Up to 600,000 people each year who apply for their first passports will have to attend an interview under a scheme announced yesterday by the Home Office.It is ever clearer that the government regards itself as master, and we all live on sufferance. Travel is a privilege, and the passport is not supplied to clear the way and help us travel, but as a means of control.
The purpose behind ID cards is the creation of a unified national database - principally for the surveillance and control of British nationals (the 26 million transient foreigners annually are not to be subject to it, thereby negating many of the supposed reasons for having it).
Now the government announces all adult passports issued for the first time will require an interview from 2006, at one of 70 centres around the country. This means travel, and travel expense, and time off work, and time waiting for interview, and time being interviewed, and time being processed and approved. And being subject and beholden to some self-important official, and whatever personal questions he chooses to ask. An intrusion into one's life and privacy.
All for our own good, of course. I don't think so.
What the government announcement is really saying is that it is setting up the system by which, when the ID cards come along, we will all have to go along for "interviews" to get our passports, whether for the first time or not.
Britain becomes less attractive by the day, and, so long as they subscribe to this evil, it is another reason the Tories will not get my vote. Time for the 1952 Committee.
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