Swearing on the BBC.

In every pub every night one can hear people of all ages engaging in what can only be termed mundane chatter. interspersed in this chatter is a smattering of swearwords. The vast majority of people accept this fact with nery a look away (or perhaps nery turning a deaf ear). And so it is with that image ingrained in your head we come to Aunty Beeb and her seeming obsession with good old Anglo Saxon words outputted by our T.V. screen.

Laudable as some may find the BBC's actions other, such as myself, will find what the BBC are doing on this subject mind numbing. Every day on every street up and down the country we adults, and our children, can hear someone somewhere uttering a swearword so why is the BBC pandering to the hear-no-evil-do-no-evil crowd in this manner? Have these self styled anti-profanity, live in a bubble types, not got the ability to turn over the channels on their T.V.'s nor an off switch? Why do they constantly have to alienate the masses and pander to the few?

In years long gone we had Mary Whitehouse doing exactly the same. Her aim was simply to ban all sex, physical and words, all swearing from our T.V. and cinema viewing pleasure never giving a thought to those who are never offended at hearing such words. She eventually became something of a laughing stock and the butt of many jokes but for all that she did untold damage which I suppose was her ultimate aim. Now we have the BBC running along those same lines. It makes a mockery of the license fee.

As someone who has enough moral fibre to simply switch channels if I find something on view to be offensive I find it totally offensive to have some unnamed person decide what my moral values should be. We already have the 21:00 watershed which almost all providers of programs adhere to. Some say it should be later in the day others say it should be earlier or removed entirely but whatever your views on it are it works as is.

Now and again my wife and i engage in a spot of you-are-wrong-and-I-am-right banter over some trivial thing. We swear during this intercourse and our children hear it. Any parent who thinks their child aged 6 and above knows no swearwords are delusional. Children aged 6 and above use such words not because they think they are cool but because they have heard them somewhere. Perhaps their parents but more likely whilst walking down the streets and so it goes into adulthood where they will surely encounter the same words in the daily working life.

Now we have the BBC acting as a crusader of moral values by lowering how many can and will be heard on their various channels throughout the day. I, personally, would be mortified if I heard ANY swearword being uttered during a children's show but for the love of all free things I am an adult and I have the ability to switch away from whatever it is that I find offensive. As long as they abide by the 21:00 watershed all is good with te world. I do NOT want or need some live-in-a-bubble type deciding these things for me.

Wild conclusions.

Is all that can be said about the comments made in this BBC article. The whys and wherefores of what makes a child later in life turn into a crminal, if indeed there is any link at all, are beyond me but that does not stop me from commenting on such things.

The article contentiously links what happened to Baby P with what might have been once he had reached his teenage years. The claim that he would have become "feral, a parasite, a yob"   smacks of an agency with an agenda.

That agenda, for all their prositations, is not to help children but to demonise them as the press do. By making comments such as the above quote they do nothing at all to help our children. What they di instead is make people, mothers, fathers, grandparents etc, fear the children they are rearing. Is that how we have become?

As a loving father of 5 children aged from 23 to just under 2 years, I abhore any level of violence towards not just children but all my fellow humans. That in itself does not stop me from admonishing my children.  All children need to be taught right from wrong and how a parents does that is up to them.  That said, I do not believe that a child needs violence towards him/her towards that aim. But comments such as those do nothing to help those parents on the edge. If anything they point the spotlight firmly on them.

It is wrong. So very very wrong.

Any parent knows how hard is can be to raise child in the modern age. Every parent has reached that line at one time or another. But a good parent will stop short. This act of not crossing the line from being a loving parent and violence towards the child is not something that is taught but is something inherent in every human being.  Not every child who suffered violence turns to being "feral, a parasite, a yob" of which I was one. My father routinely beat me but now being very conscious of what can happen I stop myself from becoming the monster my father was. I never seeked nor had any help from any organisation. I did it all myself. By myself. My own daeons died and where buried when my father was buried.

And that is how it works. Or should. It is when that normal human trait breaks down the happenings such as Baby P happen. How anyone can claim how he may have turned out is highly subjective and has no foundation in real life and that is what makes articles such as that one from the BBC so scary. The fact that someone as high as the chief executive at the children charity Barnardo's can make such a link is dangerous for all children everywhere in the world. If anyone does take notice of what he has said and turns that into something worse, which is how it will conclude, then parents everywhere should be scared because the finger will always be pointed towards you and will always fall on the wrong side of the line. Be they a doctors, a nurse, a policeman they will always end up veiwing the most casual of injuries that every child can, and most do get, as that child has suffered violence at the hands of the people that, in all probabilty, love that child. It is that slanted view that scares me so much. It will happen. Especially with people in charge such as the guy around which the article was written.

