Oh yeah, apparently the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are in a coalition. At least they agree on some good ideas, like political reform and abolishing ID cards. Good riddance ID cards (“and nothing of value was lost”). The list of civil rights goodies looks promising:

We will scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register and the ContactPoint database, and halt the next generation of biometric passports.
We will outlaw the fingerprinting of children at school without parental permission.
We will adopt the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database.
We will review libel laws to protect freedom of speech.
We will further regulate CCTV.
We will end the storage of internet and e-mail records without good reason.
We will create a level playing field for open-source software and will enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components.
We will create a new “right to data” so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis.

I hope they can work together because it might be more common after voting reform for minority parties to form governments. The Conservatives got 36.1% of the popular vote, which is not much of a mandate. In 2005, labour had 35.3%, and 2001 a popular vote of 40.7%. So these previous governments can hardly be said to represent the majority view – ironic for a democracy.

Anti Citizen One

PS: