Angela Epstein provides some light relief
Article published: Thursday, June 3rd 2010
In among all the clenched buttocks and fears over the looming cuts there has emerged a beautiful silver lining to this new government. Scrapping the ID cards and national database – or at least some of it – may be a pretty cynical bit of political manoeuvring by the Con-Dem coalition, a bit of a “Shit, we better do something popular” moment. You can’t imagine them applying the same principles elsewhere, and not many sane people will be trusting our new masters’ respect for privacy and civil liberties. But it’s great news nonetheless, and the best bit of course, is that it’s pissed off Angela Epstein.
Angela Epstein proudly holding aloft her new ID card back in December
Epstein is one the commentators at the Manchester Evening News, so right wing that she must have Melanie Phillips looking over her shoulder wondering if she needs to dial up the crazy. She’s really a lovely lady. Whether defending Israel’s right to collectively punish and murder Palestinians in Gaza or castigating postal workers as “administrative terrorists” for trying to save their livelihoods, she’s extremely hard to cope with at the best of times.
Six months ago Angela was proudly announcing to the world that she was the first person to get hold a spanking new ID card. In yesterday’s column though, full of anger and indignation, she told us she “never wanted to be a poster girl for the ID project – as much as the cards vociferous opponents would have you believe”. If not, perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to write a widely syndicated comment piece detailing the process and how she gladly accepted the Home Office’s offer “to lead from the front” on the scheme.
Maybe they could have put it in simpler terms, like “be the poster girl”. She must, after all, be almost every Home Secretary’s wet dream with all that bubbling ignorance, anger and hatred, praising the new “weapon in the fight against identity fraud, illegal workers and terrorism”. This despite the fact that Epstein argued there’s nothing to fear from the cards themselves since they “carried little more information about you than your supermarket loyalty card”.
Her next column is rumoured to push for mandatory Tesco club cards in the fight against Al Qaeda. But this seems unlikely – if there’s one thing you could never accuse Angela of, it’s consistency and coherence.
Apparently she nearly didn’t even get it in the first place, on account of nearly burning her own fingerprints off with roast potatoes! She managed it though, and “felt proud and excited when I was finally handed my card. I loved seeing my name, face and the words British citizen on this tiny piece of plastic.”
Angela was proud and excited, but now she’s angry. She paid £30 and probably won’t get it back. She’s prepared to go to court over it since it is otherwise “simply tantamount to theft”. She’s even set up a Facebook group (if anyone finds it, please post the link up) and is threatening the Deputy Prime Minister: “Nick Clegg says scrapping ID cards is giving more power to the people and less control to the state. He doesn’t know the half of it yet.”
Should the people who voluntarily signed up for the trial, in the full knowledge that the scheme itself was on its last legs, get their money back? No Angela, anyone stupid enough to jump aboard this particular nasty bit of New Labour curtain-twitchery doesn’t deserve a refund. In fact, your £30 is sod all considering the scheme cost the rest of us over £250 million.
There’s still plenty more to do in the fight against state intrusions into our private lives and civil liberties – all foreign nationals are still required to have biometric ID cards by 2015 for a start. But at least the “if you’ve got nothing to hide” argument over ID cards seems pretty much dead and buried in the public realm. Everyone’s got something to hide Angela, and finger-melting aside, no one wants to know anything more about Angela Epstein.
Andy Lockhart
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