I fully realise that some children will end up doing as their fathers did unto them but some is not all and in the case of Baby P we have no way of knowing how he would have turned out. None.

A defunct ISP.

Is what Karoo is in all but name. Their share prices, due in part to the so called credit crunch and also in part to boardroom incompetence, are getting lower and lower with each passing day. They have a slow and aging network of twisted pair (telephone) cabling through which they are forcing ADSL2+. From the 3500+ people that have contacted me it can be clearly demonstrated that the ADSL2+ experiment is a failure of massive proportions.

Of course, Karoo take heart in the fact that a few say to them that they are happy with their connections but those 3500+ people, who make up a sizable chunk of their customer base and includes home as well as business users, show the level of discontent amongst their customer base.

All of this makes it not impossible that during the coming two years we shall see some other ISP/telephone company come into Hull and for Karoo to fall away as a nasty memory. But would that be a good thing? I say no. Better the devil you know and all that.

My ISP's lack of speed.

This will probably not be the last blog i do about my ISP but even though it is about my ISP is does not sit comfortably in the 'My ISP and ASDL2+ (part X)' series so it has a different subject title.

Recently, it became very clear that our ISP, Karoo, have no intentions of trying to improve sync and connection speeds on their ADSL2+ services. After several months of trying to get them to do various things that would provide for better sync and connection speeds the following excerpt from an email from Steve 'The Head of Infrastructure' nationwide.

"At present this is all we can offer but we are still looking at other options available to us and that includes working with Alcatel, as we have been since we implemented ADSL2+."

Which, knowing him as I do, is as good as saying "We fucked up over ADSL2+ and we know it, but at this time we can do nothing about the problems.".

There is no shame in admitting defeat but that is simply beyond Steve so, as always, he wraps it up in words. He became very good at  question dodging. He rarely gave up information that would allow us to peek beyond the words spoken. His biggest problem when talking with customer representatives, as we are/were was that he could never get his head out of the boardroom. Time and time again he sat firmly on the side of his paymasters promising so and so would be done but nothing ever got started. He was to all intents and purposes Karoo's lying machine and on occasion he played that role so well we didn't see it. Most of the time though we did see through it and when we did we tried to get behind the veil. In the end He Who Must Not Be Mentioned had had enough and left the  fold. Then that email, from which I took the excerpt, came in  and Steve left the fold. This left me with nowhere to go and nothing to do so it made sense for me to cut the baggage free and so I did.  After several months of promises we have absolutely nothing to show for our endeavours.
 
As I have commented in various blog posts here at AnnoyedFolk there are several ways they can, at the very least, galvanise public support here in Hull but, as was not unexpected, they have chosen, with no explanation whatsoever, to ignore those options. It has to be said that if those options where given up as a solution then only a very small minority of customers would be able to use them. Karoo call this minority "Power Users". But those Power Users could help those not within that group to utilises those options so everyone  could, in theory at least, benefit from the options. But it would appear, allowing those options is beyond Karoo technicians (which is amazing really as other ISP's within the U.K. do it with great benefits to their customers) and because of that little technicality  ADSL2+ will never improve here.

Overall we do enjoy slightly better sync and connection rates than, say, BT but the demographic is much different. So different in fact that one cannot make suitable comparisons even given exact same line lengths and  exact same DSLAMS in use etc etc. Here, because Karoo's service offerings serve only Hull and surrounding areas they have a much tighter service area. Because of that they should be able to consistantly provide for higher sync and connection rates. Some areas of the City have copper cabling older than 40 years which does not help matters.

But enough on the technicalities and back to the   throwing in of the towel. My own personal thoughts as to why Steve has done this is that his paymasters told him to do it. It is widely known that the MD and I do not get on so my thoughts on this matter turn to that and I believe the word was sent down to rid ourselves of this problem and Steve being the opitomy of a company man  duly agreed.

Another reason could have been that Steve  could not provide the answers we were so desperately seeking therefore he felt it was time to let things go and leave it in a state of limbo. Yet another reason could have been that I have too much knowledge for them and because of that I scare them which led to the     dropping of the ball.

