Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Monday 4/2/2002

Croydon is a joyless place: where better to do another experiment into Big Brotherhood among the dispossessed. Asylum seekers there have been issued with a biometric card containing the bearer's fingerprints, the better to tell who they are on demand. Next step RFID, with wireless tagging of the unhappy supplicants, I guess: don't forget that the way the state treats its immigrants is the way it'd like to treat us all, if it thought it could get away with it.

Not that anyone seems to mind. Surveys show that nobody really cares about ID cards, and the Government would have far fewer problems introducing those than it would the euro. As a correspondent on Cix says -- we're all going to hell in a handcart over this, and as soon as we just admit it to ourselves we can just settle back and enjoy the ride.

Defeatist!