British National ID Cards

This article addresses some benefits of a national level ID card. They have a point on things like benefits fraud, ID theft, generic ID for starting bank accounts or receiving a passport. For many of these things it will cut down, but not eliminate these illegal activities.

There needs to be an understanding by everyone that no matter what you do with these cards, someone will make a passable forgery. There will be a limiting effect on the amount of fraud that will occur because the national its will be more difficult and thus more expensive to forge.

As to prevention of Terrorism, RUBBISH. Have these people missed that terrorists tend to have large amounts of funding? It will make it more expensive to get IDs to set up a terrorist act, but if you believe there is no way to dodge the need for an ID, you live under a rock.

Charles Clark also tries to persuade the reader that the IDs can't lead to government abuse. He fails.

I believe that some critics of our proposals are guilty of liberal woolly thinking and spreading false fears when they wrongly claim that ID cards will erode our civil liberties, will revisit 1984, usher in the “Big Brother” society, or establish some kind of totalitarian police state. Those kinds of nightmare will be no more true of ID cards, when they are introduced, than they have been for the spread of cash and credit cards, driving licences, passports, work security passes and any number of the other current forms of ID that most of us now carry.

Firstly, just because there are multiple databases that hold your information doesn't mean that they are organized and controlled by the government.

Secondly, just the existence of such a database will prove open to abuse because it exists. Abuse of power always occurs. It's just a matter of when.