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Applying for your first UK Passport a Warning.


Bugsy
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If you are 16 or over and haven't yet got a ten-year adult passport, then you should apply for one BEFORE THE BEGINNING OF APRIL 2007. And if you have a friend or family member in this position then let them know, quick!

This is why:

On March 26th this year, the Identity and Passport Service (did you even know they'd changed the name?) opens some new offices as part of the build up to the ID card scheme that the government wants to introduce. By the end of the year there will be 69 of these interrogation centres, and people applying for their first adult passport from April 2007 will the guinea-pigs for a process the government is calling "Authentication by Interview".

There's NOTHING in it for you - though the government is currently spending lots of taxpayers money trying to tell young people there is.

All the information collected will be kept on file for ever. It will certainly end up more expensive than the £66 passports currently cost, too, since you'll have to pay for officials to gather a dossier on you and the perform an "intrusive interview" as part of the price - as well as losing a day of your life to visit an interrogation centre.

If you want to know more about how things will work once the system is in place, please scroll down.

If you care about your freedoms, and not having government officials poking around in your private life - or your friends' and family's - then please apply for your first adult passport BEFORE THE BEGINNING OF APRIL 2007, and pass this message on.

You could save yourself or someone close to you a lot of trouble. How ID interrogations will work:

When you apply for a passport you will be asked to give lots of information about yourself: official numbers, addresses for the last few years, your educational institutions, that sort of thing. And you'll sign to declare that it's the truth.

That information will be used to look up everything that can be found out about you on all the government and private sector databases they can lay their hands on: school records, social services, police, credit checking, perhaps family details... to build a single dossier on you containing personal information. "Data-rape", some people call it.

First a few people, then every new applicant, will be called in to their nearest interrogation centre. There you will be fingerprinted and photographed (once they have installed the equipment), and put through an "intrusive interview" - the government's own words - to check that you can give answers about private details of your life that agree with the official ones. If you can, you'll get your passport. If not... it is not clear, but trying to get a passport under 'false pretenses' - if the computer says "no" - could be quite serious. If nothing else, it will mean delay and more intrusion.

In fact, the government has already estimated that 1 in 4 people who apply under this new procedure will have to cancel their trip because they don't get their passport in time.

The government's plan is that all passports will be issued like this eventually. But you can take simple action now to keep off the database for ten years. And ALL opposition parties have now promised to abolish the ID scheme - so if you escape for 10 years, you may escape for ever.

If you haven't got one already, get yourself a full ten-year passport now. As long as you apply before many interrogation centres are open, and the system is fully operational, your chances of avoiding data-rape are good. And by doing so you help to stop the same thing happening to everyone else by telling Tony Blair and his bullying government to "Take a hike".

For more information on the progress of passport procedures, check out http://www.renewforfreedom.org - the Identity and Passport Service website currently tells you very little.

Get a passport NOW. And tell your friends, if you think their private lives should be their own.

 

 

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Also, if you are renewing an old passport, beware.  I did mine last week.  I was in the UK and had therefore followed the instructions for renewing it in the UK whilst on a visit.  I filled in the forms and made an appointment by 'phone.  The woman who booked it for me made it quite clear that I would need a letter to confirm where I was staying, and the means to verify the address.  I got the friend with whom I was staying to sign said letter and took along one of his electricity bills as proof that it was genuine.  I got a teacher friend to sign the pictures and verify my identity.  On arrival at the Ecclestone Bridge Passport Office at Victoria, I was then told - sorry, this is the wrong form - you need this one.  "But I have no UK address, only a temporary one."  "Use that, doesn't matter."  "But what about the counter-signature?"  "Doesn't matter, you look the same."

So I duly filled in the new form and by the end of the day my passport was ready.  However, if I had changed in appearance, I would not have been able to get my passport and would have to re-start the entire procedure with the new form.  If anybody else who lives in France is going to use this method to renew or apply for a new fast-track passport to get in before April as Gary suggests, make sure you check and double check as to the forms you will need, or you could come unstuck.

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[quote user="Bugbear"]

...........In fact, the government has already estimated that 1 in 4 people who apply under this new procedure will have to cancel their trip because they don't get their passport in time.

[/quote]

My guess is the interviews will be cancelled in favour of randon sampling as used by many researchers.  Reasons being,

  1. The govt will need to get this in swiftly as it is universally disliked and disapproved of.  Any delays or problems further compound selling it to the public.
  2. Travel industry will collapse into meltdown as people stop booking holidays while they await outcome of the interviews
  3. 70m population (and growing) divided into 10 years (passport duration) = 7m people per year to interview.  7m/52 weeks =    134,615 people per week to interview. Based on a five day week = 26,923 persons per day. Divided between the 500 people they will employ to do it = 53.84 interviews per interviewer per day!!
  4. The cost will be astronomical, and will continue to rise year on year. Once the Govt are committed contractually, the supplier (led by ex-government advisor or cabinet minister) will increase costs as a matter of course
  5. The policy is flawed (but so was Iraq, so i retract this one)
  6. There are no mechanisms in place to correct official error
  7. There are no benefits to the scheme. New York, Madrid and a host of other plaxces have ID schemes and still got bombed.
  8. This government still thinks that a gigabyte is hotdog wagon at Glastonbury

There are plenty more resons i am sure we can come up with.......

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What was the source of the original information? It reads more like an anti-government and anti-ID card rant than a reasoned argument against providing additional information when getting a passport.

Who is going to be manning the 'interrogation centres'? I haven't seen many openings for aspirant Gestapo officers in the situations vacant pages [:P]

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It's cut and pasted from a blogger.

