Henry Porter reports for us from last night's No2ID mayoral hustings.
Henry Porter (London, journalist): Under Ken Livingstone, London has become the most watched city in the free world; but he did not take the opportunity presented by these mayoral hustings to explain why he supports the surveillance by ANPR cameras outside congestion charging hours, the enormous increase in camera systems, or the retention of Oyster card data, which connect personal details with credit cards and travel information. Perhaps this is unsurprising since Livingstone is strongly in favour of ID cards and the National Identity Register, and he is on record as saying he wants thousands more cameras installed in the run up to the London Olympics in 2012.
The five candidates who did show up at the Friends Meeting House seemed to have a reasonable grasp of the privacy issues and the oppressive nature of some of the policing we see in London, particularly Brian Paddick, the Lib-Dem candidate and formerly a senior policeman with the Met. The only one who failed to understand the significance of the retention of and use by the police of Oyster cards information was the Conservative candidate Boris Johnson, who said that convenience overrode privacy concerns. This was odd, since Johnson repeated his promise to shred any his identity card and eat it with his cornflakes.
Livingstone¹s failure to turn up and acknowledge that Londoners are on the frontline in the argument concerning the database state was marked by No2ID organiser Phil Booth when he ceremoniously erected a cardboard cut-out of the Mayor next to the UKIP candidate, Gerard Batten. After Batten's rambling's about immigration and border control, it was difficult to decide which drew the greater disdain from the audience.
