The Cabinet Office’s consultation on “legislation to support digital identity verification.” ended on March 1st. My submission:
The proposed “legislation to support digital identity verification.” is a presumptuous and wholly unwarranted overreach and intrusion into the private lives of every UK citizen drawn into its sinister net. I unequivocally reject any such proposal.
UK citizens are already the most tracked, traced and surveyed citizens in the world, a reprehensible state of affairs in a country that claims to be the crucible of modern democracy. Government is transitory, subject to the vagaries of history and social upheaval.
What is being presented as an administrative convenience, in another time, another place, could be used as an instrument of torture and repression. I grew up in a Europe that was quite capable of accommodating two fascist states in Spain and Greece. The USSR and the Eastern Bloc were entrenched realities where the full force of state bureaucracy was, through the Stasi and KGB, brought to bear in crushing their own citizens.
The collusion between state and private actors in crushing free speech over the the course of the last few years is all the evidence we need to reject this appalling proposal. The collusive relationship between the Cabinet Office, the 77th Brigade and Twitter, Facebook et al has been a national scandal, a shameful abuse of UK citizens' right to free speech.................
...................The seizure of private funds during the mandate protests in Canada is another example of how a civil service, government and private enterprise can collude to share private information to crush legal and necessary dissent.
You forget the information you hold is ours and held by you for our convenience, not yours. It is in our remit, not yours, to share that information with whom we please, when we please. Private companies have come to believe the information they hold on us is theirs to do with as they please, such as using it to harass customers with unsolicited marketing or selling it as a commodity to anyone willing to pay.
The idea that civil servants could share highly sensitive, personal data with these vultures is reprehensible. That this information should be available to anyone working with or for the state is deeply disturbing given the current trajectory of western democracies.
Corporate abuse and discrimination by government and private enterprise would be the least of our worries. The unseemly and deeply suspicious haste surrounding this consultation should give cause for concern for any responsible citizen.
Ministers repeatedly denied “Covid passes” would be introduced before they were. In Scotland, the Information Commissioner’s Office found their scheme broke the law. Every aspect of the Covid response has earned the government the disdain and deep distrust of British citizens.
This proposal puts the public at risk of even greater surveillance and threatens to entrench the brutal and deeply authoritarian currents that have recently emerged in British Society.
It should be scrapped.
