Cancelled Manchester ID Cards Itself

Manchester is first to get ID cards

Some minor aparatchik was shoved in front of the media this morning to announce this. It's embarrassing reading the pathetic excuses New Labour's underlings have desperately scraped together to try to justify ID cards once again.

They can now directly apply to attend appointments from November 30 to have their photograph and fingerprints taken for the £30 cards at Manchester's passport office.

Junior Home Office Minister Meg Hillier said the cards would be particularly useful for students and young people as they would "save the cost and hassle" of getting into clubs and bars.

Anyone over 16 in the city with a UK passport can apply for a card.

Ms Hillier told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Really for a lot of people it's a day-to-day convenience thing.

"For a lot of young people ... they often take their passports to prove their identity in nightclubs and bars and the Passport Service sweeps these up every week. So for a lot of people it'll save the cost and hassle of taking your passport, risking losing it and instead you've got this very convenient little credit-sized card. I've got one and it's very useful."

The ID cards are very hard to copy and are very secure, with biometric information stored on a database, she added.

"This is not a database that can be downloaded onto disks," she said.

"It's going to be held in different places so there'll be fingerprints and your picture on one database and your biographical information (on another), which is I must stress just the same as what's held by the Passport Service anyway ... and they will be linked together by another database."

The database would only be used for "serious crime issues" or identity concerns at a border.

The mini-witted former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced in May that Manchester had been chosen as the country's first idiot trial area for ID cards, and so it comes to pass.

Which is a bit funny because I'm sure I read Gordon Brown recently saying that ID cards were off the agenda.

Mind you, he said that a couple of years ago.

Could it be that he's a total fucking liar?