Words Dept.: entry

I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to pay for an ID card. £30 for the privilege of owning a little pink bit of plastic that has the same basic purpose as a passport – while at the same time handing over your fingerprints to the government – holds absolutely no appeal. Nor should it to anyone with even the mildest sense of curiosity about whether this “voluntary” scheme may, in one way or another, represent the thin end of Big Brother’s wedge. (The fact that the scheme is a complete waste of money that will do nothing to help towards the government’s originally stated goal of stopping terrorism is by the by.)

One would expect that a journalist might possess a modicum of scepticism about such issues. So it was with some bafflement that I heard on Radio 4 the other week that the first person to get one of the new cards was Angela Epstein, a freelance hack who writes a column for the Manchester Evening News.

In her MEN column last Thursday, she wrote:

I’M so proud I could almost burst. I haven’t felt this good about cradling something small and pink since my daughter Sophie was born.

All right, so I’m exaggerating a bit. But honestly, when you’re the first member of the public to be issued with a brand spanking new national identity card, it’s a seminal moment.

Getting to the front of the queue was a reward by the Home Office for Epstein’s decision to use her column as a “platform” to “venture encouraging opinions” on the ID cards scheme (her words). The remainder of the column reads like a government information leaflet, extolling the virtues of ID cards and detailing the whole tedious process of getting one. Embarrassingly, there is even a confession about the sense of self-validation Epstein felt after pocketing her “piece of history”, while the “if you’re a law abiding citizen with nothing to hide” line is senselessly barfed on to the page with the rest of it.

I’m a sad, lonely blogger and clearly have no chance of rising to the dizzy heights of writing a column of such penetrating brilliance for a newspaper like the MEN. As such, I’m a bit lost for words. Luckily, the commenters on the MEN’s website are a little more on the ball:

Airhead, silly, unintelligent and vacuous are the words that sprang to mind regarding the article. If this is an example of the journalism in the MEN then I have to say you have a problem. This is NOT what I expect regarding the important topic of ID cards from a ’serious’ local paper. To be honest, I’m flabbergasted that it was published. It lets you down badly and the less we read of Ms. Epstien’s ‘opinions’ the very much better. If this is your seminal moment, Ms. Epstein, then I really pity you.