Whatever the reason for his sudden capitulation this is not the end. Far from it. I have other, powerful avenues that I can take our grumbles to and it is those avenues I have spent the last few days since Steve's 'I quit' email exploring them. Right now I have more faith in the E.U.'s ability to  affect change here than I do via change from within.

At the end of the day Karoo, being a subset of KCom, is a company with shareholders and anything that needs to have money spent on it to fix whatever is broke (and there is a LOT broken) would need to get passed their money grubbing shareholders before those filter feeders at the bottom get a chance to  affect that change. In these dodgy share times I cannot see that happening. We need high speed Internet as much as anyone else in the country.

It will never happen while the current trend within the KCom company is one of damage mitigation and skimp and save at all costs in all areas.

KCom are doomed and those  from the boardroom know it. It is only a matter of time.

Rugby League World Cup.

The 2008 Rugby League World Cup is now at an end. The winners, New Zealand, showed that the dominant Australians can be beat and what a show they put on whilst doing just that. In the final no doubt the Australian press will point to the awarded penalty try, to New Zealand, in the second half as being the moment New Zealand finally believed they could win, but it has to be said that on the day the New Zealand players played the game plan that did not allow the Australians to play their usual expansive type of play. Ultimately, this was what won New Zealand the final. In the second half New Zealand dominated the game. They thoroughly deserved their victory. It was not that Australia played poorly but that the New Zealanders did not allow them to get into the game in a way they did in all their other games. As a spectical the 2008 Rugby League World Cup final was brilliant. On the day New Zealand were simply the better team.

The woefully inept England team, try as they did, were simply terrible in all the games they played. It can only be hoped that some searching questions, with solutions that benefit our national teams here in the U.K. (which included England, Scotland and Ireland, why no Wales? They have a national team but failed to qualify) can be made and are addressed and they do it in quick time in time for the next Rugby League World cup. Can the Super League teams forgo selfishness to aid not only local, as in U.K., leagues but also, and much more important, our national teams? Only time will tell.

As a follower and former player of the greatest game on Earth the Rugby League World Cup was a resounding success for all the teams involved. Even those teams from the so-called lesser groups showed they had the required skills and a burning desire to win. Some of those less powerful groups yielded some fantastic matches.

Much was said about the group layout but ultimately this did what it was designed to do and allowed lesser teams to compete on an equal footing. From that perspective they, the people in charge of putting the whole spectical together, got it right. Overall, the World Cup was a resounding, as well as a finacial, success.

For those of you who do not know what Rugby League is I will point you to this (the link points to a flash based 'Best tries' of the World Cup). While that in and of itself does not show a full game nor show the mariad of rules that govern each game it  does show some of the excellence my favourite game has. Much more information about Rugby League can be seen at the BBC web site dedicated to it here.

If the word is spread and other countries develop a national team in the years to come perhaps finally the game of Rugby League can grow into a truly international sport. I know the game is worthy as there is no other team sport that provides the level of excitement a game of Rugby League provides. Even at the amateur level.  Can Rugby League grow in countries where it currently has no presence? Yes, but it will take time and money to make it happen and year after year od grassroots development with some gritty determination to make it a success but as teams such as Samoa and Fiji prove it can be done. In Papua New Guinea the game of Rugby League is their national sport. The only  country where that holds true in fact.

If you like what you find, read and see when you type Rugby League into Google perhaps that will spur you into action in getting together like minded people who then go on to establish a Rugby League presence in your area no matter where you may be in the world. For me there is no other game played anywhere in the World that comes close to Rugby League for both players and spectators. The guys who play at the very pinnacle, The Rugby League World Cup, of the sport are supreme    athletes that have their bodies pounded week in and week out during their domestic seasons but even those who play at an amateur level do the same. They believe, perhaps you can too.

There is no better game.

Well done New Zealand.

More bilge on obesity.

Mostly Government led but also medically led. It is very hard to take all this guff about obesity when they rely on a flawed metric like the BMI to determine what classification is given to each person. The BMI takes no account of muscle tone and that alone is vital in determining if someone is really in any way whatsoever overweight.

I read this BBC article with my now usual distrust of anything related to weight that has some governmental quangos attached to it. In this instance it is the Department of Health. How they can simplify how and what people eat, espcially where children are concerned, is something only government can do. Apart from the stigma attached to anyone they claim of being obese there is the not so small problem of how as a country we differ in what we eat as much as we differ in dialects used.

