NO2ID

Keep up the good work. Don't want to be premature but I think the campaign is matching the australian anti-ID card story closely and that ended up with 90% of the population opposed to ID cards.
"http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-61882&als[theme]=National%20ID%20Cards&headline=On%20Campaigns%20of%20Opposition%20to%20ID%20Card%20Schemes"
There is maybe nearly 90% opposition amongst people(newspapers and web) who comment on this.

I work in a big office in Reading. The people that surround me here are just not interested in the Identity Register. Its frustrating, they just seem to be unphased by the whole principle. Is this an English trait? It seems that the English are typically less likely to complain than other nationalities.

What sort of person however does it take to actually want to become a number?

Oh Dear you must feel frustrated in that atmosphere, must be like working with a lot of sombies.....Isn' t it sad that britain's workforce is turned into mute robots because most of them work long hours and are tired of everything, so end up having no energy to even look what is going on around them and have no time to do anything about it........

Try drawing their attentions to what will happen if they let the id card system come in...Try an article on chips being inserted in humans.....that will wake them out of their daily spellbound state...

I was a friends on Saturday night for dinner, and there were 6 of us sitting at the table. The conversation went from the Make Poverty History campaign to the G8 summit and eventualythe converstion got around to ID cards. Everyone (except me) thought that ID cards were a good idea, but it was obvious none of them had really thought about it. I then explained to them about the cost going from £60 when they were first brought up to £95 today and the cost is expected to rise further. I told them how they would need to re-register everytime they moved house, again at thier cost, and how failure to do so would result in fines costing thousend of £. That, more than anything else, got thier interest. Once i had thier attention i asked them if they thought it was a price worth paying for a card that proves your identity, and asked one of my friends to look in his wallet for ID, of which he had already had 6 form of ID, ranging from his driving licence photo card, to credit and bank cards to his police warrent card. I think i got my point accross. Money is always a good way to go to get someones attention.

Don't bother to feel frustrated. We are so far ahead of the curve in being able to see the consequences of the Database that it's inevitable most people won't have a clue what we're talking about.

In this country, we've always had a benign government. It's been a gradually unfolding shock to me how little respect this Government has for the public. It's only because I bothered to look beyond the spin that I'm starting to see hints of dictatorship.

I agree about money being the most obvious concern to people and hence a good way to get their interest.

Another tip for influencing groups is to realise that they all have natural leaders who minutely cue other people how to react. When you convince the leaders, you have the group.

It might help to wake people up if they actually had more news to look at or listen to. The only news we get from UK seems to be about what their rugby teams are like, what the royal family are doing and what is happening with their various scandals (you would get the impression here that the English people are obsessed with scandals and are a population of plebs that can be easily placated with rugby games, racing cars and scandals involving the royal family. And as long as they are fed a diet of "bread and circuses" they will willingly enslave themselves to any doctrine or dictator who likes to rule their lives). Someone suggested to me last year - funnily enough about the London "congestion" charges: "The English people have obsequiousness deeply ingrained in their psyche, they believe that some of them are born to be better than others and you will never get that out of them and if they are 'working class' or at the bottom of the heap they relish it and seemingly love to be told what to do by their 'betters'". Now, please don't hold this against me
because it is not my quote, it is what someone wrote to me. I don't know enough English people to know whether or not it is true, but I do remember an English immigrant whom my husband worked with 20 years ago or so saying, when he got promoted from being an ordinary electrician to a "senior electrician": "Now I consider myself to be upper middle class" AND HE WAS SERIOUS.

I have been following this id card proposal for the last 2 and a half years, virtually ever since it was proposed, and I amassed quite an amount of information on it - which would have been practically impossible without the computer as there is hardly anything in any of the English publications. Apart from the "net" only fseven people I have mentioned it to since knew what I was talking about, and this included English tourists and an English family who moved here in 2003 - these English people had no idea what was proposed or what had already been put in place (like the "English market town trial" I drew to the attention of one in 2003).

I am very aware that what happens in UK or America will soon happen here. We are not safe by any means, so people shouldn't be complacent. That is a good reason that 100% of the people in our country should get behind you lot and ensure - doing what ever it takes - to make sure that this doesn't happen. People seem to have the attitude: "It doesn't affect me, so I don't care". Well, I quoted Martin Niemoller (from a paper commenting on events in Germany 1933-39), you might know: "They came first for the communists, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist........" and ending with: "Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me", to a couple of people, but then I realised that that only makes people angry. People seem to only want to live in la la land and pretend everything is great.

Has anyone any good ideas to get people to wake up?

The 50 million dollar question and one that we have addressed in various ways throughout this forum. I like to play the alarmist option and tell people that their freedom will be compromised, others want to emphasise the cost of the scheme to the individual, and others object to the database... it all depends on what buttons need to be pressed for the person we are dealing with.

N.

How about :

"you do realise, don't you, that when the database is hacked, as it definitely will be, (after all if an amateur can hack the US defence computers....) a gang of kidnappers will be able to get your address, your car number plates, which school your children go to, and all your bank account details to decide if it's worth kidnapping your children.....

We have a good quality series of ads on that very theme, which are getting limited exposure in upmarket mainstream media, with the aim of influencing opinion-formers and people who might give us money.

Most people are not interested and hard to get interested. As it is, the controversy has to fuel itself among the "chattering classes". If someone were to fund a commercial-scale campaign for us, it could wake people up a bit. It would still be only a minority though. It takes a long time for new knowledge and opinions to soak through the whole of society.

Can anyone spare £150,000?

Mind you I see that Private Eye is covering the story again. They are coming from the angle that just about all the companies lining themselves up to quote for the work are either dodgy or incompetent and probably both. See this weeks 'In the Back', I'm sure that Mr Hislop won't mind us passing the cutting or copy thereof around.

Justin.

OK, here you go. Hope Hislop won't mind too much - as long as it gets read.

And this will be another wake up for them when the world runs out of oil. and sounds like it will be sooner than later..

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4581955.stm

maybe as soon as within 50years......

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3782801.stm


This is more and lightly what is behind driving people out of their cars to save the oil industry... so all the stuff on air pollution is only a part of it...

If we in Europe were half sensible we to could have an alcohol powered motoring industry, it's all to do with the way plants metabolise. I'm digging into knowledge aquired 20 years ago here but if I remember correctly there are 3 carbon plants and 4 carbon plants, the latter being a lot more efficient at converting sunlight to sugar but they require more light and warmth than we in northern Europe have. However, southern Europe is more than capable of producing such plants but the CAP requires a level playing field across the continent thus discouraging the required diversity of crops. In the UK and Ireland we can produce milk and meat particuarly well due to our moist climate but where have all the dairy farmers gone? Its all a gigantic mismanagement of natural resources the scale of which is beyond the comprehension of most so there is little outcry. Now where have I heard that before? There is also the tax on biofuel which discourages green diesel derived from rapeseed. Just who's side is the treasury on?

BTW, if the rest of the EC kick our rebate into into touch Gordon will have to find a few billion extra from somewhere, he might even have to scale down any ambitious spending plans and pet projects of the PM. How wonderfully ironic it would be the EU, which TB has tirelessly championed, put paid to this ID stupidity.

Justin.