Called 'England Expects'

http://englandexpects.blogspot.com/

A further little taste - spelling and punctuation mistakes included:

"What is the right name for a Government like ours?

After a brief contemplation of the opitions I think I will plump with Tyranny

Why,

well first the proposed soking ban will apply to all public areas -

including private one's like pubs that allow the public in, except one,

Royal Palaces."

Most of the site is so semi-literate it's actually hard to see what point is being made.

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[quote user="Will"]Thank you Dick - I didn't realise you were so subversive as to be familiar with that sort of web site..[/quote]

Deformation professionelle - first thing I do when receiving a document is to Google part of it to see who really wrote it. And it often isn't the person who handed it in as homework...

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I am not getting at you Gary, I promise - I have no reason on earth to think that this applies to you - I am sure it does not.  However, it is often those who complain about "immigrants" who seem to have so much trouble with such extra controls over who enters a country and who doesn't.  If it's likely to affect "them" they jump up and down in anger, if it only affects others, they don't give a stuff.

Elsewhere on this forum, there is a lively debate going on about the re-introduction of some sort of control over the incomes and financial status of those wishing to be domiciled in France, and their ability or otherwise to benefit from the French welfare system.  Somewhere along the line, people who wish to come here from the UK and elsewhere, may once again be means tested to establish whether or not they can be allowed to emigrate to France.  No doubt in this case, some investigation will be made into the state of their finances so that they don't just move here to claim benefits from an overstressed system when they have large amounts of capital tied up in property etc but apparently low incomes.  Is this wrong too?

It seems to me that all these things are linked.  There is much public hostility to those who are seen as "spongers" - no doubt in every developed country throughout the world.  How do governments respond to this criticism without putting some controls in place, and asking a few pertinent questions about the financial situation/refugee status etc of those they welcome into their countries?  It's not a puzzle I would want to have to solve, which is why I would not want - under any circumstances - to be a politician.  Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

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Is it a bad thing to get to grips with all the holders of forged passports and altered stolen ones ..Lots seem to be found in raids on people trafficers  and obviously carried by many who have newly arrived in the UK   ..Add to them those that arrived in and under a lorry and  lets face it.... Immigration  lost track of who is in the UK ages ago .and over time with the new system they just might get  an idea of ..some ...of the unaccounted for ...Even if they dare not now show themselves they may later on ... their kids one day will want a passport and it could be an interesting conversation  as mum and dad have to explain to them why the dodgy one wont work anymore and they cant apply for one.

 I am all in favour of fingerprints on all countries  passports .....they should have been a requirement 30 or 40 years ago...and  all scanned into the system in Immigration .. things might just be a bit different population and crime wise right now if people knew they  would be held on record  after arrival .......... If you have nothing to hide ....you have nothing to be worried about !  

 I read recently that  Supermarkets  had a more accurate  way of measuring  the UK population than the Governement.....I suppose by the number of store cards they have issued and knowing how big the family shop is ...they put the UK population at near  82 million . way above to 60 odd the Goverment calculated ....if I had to believe which computer system gave the most accurate results the UK  Governements or  the Supermarkets ..going by how crowded the trains are these days ....it would have to be the Supermarkets .

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I can't actually say, in this pc world we live in, exactly what I want to say when it comes to some of the recent posts. I really do question the need for a 'blanket' introduction of controls and intrusion on our everyday lives.

Perhaps my feelings can best be expressed by a situation at Poitiers Airport the last time my father visited us before he died last year. This eighty-seven year old englishman, a wheelchair bound war veteran was made to remove his belt, jacket and shoes whilst passing through security before he was allowed onto the plane.

That is the stupidity of blanket actions taken by those in power that simply haven't the b***s to target the specific groups that currently threaten our way of life.

 

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Here here Bugbear,

This is not intended as a racist comment (though some will undoubedly take it that way) but just how likely is it that a white, anglo saxon couple, toting a brace of nursery age offspring are going to be hijackers or suicide bombers?

As rightly you say, "they" dont have the b***s.

 

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On the other side of the coin, I once had a colleague who was half Maltese (10 years or more before 9/11).  We went on a few trips abroad with him.  Every time we came through customs and imigration, we sailed through and he arrived about an hour later, having been strip searched and questioned and goodness knows what else.  I don't suppose that we WASPs (for want of a better collective noun) will ever understand or appreciate what that can be like.
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[quote user="ErnieY"]

Here here Bugbear,

This is not intended as a racist comment (though some will undoubedly take it that way) but just how likely is it that a white, anglo saxon couple, toting a brace of nursery age offspring are going to be hijackers or suicide bombers?

As rightly you say, "they" dont have the b***s.

 

[/quote]

Yes. Well let's just think for a moment - how do they check that the couple is Anglo-Saxon? (Whatever that actually means other than white - and some Moslems are white, you know).

I know - they could meet them and ask them a few questions!  Sorted!

This is all so naive.

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[quote user="cooperlola"] I don't suppose that we WASPs (for want of a better collective noun) will ever understand or appreciate what that can be like.[/quote]

You suppose wrong, cooperlola! [:D]     I have been taken for a terrorist while travelling to/in a number of countries, the most memorable being Ireland and Israel.   The long and short of it is (and always has been), if you want an easy life you go for beige.  [;-)]      

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Every one of us is racist to one extent or another and that goes for all races on the planet. It was built into our genetics many millions of years ago and has evolved over many millennia as a means of protecting our own particular group. How else were we to recognise the enemy in the camp except by obvious signs of difference. It is not a very pretty characteristic of human behaviour to be racist

but it is none the less a very real characteristic of all races.

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