ID card uptake: Some Statistics
According to the propaganda around the government's utterly contemptible ID card schemes, there has been some "voluntary" uptake:
Trials have already been held in Manchester, where more than 3,500 people signed up.What? More than 3,500? Sure, that's thousands of people but... let's crunch some numbers.
Now, according to Wikipedia (yeah, I know, Wikipedia is about as reliable as... well, government stats, so bear with me) the population of Manchester is 464,000. Which is an uptake of 0.75%. Hardly a massively impressive result, is it? Particularly when you consider that in the 2005 British General Election, the BNP scored 0.7% of the vote. Which makes ID cards only marginally more popular than the BNP. How depressing for advocates of this particular invasion of our civil liberties.
Ministers have admitted spending £1.3 million on an advertising campaign to persuade people to pick up ID cards in pilot areas.£371 per sign-up. No wonder it needs to become compulsory - otherwise, it could cost circa £22,260,000,000 to get everyone in the country to "volunteer" for it.
We're supposed to be impressed. We're supposed to see this as some sort of endorsement of ID cards. But the numbers seem to suggest that the public is doing anything but endorsing the ID card scheme. They will have to be forced on us if the government truly wants everyone to carry them - and if they become enforced, then they fail to realise the key claim the government makes on their behalf. After all, how can they make anyone feel safe, when they have to be forced onto the people at great cost?
Labels: BNP, ID cards, Lies, Waste of money
posted by The Nameless Libertarian @ 8:31 am
9 Comments
9 Comments:
Northerners give up ID cards for Lent?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/09/id_card_numbers/
Here in France ID cards have been around for years, no problem, except when they need one to travel around the EU for instance, because mostly the French forget to renew them when they expire. French bureaucracy being what it is (the worst in the world some say) you are f@*ked if your travel date is earlier than three weeks hence.
If i put a bowl of the queens shit on ebay somebody would bid on it but it would still be shit.
3500 shit admirers.
Interesting article which shows just how deep New Labour dogma runs.
I'd also point out that plans to replace Trident nuclear weapons at a cost of £97 billion are equally pointless and unpopular.
I'd point out that Trident's replacement cost is a multi-decade figure, so even at a hundred billion quid, spread over its lifetime its yearly cost is about what Brown and Darling are pissing up against the wall between knocking off early on Friday and reconvening on Monday to cook up new ways to shaft us all sideways. Shut down the top half-dozen quangos and the more egregious cabinet dockets (DCMS? Who ordered that?) and it pays for itself. There's another big difference between Trident and ID cards: nuclear weapons are a proven technique against hostile forces bent on the overthrow of democracy (ask the Japs.)
Yep, the Japanese have come up with another bomb better than a nuclear one; have a debt the same size of America and and a GDP considerably less. Want to know where the next implosion is going to be and that one is going to make the bank collapse look like a firecracker.
£22,260,000,000 to get everyone in the country to "volunteer" for it.
Er no £371 was what it cost to persuade 3500 dolts to sign up for the process. A number that no doubt includes numerous NuLab drones and the staff of the Manchester ID office. It wasn't enough to persuade the other 99.25%
If we assume that to persuade each succeeding 0.75% would require extra advertising (say a measly 1% more per tranche) it would cost over £46 billion to persuade us.
Not sure I fully agree with David Gillies about Trident.
It's true that the £97 bn costs of replacing Trident are whole life costs spead over 30 or so years, but that still amounts to a big sum every year. So there is still value in cancelling Trident to address the current crisis.
Also, it's not true to say that nuclear weapons are a proven technique against hostile forces bent on the overthrow of democracy. They didn't stop the Falklands war, didn't stop 9/11, didn't stop the Russia / Georgia conflict, or many more conflicts involving nuclear weapons states since 1945.
There is more to deterrence than nuclear weapons, which could only be used in a massive crisis. What the armed forces need is weapons matched to today's military needs, not the Cold War. How, for example, are nuclear weapons helping us win the war in Afghanistan?
Plus, linking back to the key point of this article, opinion polls show that replacing Trident is poliically unpopular and supporters of the scheme are in a minority.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the 3500 are all local party loyalists too.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home