Another lousy excuse for having ID cards

From The Metro:

Residents in Manchester will become the first people in Britain to be able to apply for ID cards. They can now directly apply to attend appointments from November 30 to have their photograph and fingerprints taken for the £30 cards at Manchester's passport office.

Junior Home Office Minister Meg Hillier said the cards would be particularly useful for students and young people as they would "save the cost and hassle" of getting into clubs and bars. "Really for a lot of people it's a day-to-day convenience thing. For a lot of young people ... they often take their passports to prove their identity in nightclubs and bars and the Passport Service sweeps these up every week. So for a lot of people it'll save the cost and hassle of taking your passport, risking losing it and instead you've got this very convenient little credit-sized card. I've got one and it's very useful."

They are really scraping the barrel now. If they wanted more people to go to clubs and bars, they could just scrap the smoking ban. We've had pubs for centuries and it's never been a problem to get in.

Then it gets absolutely laughable:

The ID cards are very hard to copy and are very secure, with biometric information stored on a database, she added. "This is not a database that can be downloaded onto disks," she said. "It's going to be held in different places so there'll be fingerprints and your picture on one database and your biographical information (on another), which is I must stress just the same as what's held by the Passport Service anyway ... and they will be linked together by another database."

The database would only be used for "serious crime issues" or identity concerns at a border...