Adam Smith Institute

According to Jacqui Smith, public demand means people will be able to pre-register for an ID card within the next few months. She said: "I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don't want to wait that long."

What tosh! The only people who would want to talk to her are slimy obsequious fools, one rung down from most politicians on the evolutionary scale. ID Cards are deeply unpopular. As I have written previously, they are one of the only issues that all newspapers are against.

In the same piece I suggested a bonfire of ID Cards, if and when we are in position where we are forced either explicitly or implicitly to carry one. A comment rightly suggested that the fumes would be too much, and that instead we should shred them. Good idea. Perhaps one of those industrial wood chippers would do the job?

For a number of years politicians have been assiduously stripping away our hard fought freedoms like cork from the Quercus suber. Now they are getting out the axe and preparing to strike. The yell of timber is not far away. The freeborn Englishman is increasingly the stuff of legend.

If you take something from someone without paying them the full market value the Americans call this a "taking". In their Constitution (actually, the Fifth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights) this is expressly forbidden, the taking of private property for public use without just compensation.

While this is, sadly, often honoured only in the breach the reasoning behind it is quite simple. To use the law, or the power of government, to take the property of a person is theft in the wider sense of that word.

The impending closure of the Colony Room, the Soho drinking den patronised by louche figures from the art world including Francis Bacon and Tracey Emin, may be averted after an intervention by English Heritage.

The advisory body is rushing through an inspection to determine whether the club, which has witnessed 60 years of booze-soaked misbehaviour by some of Britain's most creative drunks, merits listed status.

Quite why the room where artistic livers have been destroyed should be listed escapes me, but the real reason why they want to try is this:

Artists who are campaigning to keep the Colony Room open believe that listed status will help them to come to an arrangement with the landlord because it would be harder to redevelop the premises.

Making it harder to redevelop the building means that the landlord will lose some of the value of the property. That value will be transferred, by law, from the landlord to the drinkers, for the landlord will lose any development profits while the artistes will be able to drink in Soho without paying the full cost of the premises in which they do so.

That the law is used of course makes it entirely legal but in my opinion this is still theft.

Don't list it, don't create such a taking, let Tracey and her friends cough up the full cost of their tipples and the room they like to spill them in.

It was reported yesterday that private shops and post offices might be recruited to collect biometric data for the government’s ID card scheme. This is another addition to the elaborate plan for introducing the UK's new form of identification. Starting next year, some 200,000 airport workers will get identity cards as a condition of employment. The following year, students will be encouraged to apply for a card when opening a bank account, and eventually, the Identity and Passport Service hopes to distribute a substantial number in connection with issuing British passports.

Yet the Home Office is already encountering (justified) opposition to this plan. Many are protesting the £30 charge for an ID card, when most of the population do not see it as necessary. Airlines such as British Airways, Easy Jet and Virgin Atlantic have expressed opposition because they claim the scheme is unfounded and will not increase security. Despite the good intentions of the government, it is obvious that this scheme will build up its already mounting costs. In the next ten years, the ID cards are predicted to cost £4,740 million for British and Irish citizens, and an additional £311 million for foreign nationals. In times like these, who really wants to think about further spending on plans most people contest?

As the government tries to move forward with the ID card scheme, the British people may not be the only opposing force that they face. As mentioned earlier, the Home Office is looking to "use market forces and competition" by enlisting the services of private companies, organization and retailers to enrol UK citizens in the program. Those outside of the Home Office, however, speculate whether private companies would be willing to invest millions into a program that very well could be scrapped by a new administration.

So, we must wait and see how the execution of the ID card scheme pans out in the next few years. But getting fingerprinted while shopping for groceries at the supermarket is still a rather worrying thought.