But oddly enough, it is exactly what I expected of them.
Children of 11 to be fingerprinted
Children aged 11 to 16 are to have their fingerprints taken and stored on a secret database, internal Whitehall documents reveal.
The leaked Home Office plans show that the mass fingerprinting will start in 2010, with a batch of 295,000 youngsters who apply for passports.
The Home Office expects 545,000 children aged 11 and over to have their prints taken in 2011, with the figure settling at an annual 495,000 from 2014. Their fingerprints will be held on a database also used by the Immigration and Nationality Directorate to store the fingerprints of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers.
Just why do they need to hold biometric identifiers on 5th graders? Is crime getting that nbad over thar?
Or is it something more nannystatish?
While crime is pretty bad over thar, I think we can safely suspect Answer #2.
Found at Samizdata
Btw, it’s official now!
Gun crime in the UK has doubled since the laws keeping firearms out of the hands of law abiding citizens were passed.
From the Telegraph UK
Gun laws that constrain the law-abiding
For James Andre Smartt-Ford, 16, Michael Dosunmu, 15, and Billy Cox, 15, the hand-wringing by police and politicians over the escalation of gun crime comes a little late: all three have been shot dead in south London over the past 10 days.
Public revulsion over such criminality is, shamingly, blunted by the fact that they appear to be victims of ethnic gang crime. Society at large sees it as “their” problem, not its own. Such a view is criminally complacent.
We have, post-Dunblane, what are said to be the toughest gun control laws in the world. They have actually proved strikingly ineffectual.
Gun crime has doubled since they were introduced. Young hoodlums are able to acquire handguns – either replica weapons that have been converted, or imports from eastern Europe – with ease. With no dedicated frontier police, our borders remain hopelessly porous. The only people currently incommoded by the firearms laws are legitimate holders of shotgun licences, who are subjected to the most onerous police checks.
Well now, the law abiding are much easier to find and much less of a threat to police, now aren’t they?
It sucks to be a guniea pig for leftist policy.
Meanwhile in the UK, while the police are wasting their time checking up on law abiding firearms owners and record numbers of people are being murdered with supposedly banned weapons, the Crown Police are looking to fole charges against a handful of students at Cambridge University for…
Wait for it….
Printing one of the Mohammad cartoons.
The controversy over the publication of one of the now infamous Jyllands Posten Mohammed cartoons in a Cambridge University student publication has taken on a new seriousness, after two students were questioned under caution by Cambridgeshire police.
It truly is Bizarro World over thar, isn’t it.
Found at LGF
I must have slept through England’s “tipping point”, but they are now clearly on a rapid downhill slide to totalitarianism.
Their Civil War is much farther back in time than ours, but with the innate Brit sense of history, I’ll bet that they still remember how to put a tyrant’s head on a pike.
Too bad that the only other nation of any size to speak our language is about to dissolve, but if they do, I hope it’s soon, because the sights and sounds of that strife might just be enough of an example to us to stop OUR slide into totalitarianism.