Two parliamentary votes in the last 24 hours: one good, one bad, I think.
Today, there was a vote in favour of effectively a total ban on smoking in all public places, like pubs, restaurants, offices etc. This is good. Smoking is evil as far as I’m concerned and pretty-much nothing anyone else can say will make me change my mind on that one. Being able to go out to a restaurant or a pub and come home not smelling of smoke will be very welcome.
Now, the ‘bad’. The saga over ID cards continues. MPs have voted to make the cards “not compulsory”. However, after $SOME_DATE, if you want a passport, you’ll need an ID card too, no opt-out. That’s obviously a rather warped definition of “not compulsory”.
For what it’s worth, as I’m sure many readers of this site are aware, it’s not the cards as such that is the problem. It’s the ID register (“the database”) that holds information related to the cards. Specifically, what’s going to be stored in it? And who will have access to see it? To modify it?
Furthermore, the government are partly trying to ‘sell’ the idea of ID cards to the public based on the assurance that they will stop terrorism (unlikely, especially for anyone contemplating being a suicide bomber – all the 7 July 2005 bombers were UK citizens and, had ID cards been in use then, would all have had legitimate ID) and stop fraud. Stopping fraud: not sure about that: having a single card which is presented as the “gold standard” for personal identification strikes me as being more of a risk of identity theft than anything else.
Mutter, mutter….