As an example, I hail from Hull on the East coast of England. My wife hails from Nottingham, roughly, central england. Her father is from Scotland and is married to a woman who hails from Devon. We are quite a scattered lot and if we take from each area what is classed as that areas main dish we find substantial differences in what each dish gives by way of nutrients, energy, fat etc etc.

Devonshire, like a lot of the surrounding shires, people tend to have a much sweeter tooth than anywhere else in the U.K. This is reflected somewhat by the people who on average have a larger girth, especially the women.

Nottingham and surrounding areas has a much higher intake of none English people than other areas of comparable size and this is reflected in what they eat. This in turn means that they have a good mix right across the definitions of weight versus height (but not the flawed BMI scale).

Hull, while this is changing due to the fish trade being killed off by goverment of the time meddling, we used to be a city of fish eating people. Now, like everywhere else, we have seen the rise of fast-food places, frozen foods etc and with it a rise is body fat levels. So, you will see the core of the 40+ age group in a different light to those under it.

Everywhere in this country though has seen a drop in children who play, and/or are allowed to play, running about street games that us fast approaching 50 year old and older took for granted when we were kids. Added to this was the 1980's abandonement of P.E. (Physical Education sometimes known as Physical Training (P.T.)) and games (which included football, rugby, athletics etc) which led to a whole generation of adults that did none of those. Those traits where in all probabilty passed onto their children. This added together with a poor diet means we are now seeing the rise in unhealthy kids.

But back to the point. That article demonstrates perfectly everything that is wrong with such labling and catagorisation. It is impossible to do in anything approaching a satisfactory  way. There are simply too many variables at play.

It seems to me that just like the flawed BMI scales the whole thing is based around that what they want to do is to force every one to eat according to their slots in their database. It would after all make life easy for them in their fight for removal of perceived fat in peoples, especially childrens, bodies. Like everything else on a personal level the government of the day gets involved in it will all end in abject failure.

We, as a nation of people, are not on the whole naturally, nor gentically, slim people. The  further south one goes the more heavy  the people are. The further north one goes the less one sees  heavy girthed folk. So it has always been and so it will always be.
 

Stupid, inane and utterly purile.

Is how I see articles such as this from the BBC. No-one can argue with the fact that the Microsoft family of operating systems dominate the desktop but do we really need the near on worshiping proffered in that article? The BBC, in that article, has clearly moved from a review to advertisment in clear breech of their own ethics standards. I make no bones about the fact that I pimp a Linux based operating system at any and all times to anyone willing to listen so when I read that link the red light in my head came on. It is so wrong on so many levels is ceases to be funny how the BBC continually cow-tow to Microsoft at every opertunity as well as spending unknown millions of the U.K. peoples monies ponied up via the license fee on Microsoft operating systems when instead they could save millions by using an alternative like a Linux or UNIX based operating system.

When reading any article on the BBC that has any level of technological bent one can be assured of a giggle or two as the wrter clearly has no real clue about that which he/she is writing about. Many, almost classical, gems have come via the keyboard of the BBC's computer technology writers. The gems may go down well with your average Joe and Jane but for us who are more technologically gifted (having been around computers since 1974 and having had my own at home since 1980 I have picked up a few things like the correct terminology to use. This level of competence utterly fails as far as the vast majority of BBC technology writers go). Without fail, time and time again the authors show their complete lack of technological expertise. How these people get jobs on such a high profile web based news outlet only those who employ them really know. For such as myself I cannot figure it out.

In that article above there is no mention of how Microsoft the company is a tried and convicted criminal. Nor how Microsoft effectively stole their first release of MSDOS all those years ago. Nor how they reneged on deal after deal in their quest for desktop domination. Nor how release after release of each and every one of their operating systems has contained bits and pieces that where assimilated, reworked, then spat out to become part of the Microsoft operating system of the time. Nor how they made deals with hardware manufactures to ensure that Microsoft Windows  demanded ever better  computers on which it ran. Thereby giving both the hardware manufacturers and Microsoft much revenue in clear breech of anti-competitive laws around the world. Microsoft has been proven to have  done much harm during their tenure as the premier operating system creator. Microsoft have  done much wrong and broken many laws around the world over the last 15 or so years and in many parts of the world are now paying the price for those wrongdoings. In some parts of the world Microsoft is losing its formerly powerful grip on the desktop as Goverment after Goverment the world over tells their people to use alternatives such as a Linux based operating system and within the walls of power in those countries there too they are using a Linux based operating system.

