Ihr papieren ist nicht in ordnung! Kommen sie bitte mit uns!

So the Dear Leader is pressing ahead with his crackpot schemes to introduce ID cards which will of course make us all safe from those nasty terrorists - who are all home grown and would have them - and those nasty illegal immigants - who will work the black economy anyway and will get hold of forged ones and for the rest of you they will come in handy when plod come to turf you out of your house to prove that you really are who you say you are. "I am not a number!" Yes you are if Stormtrooper Tone gets his way. What's the betting that folks like me who'll never have to use an "entitlement card" will end up coughing up twice as much as they are currently saying this will cost because (a) it's a government project and the costs will overrun and (b) they will have to give them free to the "disadvantaged" dole scroungers who will need to flash them when claiming their benefits and I'll be subsiding that.

So what else do we have. Some token "Green" effort which sounds like yet another backdoor tax; how about shoring our sea defences up ... oh you can't you've spent all the money to defend us from the real threat of a North Sea surge on defending us from that fantasy threat in Iraq. A promise to lock you up of you might be a little bit fruitcake (well that at least will keep Mrs Dracunculus (who works with looney-tunes) in gainful employment), yet more power for Kommisar Ken and his campaign against anyone with two pence to rub together and the mandatory installation of CCTV in every room in your house - after all if you've nothing to hide why would you object?

Oh and the icing on the cake is that we're going to get a law banning the posession of "Extreme Pornography". This one looks madder than a bucket of eels* with plenty of opportunities for people's lives getting thoroughly f*cked up as what is regarded as "Extreme" was battled out in the courts. This has all the hallmarks of a badly thought out bit of knee-jerk playing-to-the-tabloid-gallery politics - a Dangerous Dogs Act with willies. "Extreme" changes all the time so how you would even begin to draft such a law baffles the imagination and it would be left for the courts to interpret. Anyway how would you enforce such a law? One of my relatives is in the police at a fairly senior level and tells me that they can barely cope with trying to investigate child porn - which is illegal pretty much everywhere so they get lots of co-operation from overseas plods - and it's well documented that the fabled "Operation Ore" had about three to four years backlog of people who they *know* downloaded very illegal stuff that they haven't even got to seeing yet. Can you imagine what will happen if they now have to chase every iternet user who might have looked at a naughty picture that might or might not have been "Extreme" and trying to get co-operation from a plod in, say, Amsterdam, who goes "No, the bucket of eels thing is OK here, I'm afraid we can't be forcing the website owner to send you anythinks."**

The real danger with the above though is that some senior reincarnation of "God's Copper" will announce a purge on "Internet Filth", lots of recources will be diverted to his "cause" which means some poor granny will get her head smashed for the two pounds thirty seven in her purse and a bunch of child molesters get away uninvestigated whilst plod is busy yelling "Do you recognise this fish!" as some poor bloody schoolteacher.

Ja, mit der Insel Affen, alles is nicht in ordning!


* I seem to recall seeing some porn featuring a bucket of eels once.
** That's funnier if you read it in a dutch accent.