NO2ID Birmingham sets out its stall

Braving the wind, but thankfully not the rain, nine supporters from the recently formed NO2ID Birmingham group quite literally set out their stall today in Birmingham city centre in a bid to raise public awareness around the identity card scheme and the controversial National Identity Register, the database underpinning it.

The stall, on New Street from 10am till 3pm, attracted lots of interest from city shoppers wanting to know more about ID cards and the personal data required under the scheme, which will cost anything between the government's most recent £4.7 billion estimate [1] and the highest estimate of £19.2 billion [2] the London School of Economics put on the scheme.

Fifty-six people, including some of the nearby Hare Krishna singers, signed the petition opposing the scheme and many more took away NO2ID leaflets to read and ideas to chew over. Campaigners got a bit jittery when two community support police officers approached the stall, as they had been warned about overzealous officials, but it turned out one of them simply wanted to sign the petition!

NO2ID Birmingham Co-ordinator Michelle Graham said: "The public are largely unaware of the details of this scheme, which we believe is intrusive, expensive and unnecessary. We were delighted by the level of support we got from local people. We're hoping to make our campaign stall a regular feature on the streets of Birmingham."

Pictured: Stall organiser Lesley (right) with (left to right) Ghiyas, Kelvin, Val and Steve. Also there on the day: Anthony, who helped organise the stall, plus Jennie, David and Michelle. Well done everyone!

1 IPS Identity Cards Scheme Cost Report (pdf)
2 LSE ID Card Final Report