Lies, damn lies and Peter Hain
If you’ve got a spare hour, and if you didn’t watch it last night, I recommend you have a look at this week’s edition of Question Time online (it’ll be there until this time next week), if only to see the feckless Peter Hain taking a kicking.
At some points it was painful to watch, the other four panellists, the audience and even the arch establishment figure David Dimbleby queued up to lamp him. It was like a bunch of squaddies taking their frustrations out on an Iraqi teenager. He didn’t give up much of a fight.
You have to wonder what really goes through the mind of a former anti-Apartheid firebrand when he has to (half heartedly) defend ID cards, house arrest and extraordinary rendition. It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to know what Hain’s reaction would have been had, in 1970, the South African government put Nelson Mandela on a plane to Algeria to have information beaten out of him.
But as fun as was to watch this abject turncoat take his licks, he was also guilty of peddling this to defend ID cards:
Look at the 7/7 terrorists, they had multiple identities, as many as 12.
I wonder where that came from because, try as I might, I can’t find any mention anywhere of the July 7 bombers having used multiple identities. The nearest I can find is this, from Andrew Marr’s interview with Gordon Brown on February 12:
I mean most of these terrorists we’re talking about have about 12 identities, they operate multiple identities and false identities.
And, as has been repeated over and over (particularly by me), Charles Clarke himself said that ID cards would not have prevented the the July bombings. I doubt whether Hain will ever be picked up on this but for thousands of people watching Question Time last night, the seed will have been planted. It’ll be interesting to see if it surfaces anywhere else, from whose mouth, and if anybody challenges it.
(I could quite easily spend a day dissecting the evasions, equivocations, misdirections and, yes, downright lies, that Hain put across last night - on glorification of terrorism, on how ID cards won’t be compulsory without a further act of parliament, on why the British government won’t help the British residents still in Guantanamo Bay - but you have to wonder what the point would be. I’d be that little bit more pissed off, you’d be that little bit more pissed off and it’s such a sunny day and everything. The level of deception at which this government operates that becomes apparent to even a halfway attentive observer is amazing. Just what Hain got away with in one hour of a TV show, despite his mauling, well, you have to salute him for it really.)
I guess the identity theft/fraud angle on ID cards has failed to catch the public imagination so the prevention of terrorism aspect has to be bigged up again. It went away for a bit - so much so that the Prime Minister did not use the T word once in his defence of ID cards at Prime Minister’s Questions on January 18 - but now it’s back. Fear sells - Gordon Brown, in his hard man speech to herald the arrival of the “dual premiership”, used the words “July 7″ seventeen times.
It’s said that the New Labour project lifted, wholesale, policies and their way of conducting business from the Clinton administration. In this technique of embracing the politics of fear, it’s obvious New Labour have picked up a few things from Clinton’s successors as well.
Bloomberg: U.K.’s Blair Wins Vote on Glorification of Terrorism
The government scheduled the terrorism vote for the same day that 20 people received honors at Buckingham Palace from Queen Elizabeth for helping to rescue victims of the July 7 terrorist attacks in London. When the Commons last took up the bill, in November, the vote was scheduled for the day after the memorial service for victims. Blair’s spokesman Tom Kelly described that as a “complete coincidence.”
Posted on February 17th, 2006 at 11:11 am
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You are very unfair to Peter Hain, a very busy man, who not only looks after the interests of the Welsh and Northern Irish, but judging by his alarmingly orange skin colour is suffering from some serious kidney / liver problem.
It is also evident that this condition has affected his mental state - hence his equivocations / lies / evasions / untruths … and the ocassional darting malevolent glances betraying that he was obeying the voices in his head saying,” I would not only like to kill you, you masked only when JD jokingly suggested that the next PM might be he - revealing what might be loosely described as a lupine smile, when he revealed his alarmingly sharp and brilliantly white canines.
The men in white coats cannot be far behind, Care in the Community has it’s limits.
Mr Hain and the truth you say? Don’t be silly. That’s asking way too much.
Bastard. I just got in, sat down at the pc to do a post on Peter Hain’s performance last night, and what is waiting for me in my inbox? This superb offering from yourself.
If you are going to keep getting incensed by the same stuff as me, can you please not post it so goddam quickly:) Also, if you could not write so well, that would help too:)
Great post, as ever.
