Gove ,the Tories & privacy. Whither the Freeborn Englishman?
It has been reported that Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine has split up from her husband Michael Gove. There are two children and these situations are difficult even for the very wealthy. They have appealed for privacy. Certainly I have no wish to know more.
On the other hand on the wider issue Gove and privacy is not something that can be passed over.
In summer 2020 when pubs were open in many areas a requirement of admission was that you scan a QR code using the NHS Covid App on your mobile so that if COVID infection was reported this could be tracked and traced.
I had no issue with doing that and I did. Later it became clear that the privateers running the system at vast expense to the public and vast profit to themselves hadn’t bothered to check the data.
It was the world of Sinecurists and placemen that William Cobbett wrote of before the 1832 Reform Act. People who held profitable Government jobs not because they were any good at them or often did them at all but because of who they were and who they knew.
Cobbett wrote in Rural Rides:
There was no harm in them that I know of beyond that of living upon the public, but, where were their merits? They had none, to distinguish them, and to entitle them to the great sums they received.
These matters were perhaps more related to the now departed Hancock who backed privacy for his own affairs but not for everyone else.
Gove has been behind in 2021 the trialling of COVID Passports at events in May onwards. Again other issues are present
I’m fully vaccinated. The NHS App my GP Surgery uses shows electronic proof of that. However that is not the App Gove’s system is using and that is not of course the NHS Covid App either (there are good reasons around privacy for that).
Investigating how I could get an officially approved vaccine passport on the separate NHS App I noted that the requirements are in fact very close in terms of proof of identity to the Government’s plans for voter ID.
Again its not a question of either getting vaccinated or showing proof- I fully support both- but concern as to whether this is the opening to an ID card system which I oppose.
Without any guarantee the data gathered will be used and used properly, Gove’s latest plan certainly offends against Cobbett’s Freeborn Englishman who disliked nothing more than the State interfering in his private affairs. The Freeborn Englishman was as likely to appear on the right as the left but was not a figure then or now to be dismissed lightly. He was above all an anti-authoritarian figure.
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