None of that was mentioned in that article though. Oh no. Not a word of it as the BBC once again laid its belly bare for all to see as Microsoft tickled its soft underside.

Being as I am a staunch advocate of free standards and the Linux based operating system I see Microsoft as the daemon company that it is. Is it really too much to ask that the BBC editors do the same or at the very least tell it like it is. All the information about Microsoft practases is out there on the Internet so once again the BBC has no excuses. In this, and many other instances, the BBC has shown who is the tail and who is the dog.

Football (soccer to U.S.A. folk) and footballers.

It cannot have escaped your attention, here in the U.K. at least, that SportUK who do drug testing of sports people here in the U.K. has turned its attention to football players. Amid much hyperbole there are some issues in getting this turned from mere talk to reality. This blog post though has little to nothing to do with that. Instead I will recount what happened during my formative years.

When I was a football playing lad back in the late 60's and early 70's it wasn't unusual to find oneself playing alongside or against the Hull City players of that time in the local park (Princes Avenue for us). They almost always turned up unannounced with a Watneys 8 pint beer tin. One or two per player. Of course not all the Hull City players of that time turned up but of those that did they were the stars of the team. Also, we used to get Hull FC and Hull Kingston Rovers players from the world of Rugby League. At that age, we were aged between 9 years old and 13 back then, we where much in awe of our fellow players. Why they chose our park we had, nor have even now, any idea but for whatever reason they did.

Sunday afternoons at the local park where always an exciting place to be for us as we never knew who or how many of our sporting heroes would turn up. More often than not they never turned up at all. Sometimes it was just the Rugby League players who did. Other times in was just the Hull City players. Now and again they all turned up on the same day and at roughly the same time. Maybe they all preplanned this but we will never know. Certainly, at that time, we did not care. They always headed straight for our lot which could have been down to our playing skills but was more likely because, outwardly anyway, we were not in awe of them and treated them as just another bunch of grown men that wanted to play football with a bunch of kids on a Sunday afternoon. Can you imagine todays elite 'stars' doing something like this? Turning up with no security guards present at a local park to play a few hours of football with some kids? I can't. Those days are long gone.

What always stood out though was that they were always invariably drunk either before they turned up and always after a few hours of playing football.

None of this is related to the drug testing being touted of course but as beer, these days more so than 10 or 20 years ago, has chemicals added that could be classed as drugs. I am not one who would claim beer drinking leads to a lifetime addiction as some claim. In fact I refute such claims totally. Coming from a family background that had many heavy part-time drinkers within it and once being a part of that myself None of us where  addicted. My father and Grandfather were both seafarers and only drunk beer when on land which would mean 3 to 4 weeks  abstinence, for my Grandfather who was a  fisherman, and anything from 6 months to 18 months abstinence for my Father who was a long haul seaman. Once on land though they would both drink themselves silly. Myself never went to sea, much to both their disappointment, however, drink I did. A lot. Not now though as I rarely touch any alcohol due to the medication i am forced to take. I say rarely because i do, now and again, have a pint but that event is so rare as to be easily discounted and well within the intake limits recommended by Government. But, I digress...

Back to those Sunday afternoon football sessions. These are highly unlikely to happen these days as both football and Rugby League players are much removed from such things now as can possibly happen. Back then both Hull FC and Hull K.R. were, as they are now, high flying teams. Hull City where in the old (ancient?) third division North and during the 70's in the old second division and the players of all three were just as happy amongst a group of school children as they were on the pitch. It would never happen today. Maybe in the lower leagues but certainly never from players in the Premier League and extremely unlikely from any in the Championship nor the super fit athletes that make up the Super League (Rugby League).

It does, however, give me something to recount to any Grandkids my offspring may provide. My life has been full of such things happening and it does seem a different world to the one we are living through now. In all probability it is a different world. It certainly shows how some things have moved on. Not always for the better though.

Kcom and Karoo.

Kcom the incumbent telephone company here in Hull and its ISP spin off Karoo are technologically so far behind the other ISP's that proliferate around the U.K. they are fast becoming a bigger joke than they were last year.

