Free Country? Not for much longer.....

Today I was reading the news and I snapped. Turns out the government want to issue a £2500 fine to anyone who refuses to sign up for an ID card. Ugh. I was so annoyed, that I decided to send an email to people who I thought would care enough to either take note or pass it on. Or at least read it and think about it:

I would firstly like to say that I have emailed you all because I am growing increasingly concerned with Blair's continuous erosion of our basic civil liberties. Yes, this is an email about politics. No, do not switch off yet. This is important.

If you will take a look at various links from recent news headlines, you will notice that over the last few years, Jack Straw, David Blunkett and Charles Clarke (all once home secretaries for New Labour) have introduced laws and taxes that impose upon our freedom.
They have even admitted it themselves, with the head of MI5 admitting back in September that civil liberties may have to be eroded "for our own safety": http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4232012.stm
If nothing is done about this, we will no longer have the freedoms that we Britons have been enjoying for the past few decades.

Unfortunately, we have already lost the right to protest: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4507446.stm
This is the story of Mary Evans, a political activist who was arrested for reading out the names of all the British soldiers who had been killed in the Iraq war. She was convicted under the new law that bans unauthorised protests from taking place within half a mile of Westminster. This has even been stretched to include such things as carol singing: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article332149.ece

This is not the worst of the new laws though; on January 1st 2006, a law was introduced that allows police to arrest people for any offence. This means you can gain a criminal record for petty offences such as failure to wear a seatbelt, dropping litter, and other misdemeanours:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/12/29/narrest29.xml&sS

Britain is already the most spied upon country in the world, with over 4 million CCTV surveilance cameras operating nationwide. This is unacceptable. But it is only the beginning, because the government plan to track the movement of every single vehicle, thus becoming the first country in the world to do this: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/transport/article334686.ece
Furthermore, the new national surveilance system will hold these records for at least two years.

But the most pressing issue of all is the proposition to bring in compulsory ID cards. These ID cards store a lot more personal information than any other form of identity. The full list is here: http://www.no2id.net/IDSchemes/faq.php#7 and lists over 50 different categories of information required to register for one of these. I am aware that most of you will probably not read out all of them, so I will pick out a few for you:
"3. Date and place of birth and, if the person has died, the date of death;" (Surely dead people don't need ID cards??)
"13. Fingerprints"
"14. 'Other' biometrics (iris recognition);"
"29. Any driver number connected to a driving licence;"
These cards store a lot of information on one card. A bit much just to prove someone's existance. In fact, there is so much stored on these card that one could argue that instead if reducing identity theft, it would make it easier for people to steal others' identity. There are several other reasons why these Identity cards won't work. A friend of mine has written an artice listing them here: http://www.vigay.com/misc/idcards.html
Pressure group NO2ID also not only have a very informative FAQ, which I have already posted a link to, but have put up 2 petitions to refuse and 1 to support those who refuse. Unfortunately the most recent pledge was not as successful as the first, but should any of you feel that you do not want to sign up to these cards - you are not alone. There are at least 11,000 people who have already pledged to resist compulsory registration (me being one of them).
Currently, the government are attempting to blackmail citizens into buying into these ID cards. They have proposed a £2,500 fine for refusing to sign up to one, because they are banking on only a few people resisting. If everybody was to resist, there would be much more chance of getting it thrown out of parliament.
http://www.pledgebank.com/refuse2
http://www.pledgebank.com/resist

Even if you choose not to support NO2ID, please tell others about it. We must let everyone know what is happening. We cannot let Blair turn this country into a Totalitarian state.

Spread the word - we're losing our freedom fast!