Vox Polis

A YouGov poll commissioned by The Telegraph has revealed that a significant proportion of the population would refuse to accept an ID card even when faced with a fine or prison term. The government have claimed in the past that there was widespread support for the scheme (although it’s not hard to imagine a survey that would generate a favourable result: Q - “Would you accept an ID card if it would stop terrorism and prevent identity fraud”; A - “Yes”. That both those claims are widely discredited won’t cause an unscrupulous and well funded statistician to lose much sleep).

39% of respondents to the YouGov poll said that they were opposed to ID cards, of those opposed 21% would be prepared to face a fine. Given the UKs current population of approximately 60 million that means that the government could be forced to take action against 4.8 million people. Of course it’s very easy to be bullish when filling out a questionnaire so the reality will no doubt be a rather smaller revolt but even a million people refusing to take a card could be enough to turn this into Labour’s Poll Tax. No politician wants to be associated with a policy that leads to rioting but so far Mr Brown seems to be as keen on ID cards as his soon to be predecessor.

Chirac has been trying to develop a French CNN to combat the Anglo-Saxon dominance of news coverage for the last 25 years. That dream is now a reality, albeit with a tiny budget. And to combat this Anglo-Saxon dominance its also broadcast in English.

According to the snazzy promotional video France24 “Questions, Confronts, Testifies and Analyzes”. All sounds exciting to me.

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Blair has given into criticism and decided to reduce the Trident warheads by 20%. Now we can only destroy the world 5 times over.

According to the new white paper, the replacement for Trident is only going to cost £25bn - the Government’s going to save us £2bn by only having 3 subs instead of 4.

Great. We can all sleep sound at night knowing that we have a deterrent against all those Communist states. Urmm I mean terrorists France rogue states.

Only 212 days to go until our pubs become empty and our streets are littered with fag butts.

In Scotland the bars may now be smoke free, but they’re also usually free of people as everyone loiters outside. In fact you almost need to smoke to talk to your friends.