My favourite was in the ID cards bit when he said that without ID cards people will not be able to access “services that you are going to have to need in future whether you like it or not”.
I love it! The cards may be voluntary, but the government will make sure you can’t live without them.
Class!
judging by his alarmingly orange skin colour [Peter Hain] is suffering from some serious kidney / liver problem. Either that, or too many carrots.
But seriously… I channel-hopped through a couple of bits of QT, and it was obvious Hain was on a loser. The audience clearly showed the first inklings of realising how much ID cards are going to cost them (financially and personally). Shout out (as they say) to the guy who threw the reference to South African ‘Pass Laws’ in Hain’s face. Hain did try a feeble line with Kat Fletcher from the NUS, saying that you needed ID when you’re a student. Yes, but that’s because you’re a student: once your graduate, that’s it - no copper’s going to ask for your membership of Nollege College or whatever when you’re 65. There was one point where the audience were obviously laughing at Hain, even as he tried to dig himself out of a hole.
PS: Re: My favourite was in the ID cards bit when he said that without ID cards people will not be able to access “services that you are going to have to need in future whether you like it or not” What are these services? Is the government seriously planning to make access to them dependent on reading ID cards via scanners?
Incidentally, the issue of multiple IDs is easily undermined if (a) you steal the identity and then claim the card; (b) the (in)accuracy of the technology (e.g. around half a million people for every one percent shortfall); (c) if all you have to do is show your ID card rather than have it read by a machine.
Interpol Secretary-General Ronald Noble was in New York for a 2 day visit in November to speak to the Counter-terrorism Committee of the UN Security Council on Interpol’s work.
He claimed that there are 10 to 15 million stolen passports in use around the world at the present time
“If member countries treated stolen passports like citizens treat their stolen credit cards, then we would have many, many fewer terrorists and organized criminals in the world than we currently do,�
He said only 87 countries are using an Interpol database on stolen passports, 100 more countries remain undecided. Since it was created 3 years ago when only 12 countries had signed on, he added, the database has gone from 3,000 to more than 8,000,000 entries. “Unless all countries share that information globally, the terrorists and organized criminals will be able to move from country to country,� Noble said. It also makes one wonder what utility the proposed UK national Identity Database will be…. and the very remote possibility that a user of a stolen passport will be picked up.
Noble claimed Ramzi Youssef the WTC Bomber in 1993 was using a stolen Iraqi passport and that the Serbian Prime Minister, Zoran Djindjic who was assassinated in 2003 by someone carrying a stolen Croatian passport that had been stamped 26 times by six European countries and by Singapore.
ID cards also starts to look a bit ropey if you start doing the maths on how many new people have to enroll per day to keep the system going - at ~700,000 births annually and allowing for holidays and weekends it’s 350 per *hour* across the country’s 70 offices, or one every 12 minutes per office *on average* *forever*, including checking their new biometrics against every single record in the database to see if it’s a duplicate.
It’s not hard to see that if the 12 minute time is exceeded for the total interaction between the office and NIR then the work required of the NIR by the office will pile up (as the next job will start before the previous one has finished) and you’ll either have to keep the new enrollee there until it catches up (which could be sometime the following night) or let a possible duplicate go unchecked (say if you decoupled the duplicate check and just sent a note to the Old Bill telling them to go round to X address and check them out whenever you happened to find a duplicate).
By the time it reaches 60m entries the database will have to check 13 biometrics (each of which isn’t a single piece of data) against every new applicant at a rate of 83,000 per second, a check which can never be 100% accurate anyway.
That doesn’t include foreigners reaching three months in the UK, of course, nor does it include database downtime or the occasions when the system will erroneously flag up that someone’s already enrolled, nor the fact that initially compulsory enrollment will have to cope with >700,000 people annually (at 45m passports renewed biometrically in ten years it’s more like 4.5m a year).
Put it this way, I’m glad I’m not the system designer. If I were I’d be asking for a very large cheque in advance and keeping a speedboat somewhere for when it all went titsup.
http://clairwil.blogspot.com/2006/02/i-d-cards-and-mind-boggling-home.html#links
If the incident described in the above link is correct and the governments own civil service are so careless with identity documents, one wonders what the real agenda is in introducing them.