not right and proper and wants to use informers to help with enforcement. Today, it is smoking that offends the state’s sensibilities. What will it be tomorrow? There’s plenty to choose from. It may seem the right thing to do; informing on the neighbour who uses a mobile phone while driving or speeds past breaking the speed limit - but what if the state decides that something perfectly legal today is not tomorrow and decides that your neighbours’ “intelligence” is enough evidence to take action against you? Maybe it was that triple cheeseburger and large fries that will get you into trouble with the health nazis. All that cholesterol will be a drain on the NHS’ resources - and it is for your own good, after all.

It all seems to be so paranoid, so unrealistic, so, well, Smiley’s People. But it has happened elsewhere and given the authoritarian bent being exhibited by our present regime, it starts to become a real possibility. If you are a smoker, it is sooner than you think.

I was going to mention this story as an amusing footnote to my discussion about politically correct language. However, I forgot, so here it is today.

It seems that the British Potato Council objects to the term “couch potato” on the grounds that it has negative connotations and people won’t buy potatoes as a result. While this may sound exceedingly silly - I certainly won’t stop buying potatoes because of the term and I find the suggestion faintly patronising - there is a serious side to all of this. We have been discussing this very topic over at News & Views and one correspondent mentioned that in his home state of Texas it is illegal to comment adversely about Texan agricultural products. That is serious and it makes “land of the free” ring rather hollow.

All of this reminds me of the French Golden Delicious apple. The Golden Delicious is a green apple that looks delicious (the clue is supposed to be in the name) - but as English apple producers will tell you, they lack the flavour of a good English grown product such as a Cox’s Pippin or Granny Smiths. Looks can be so deceptive. They are right - while the English apple has a tart, lively taste, the Golden Delicious is sweet yet bland. The Golden Delicious became popular in the UK during the late seventies much to the consternation of the local growers who were threatened by the competition. And, indeed, orchards have been in decline during the past couple of decades. Yet, my love for France doesn’t extend to their apples - I much prefer that tart, zingy taste of the English varieties. My French penfriend, Elizabeth explained this during an exchange visit in the early eighties. The French, she said, kept the best varieties for the domestic market; exporting the lesser quality apples to the UK. I cannot comment on the veracity of that claim, but if it is proved to be true, it wouldn’t surprise me.

So, perhaps the British Potato Council has a serious point to make. Perhaps the political correctness surrounding the term “couch potato” is merely a smokescreen designed to get their product into the national consciousness. Making a silly point can be an effective method of delivery. Certainly we are discussing it, so there is a degree of success so far. If it is just an elaborate publicity stunt, then that’s okay with me. If however they are serious in wanting to change our language, where do we stop? Is the term cathouse offensive to cats? What do the Cats’ Protection League have to say about this?