WTF! As a British Citizen I felt strongly enough about this proposal that I wrote my opinions out carefully (after lots of thought) and sent them using their e-mail address. But that doesn't count because I'm living in the US at the moment and figured that sending an e-mail was a more efficient way of doing it than printing the message out, sticking it in an envelope and hoping that the US post office didn't lose it somewhere.


Wonderful!

Z.

Any government that owns the postal service is going to make damned sure people keep buying stamps until their last lick of glue-infused saliva.

I'm a little sad about this, for indeed this was my first involvement in a "consultation". Like Zwack I gave it some thought, trying to put into words why I felt is was such a bad idea and in what ways I was really didn't like the whole ID card idea. (For the record it was more to do with the 486 and Access database that was going to be used to store the data, rather than the card itself).

I even sent a fax to my local MP (via faxyourmp), a week later I got a lovely looking formal (cream) letter back, which for some bizzare reason I still have around someplace. I felt really pleased with myself, having never involved myself in politics before here I was with a letter from a real live MP. I'd added my voice to the whole process, job done, warm fuzzy glow.

It even caused me to go scooting off to the government web site to hunt down a list of current consultations so I could see if I wanted to have a say on anything else. Needless to say in the 5 mins I spent being sent round different gov web sites I gave up not having found anything so simple (isn't the attention span of an internet user great).

So the other week I was listening to Radio4 when on came an article (or whatever they're called on radio) which said something like "blah blah blah, 2000 responses to the consultation, most of them positive, blah blah blah".

And I'm thinking, . o O (no wait) it was 2000 responses when I first read about it on NTK, when there was still 3 weeks or so to send in an opinion. So shurly that must be at least 2001 responses (notice how some of the simpler elements of statistics are lost on me) quite probably more as I'm sure it's not just me reading NTK.

I could write that I feel disappointed, or angry or let down, or, or, or maybe disallusioned by the whole thing. But I don't, I just feel cheated.