The Home Office is to spend over £500,000 this year on a marketing campaign for the identity card that features cartoon fingerprints.
A departmental spokesperson told GC News that it is planning a public information campaign to alert businesses on the need to prepare for the introduction of the card, which will initially be made available on a voluntary basis.
It will be focused primarily on the north-west of England, reflecting plans to make the card available to residents of Greater Manchester later this year, with some nationwide marketing.
The campaign, one advert for which features a cartoon fingerprint unveiling the identity card to an admiring audience of other fingerprints, is expected to cost £544,000 between September and December.
"This will help businesses with 'know your employee' and 'know your customer' checks," the spokesperson said. "The National Identity Card may be presented to businesses across the country any time after launch, as proof of identity. Businesses need to ensure that their staff are ready to recognise the National Identity Card, and know how to check the security features."
The plan has attracted fresh criticism from campaigners against the card. Phil Booth, national co-ordinator of No2ID, said: "This latest, desperate attempt to market the ID scheme is patronising hype. Having failed to come up with any convincing benefits, officials are set to waste millions shoving ID cards down the throats of shops, of licensees, and of young people who already have alternatives.
"The IPS is treating the public and businesses like children if it thinks giving fingerprints smiles will make us all happy to be fingerprinted.
"Let us be clear: anyone signing up for a Home Office identity card has agreed to report to an official database for life, and lost control of their own identity information for ever. It is nothing to smile about."
Talkback
This is a sickening wast of money given the state of the public finances and the fact that the next government is almost certainly going to scrap this nonsense. Typical of this government to try and manipulate people into buying into this by making it all so jolly with cartoons and spin. This all seems really desperate.
"Let us be clear: anyone signing up for a Home Office identity card has agreed to report to an official database for life, and lost control of their own identity information for ever. It is nothing to smile about."
Best thing for anybody to do is refute it completely.
ID cards and UBER databases *are* coming.
Next year, we have the 'Vet and Bar' scheme coming into force. The EU *are* actively considering an EU wide super database, shared with the US. UK Universities *are* developing software for for the multitude of surveillance (security) cameras.
All of the above are predictive, i.e. they are designed to figure out what you might do wrong before you do it, or as the case may be, before you *don't* do it.
Interesting to know what you will be charged with if the plod steps in before you have done anything, even if you had never had any intentions in the first place.
And yet, in today's news we read about the mother of a handicapped child, at the end of her tether, committing suicide because she could get no help from the police or council to deal with youths out of control in her road, menacing her on account of her handicapped child and creating a climate of fear in the road.
It seems that we have lost control of the basic requirements for a decent society, and that all these schemes are a very poor substitute.
The IT angle! None of this would be possible without the development of hardware and software that we have seen in the last decade or so.
The future *is* Orwellian, there is no escape from it, but *who's* responsible!
Fiona & Francecca Pilkington on the daily mail website, I'm shocked and angry i really don't know what to say, its horrendous if they was ever a time we needed boot camps like they have in the US now is that time.
Little ********* have gone unpunished for far to long now and if their parents don't want to do it then we need to do it, and break them! like the military do round them up and send them off to boot camps give them a taste of there own medicine 10 weeks should suffice.
They want to play the big men then fine we should punish them like men, all this is a direct result of both the politicians interfering with how the police force are run, and the politicians taking adult powers away and giving them to the children.
"The future *is* Orwellian, there is no escape from it, but *who's* responsible!"
Us for letting the politicians go unchecked.