Who Needs Cards?

So we're being asked to give our fingerprints on the streets now, are we? Whoop-de-woo.

Mark Wallace's comments about the end, pointing to this basically being a trial, rather than merely a "voluntary" scheme, are correct. This is yet another of those small steps that add up to become a mountain.

I say that the term "civil liberties" is wrongly used in a case like this. The impression we get of civil liberties is of the person, of the individual, and their relationship to the powers that be. In my view, that doesn't go nearly far enough. Schemes like this need to be reconsidered - not at an individual level, but at a societal level. We need to re-address what we want society, not people to be, and under increasingly "efficient" (and supposedly "necessary") mechanisms like this, we apparently want it to be bullshit.

I hereby discard "civil liberties" as a relatively useless, romantic politic under the current regime (perhaps it has more value in other cultures, which don't merely regard it as Hollywood optimism). And I hereby launch vitriol against the new idea of "Police Society" that, it must be said, we are loving every minute of in our fear-induced, cowled state.

Truly, the cult ("ure" omitted) of the UK has never been so weak and actively apathetic.