On January 1 2005, the Freedom of Information Act comes fully into force. This will give us the right to ask various government departments and public authorities what data they hold on us.
Remarkably, the Cabinet Office has suddenly decided that now would be a good time to delete all emails older than three months! So millions of emails will go – and those which need to be kept will be printed out and filed! That way, when someone makes a Freedom of Information Act claim it’ll be a lot harder than running a search engine over the email server. It’ll be good old fashioned civil servant filing cabinets.
And never mind the fact that millions of official records will be lost forever.
The fact is that storage of these emails will be a trivial cost in the scheme of things – indeed I’d think that the ground rent on one filing cabinet in Westminster postcode is more than the cost of gigabytes of backup tapes.
Anyone would think that they’re trying to hide stuff from us.
In the meantime the Law Lords on Thursday ruled that human rights laws are being broken by holding people without trial. This really is our version of Guantanamo. I don’t understand why they can’t be charged if we have any proof of any kind of terrorist activities. We’re told that we can’t be told everything – but since we just went into a war where the primary reason for doing so was found to be false – I’m not really going to accept that. Cases can be heard behind closed doors if need be, but either charge them with conspiracy or release them. If we don’t have law to fall back on then we have nothing.
Finally, tomorrow sees the second reading of the ID Card Bill. Yup – already. And this is despite the Home Secretary resigning and the Home Office being is chaos as a result. But they government are just ploughing ahead with this.
Charles Clarke says that he’s going to continue with plans to introduce the cards. It seems that the objections he was reported as having in September must have all gone away!
Then there’s the Shadown Home Secretary David Davies. This is the same David Davies who spoke at the Mistaken Identity meeting earlier this year, where he was certainly not fully behind the scheme. See my report here, or listen to the meeting’s audio here.
Finally there’s Mark Oaten of the Lib Dems who have always been ID Cards. Again follow these two links for my report and the Oaten’s audio from Mistaken Identity.
So there you have it: three people leading the debate tomorrow in the Commons, all of whom have at the very least, some serious reservations towards this ridiculous bill. A bill which will cost the taxpayer much much more than the widely reported £3 billion, will not make an iota of difference in the fight against terrorism, but will ensure that we become that much less of a free people.
There’s an election next year, and I really don’t know who I can vote for except the Lib Dems, however unlikely they are to get into my constituency.