Labour minister says 14 year olds should get ID cards

Deluges fringe meeting with Kool-Aid

Posted in Government, 23rd September 2008 14:11 GMT

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A government minister has spoken glowingly of the prospect of kids as young as six handing over their biometrics as she boasted that the Tories and LibDems would find it impossible to unpick the government’s ID card scheme.

Meg Hillier, an under secretary at the Home Office, told a fringe meeting of tobacconists and convenience store owners at the Labour Party conference that cards could be ~~foisted on~~ given to 14-year-olds, the BBC reports.

Hillier pointed out that six year olds were already required to hand over their fingerprints as part of visa applications. While 16 and 17 year olds are due to be caught up in ID card plan, she said the age range was “up for grabs” and there was every possibility of its being lowered, if the cards were deemed popular.

If by popular she means that children will find themselves ostracised or unable to prove they are entitled to cut price travel without a card, she may well have a point.

Warming to her theme and no doubt ordering another vat of Kool-Aid, Hillier then told the meeting that the government was going “full steam ahead” with the plan and that Gordon Brown wanted to roll the scheme out “quicker than it was possible.”

Of course, the further the roll out, the harder it would be for a Tory government to roll the program back – assuming they did follow through on pledges to do just that.

“There isn’t an easy way to unpick this scheme, quite rightly because it is invaluable,” she bragged.

Quite right.

Despite what the civil libertarians say, what better use could there be of the government’s shrinking public purse than to ensure that newsagents can usefully enforce their two-children-at-a-time schemes and that off licence staff needn’t make their own judgements on what an 18 year old might look like? ®

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