Petition to scrap ID Card scheme - deadline 15FEB07!

(Please see the UPDATES at the end)

I just had a look at some of the other petitions on the Downing Street website (after signing the one on vehicle-tracking and road pricing) and found this euqally important - much more important really - petition:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to scrap the proposed introduction of ID cards.
The deadline to sign this petition is 15th February 2007. If you agree that introduction of ID Cards is a pernicious scheme to monitor citizens for who knows what [political] ends then you should sign the petition. It is highly unlikely to fulfil the multifarious purposes for which the Labour government says it wishes to introduce them - to combat terrorism, reduce crime, etc. The database which will be required to back-up the scheme the government wants to introduce is a direct threat to our civil liberties by this and future governments (of whatever political party). It will cost huge amounts of money (probably much greater than even the current rising estimates) and will either fail spectacularly at a technical level, or in the unlikely event that it can be made to work turn us into a nation of helots.

I applaud the Conservative Party for last week having placed the contractors for this scheme 'on notice' that a future Conservative government will abolish ID Cards - and we must not let the Conservative Party renegue on that promise.

Please, please sign the petition! (so far there are only 25,242 votes recorded - sigh ...) Click here now to sign up!

UPDATE: (Tuesday 20FEB07 00.15 RST) I have received a 'personal' email from the Prime Minister on the closure of this petition. Basically its message can be summed up as telling those who signed it that the government plans to carry out its policy unamended; the whole petition scheme is a sham, in fact it might more properly be called a 'SCAM' as its real purpose appears to be for the government to gather personal information (names, addresses and email addresses) of those who challenge its policies - it is extremely sinister. I have reported the Prime Minister's email as 'SPAM'. Any further messages I receive from the Prime Minister as a result of completing this petition will also be reported as 'SPAM'. I do not accept the conditions applying to completion of these petitions that one implicitly agrees to receiving upto two emails; I for one do not!

2nd UPDATE: (Wednesday 21FEB07 09.16 RST) See my later posting here, which discusses an important piece of policy information which our crook of a Prime Minister has slipped into his email and which I missed when I scanned through it.