Tony Griffin

Likes (A-Z): beer, cricket, family, golf, guitar, people, rationalism, song, socialism, words

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@Aliya562219 We can’t say because we don’t know how old he was when his child was born (bearing in mind that it could easily have been before he got married, and could have been with a different woman).

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@Artemisfornow I’ve been “waiting to see the evidence” about God for nearly 70 years. There is none. But there’s plenty of proof of Lammy’s ineptitude.
There’s something irrational about invoking imaginary friends that should preclude people from high office.

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@SaulStaniforth It won’t make a blind bit of difference. They are a so-called democratic organisation but the leadership simply ignores what it doesn’t like

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@JakeBenRichards You’re proposing something that requires the majority law abiding population to prove themselves & will create (hackable) 1984-style surveillance (probably by a private company). It won’t address any of the real problems we face. I won’t comply with this authoritarian overreach

[Chris Littlewood @chrislittlewoo8]

Digital ID for every adult is not progress. It is the end of a free society dressed up as convenience.

I am a cyber security specialist. This is my take.

They are selling it as a fix for illegal migration. That is bollocks.

We spend hundreds of billions a year on cyber security and yet the volume of breaches is breaking records. The threat is growing faster than the spend.

Digital ID will not stop boats. It will not stop trafficking gangs. It will not fix a broken border.

Criminals will work around it.

Honest citizens will pay the price.

It builds giant data banks that track where you go, what you buy, what you read and who you speak to.

It links your identity to every checkpoint in daily life.

One breach and your life is exposed.

Look at Jaguar Land Rover and the airports in recent weeks. Now imagine that at national scale on an ID system tied to everything you need to live your daily life.

Here is the risk that ministers will not admit.

Ransomware seeded through a supplier or an insider:

It lies quiet for months.
It rolls through the backups.
On trigger day the register and the recovery sets are both encrypted.

Payments fail. Health and benefits stall. Borders slow. Citizens are frozen out until a ransom is paid or the state rebuilds from scratch.

Centralise identity and you centralise failure.

Do not fall for the pitch.
Function creep is certain.
It starts as login.

It becomes access to money, travel, speech and public services.

It turns rights into permissions controlled by the state and its contractors.

It creates a single point of failure for criminals, insiders and hostile states to target.

It will punish the elderly, the poor and anyone who is not always online.

It will centralise risk and outsource blame.

It will not stop fraud.

It will not stop illegal migration.

It will build the machinery for a social credit system by stealth.

If ministers cared about the border, they would enforce current laws, resource patrols and processing, close loopholes and remove those with no right to stay.

You do not need a national ID to do any of that.

We scrapped ID cards in 2010 for a reason.

Britain does not need a central register to prove age or status.

Yes to privacy first proofs. No to a database state.

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@PolitlcsUK @thetimes If you recognise it then you must take action to defend it against a rogue, genocidal state.

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@wendy_cooksey Are we really bothered? Isn’t the Labour Party such a dead duck that it doesn’t matter who its deputy leader is?

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@TheBarmyArmy If we are talking best ever, then it has to be John Arlott. I’m only surprised he isn’t getting more mentions on here. Anyway, Benaud is in at number two for me.

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@JakeBenRichards Jake, you’re better than this: attacking a platform that mirrors the Labour 2017 manifesto, just in an effort to bolster support for your party, which has severely lost its way under its worst leader ever.

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@JakeBenRichards Vote Labour. Get a slightly kinder version of Farage. One that’s still obsessed with small boats and big flags, and won’t address the real problems we face (that stem mostly from corporate greed and a failure to tax the obscenely wealthy).

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@JohnHealey_MP What you seem to mean is: We should welcome the idea of the world being a more dangerous place, because it’s an opportunity to create jobs. What a sad, warmongering position to adopt!

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@JakeBenRichards Good news for who? Not for the vast law abiding majority who should not be obliged to prove themselves as legitimate. And who, in doing so, expose all do they to this and other authoritarian governments. You’ll soon be telling us that 2+2=5.

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@10DowningStreet The number arrested for this is almost certainly smaller than for those taken into custody for the apparent “terrorism” of peacefully opposing genocide. It’s obvious from the comments that you are pissing off the fascists and now you’ve lost the left too. What a pathetic mess!!

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@Keir_Starmer You stopped the author of your review from even considering renationalising the industry. Having vulture capitalists running water companies is the root cause of the problem, with billions being siphoned off abroad; prices and CEO pay rising. Just get us our water back!

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@JakeBenRichards I’m not. People don’t like this government so they won’t trust you with their data. As you proscribe organisations that are not terrorists (a view held even by the UN and The Times) we don’t want what smacks of more Orwellian authoritarianism.

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@statsjamie If I go in a shop and they charge me for something they can’t provide (because they’ve failed to secure its supply or to stop it falling off the back of their delivery vans) I’d be justifiably pissed off. So why should I respect (US-owned) Yorkshire Water’s hosepipe ban?

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

If I go in a shop and they still charge me for something they can’t provide (because they’ve failed to secure its supply or to stop it falling off the back of their delivery vans) I’d be justifiably pissed off. So why should I respect (US-owned) Yorkshire Water’s hosepipe ban?

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@JakeBenRichards @NewStatesman Oh, and (finally) get our government to put the interests of its electorate first rather than those of Israel.

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@JakeBenRichards @NewStatesman It’s possible - but unlikely - that you say this in your article, but it’s behind a paywall so I can’t access it. Anyway, unless we take our infrastructure (NHS, PO etc) back from rapacious capitalism, then the disaster will be more than simply “political”.

[Tony Griffin @tonytigertoad]

@JakeBenRichards @NewStatesman The obvious & popular thing to do (which I am loathe to call “radical”) is to get “the state” back from all the private, wealthy (often offshore) entities to which it has been given. When we don’t (eg) even own our own water supply we leak power and influence away from the state