Even Home Secretary Charles Clarke has admitted that ID cards would not have prevented the recent bomb attacks in London.
He went on to indicate that on balance he believed ID cards would help rather than hinder the ability to deal with particular terrorist threats, in an interview with Radio 4's Today programme on July 8.
Certainly we can expect that he and the rest of the New Labour gang will waste no opportunity to use these events to claw back as much as possible of the ground they have lost in the recent debates over the issue of ID cards as well as to launch further attacks on other elements of our civil liberties. Fourth
The ID card bill passed its
second reading on June 28,
with Blair's majority cut from
67 to 31. Twenty Labour MPs
voted against while others
abstained. The bill will now
go through a committee stage
and the government has
ensured that no Labour critics have been allowed to participate in that process.
But opposition to ID cards
was building outside
Parliament.
A poll in the Mail on
Sunday just before the second
reading showed that while 57
per cent support the measure
in principle less than 1 in 10
would stick with the measure
if the cost was more than £100
per head.
Researchers from the LSE
have challenged the governoppressed, Malcolm X and
Black Power will be a major
theme for revolutionaries of all
nationalities to debate within the
context of permanent war and the continuation of resistance in
In France, school students have been in regular confrontation with the government and police over attacks on the education systern, whilst tens of thousands of workers have
struck over neoliberal reforms. Hundreds of students from these struggles will be at the
Last year Fl supporters from England, as well as young people from the Scottish Socialist Party joined the camp in Northern Spain.
This year Socialist Resistance supporters hope to take even more people and look forward to seeing all our friends, supporters and people we have worked alongside in the last year in the anti war movement, Respect, and student campaigns.
If you are interested in going to the camp email: [email protected] or phone 0208 800 7460. ment figures. The Home office claims that the cards will cost around f93 per head, with total costs between 1.33.1 billion.
The LSE figures put the total costs at around £20 billion, with the cost per head varying between £170 in the best-case scenario to over £300 in the worst.
The broadening debate on the scheme has raised other issue. People are all too well aware that many major computer schemes have led to chaos and failed to address the questions that billions have been spent on - from the Child Support Agency to local (privatised) Housing Benefit systells.
One of the strongest interventions in the debate so far has come from the leaders of nine of Britain's major trade
In a letter to the press on the eve of the Commons debate they point out that