The Musings of Harry

In respect of the massive fingerprint fishing expedition covered in yesterday’s post, Joan Ryan, the Home Office minister responsible for identity cards, had this to say:

There won’t be any fishing expeditions. That is complete nonsense. That is not what can happen. We’ve always said one of the real advantages of identity cards would be the fight against crime and protecting the public.

If police want to check fingerprints found at the scene of the crime that they can’t find on their own databases then they will work with IPS staff.

And surely no-one would suggest that we should put obstacles in the way of police investigating crime and bringing offenders to justice?

Emphasis mine. Why, Ms Ryan, how charmingly naive. Surely you’re not that stupid? On second thoughts, maybe you are. You do, after all, contradict yourself within the first two paragraphs of your own statement. Running all of the fingerprints that they can’t find on their database through a different database is the very definition of a fishing expedition. We know that’s what you’re going to do because the leader of your own party said so:

“They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register.”

Are you contradicting him as well as yourself? Perhaps you should have a meeting and get your spin straight before you tell tall tales to the BBC.

What Ms Ryan calls “putting obstacles in the way of the police”, Harry calls “checks & balances” and “accountability” and “not letting the police ride roughshod over the rights of the law abiding majority”.

Perhaps Ms Ryan should ask her predecessor, Andy Burnham, for a little advice. His bullshit was much more believable.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 10:00 and is filed under Identity Cards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.