They use relatively new DSLAMS but their back end servers often fail and twisted pair cable runs are mostly 20 or more years old. If you are stupid enough to use their proxy servers you are guaranteed to run into problems more times than not. Their back end servers that sift through what you do on-line so the data can be sold to third parties often fail. In the last year or so we have suffered outages of between 24 and 14 hours on 3 separate occasions. They have no backup servers. No redundancy whatsoever. They are a cost cutting operation. They have not invested much in new stuff for years. As for cable runs well, the best that can be said about them is they work. Slowly, but work. Just.

Look at the state of ADSL2+ in this city. Ignore what KCom and/or Karoo say about it as they often lie about statistics and it is a well known fact that those who say they are happy with the service are those who are technologically lacking in skills. There are thousands of people suffering from poor connection rates. Piss poor throughput rates and it can all be put down to 1 or 2 things. 1) Lack of exchanges. 2) Long, poorly routed, twisted pair cabling. Cable runs  that where laid early last century and new runs bolted on as the city grew in size. Back then of course there was no Internet so they laid cable willy nilly which results in this Internet age with piss poor sync rates and throughput speeds.

Almost every area of this city suffers from old copper cabling. Almost every area of this city suffers from long lines (from house to exchange). Some areas suffer what they call 'dead' exchanges which are then routed out to real exchange which can be several miles away from the 'dead' exchange. It is a mess. Worse still is the fact they are doing nothing whatsoever about it.

It is quite simply take it or leave it. As there are no other ISP's in this city it is impossibly difficult to go eslewhere.  Those who do not understand the telephony situation in this city often say "Go to another ISP"  which is impossible to do here.

If another ISP came here and did not use the Kcom network of piss poor cabling nor use their exchanges but did in fact set up their own autonamous network then people and businesses would jump ship in a heartbeat. But they will not come here and neither will they invest in a new network simply because of some believed loyalty to Kcom and Karoo which frankly does not exist amogst the rank and file of this city.

The people and businesses of this city are crying out for a real high speed connection. If there is someone out there with money to burn and they set up a high speed fibre network and charged reasonable rates for the connection they are guaranteed to succeed in taking  thousands, 10's of thousands, 100's of thousands of customers.

Kcom and Karoo can't see this simple fact. If they can see it they are doing nothing whatsover about it. Last I heard they where  doing a feasibility study  about fibre but the fact of the matter is if it will cost then money they  will not do it. They are a shadow of the company that once served Hull only. In those long since gone days they where a company to proud of. Since they expanded into a, don't laugh, world wide company they have forgotten about their long suffering roots. Telephony in this city is so poor now they are the biggest joke this city can offer.

Someone, any one, set up a fibre network. Use the cities extensive sewer system to route the fibre to homes and businesses. Use a route out to the wider Internet somewhere outside the city. No need at all to touch anything belonging to Kcom. Provide  real high speed services which the current piss poor ADSL2+ cannot provide, Offer Internet, telephone and TV via cable and the people would jump. It it so easy to envisage but finding someone to do it is the hard part. Which is a shame because I guarantee the people of this once magnificent city would jump ship tomorrow if the fibre network suddenly appeared.

The fact is that the long suffering people and businesses of this city are ready and primed to move elsewhere.

Really?

According to this BBC article Jacqui Smith who has never ever been in sync with what the English rank and file people want has declared that the  people  "can't wait for ID cards". While her comment is not the first bullshit to come via government sources at any level it sure ranks right up there as the biggest lie to be uttered.

I don't know every member of the English population obviously but of those I do know and/or have contact with there is not one amongst them that want an ID card. These people come from every walk of life. From the lowest to the highest and yet here we have the home secretary telling the masses that people "can't wait  for ID cards" like she  even knows what the public wants. She is, and always has been, so out of touch with the general feeling amongst the general public is it unreal.

From her lofty promiment position of home secretary you would think she actually knew what the public wanted but no. Not ever has she shown that to be true. This latest lie, in a long line of lies, comes across as if she knows. She is undoubtably the most unpopular home secretary this country has ever known and comments like this will only serve to reenforce that unpopularity.

Say no to ID cards but remember the governemt, especially the current one, knows more about what you want than you do as is seen by the home secretarys comments.

This current government, more than any other previous government, has dome more to remove your control over your own life. That comment only serves to re-enforce that. There is not one iota of evidence to back up her claim and yet she will force it on to a public that simply does not want it. This government has done that at every level so it should not be a surprise to anyone.