I was very pleased to discover, this afternoon, that both my brother and my cousin had attended the flag-flying march in London, a couple of weeks ago.
I don’t know if you will have heard very much about it, because according to the BBC it wasn’t very well attended. I can’t remember the exact details of their reporting, I think they said that about twenty five people marched and they all got arrested for being violent, woman-hating racists. Since neither my brother nor my cousin were arrested, they must have got their figures wrong somewhere, perhaps twenty seven people went and the BBC can’t count very well, which is rubbish for a load of Oxford graduates.
I was very impressed, because I would have liked to have gone myself, if London hadn’t been such an expensively long way away. Also the extra twenty seven people turning up on the trains must have put some pressure on the infra-structure, so I expect hotels were pretty overcrowded.
Still, I feel that I have been involved by proxy, and am feeling quietly proud of their nationalistic efforts. I expect Kier Starmer will jolly well rethink all of his digital ID policies and VAT on private education now, that will show him not to mess with the Great British Public.
I was put in mind of the marching by being obliged to complete some hateful Government paperwork today. In their wisdom, our mighty overlords have decided that all those who run limited companies, which is me, along with Richard Branson and Elon Musk and Jeff Besos, have got to prove their identity to Companies House.
I am accustomed to pointless paperwork, being the possessor of a taxi licence, and so I set to get on with it this afternoon.
It was very horrid indeed.
It did not want to do it on my computer. It wanted me to download a Government App on to my telephone.
It is not that I am mistrustful of our beloved leaders, but I lean towards the opinion that they are becoming a type of recreational cyber-stalker, like the weirdos who write peculiar comments on your Facebook posts and then add, threateningly, that they know where you live.
Everybody knows where I live, it is on the electoral roll. Even the Government knows that, if only they bothered to look.
I did not have the smallest intention of downloading any kind of Government App, not the NHS App, not the Companies House App, not the Bat-Flu Early Warning App, not any of it. I am aware that this is mildly paranoid, because our current leaders are completely incapable of any technical achievement more complicated than deleting their What’s-App messages when they are in a sticky situation, but in the unlikely event that we get some leaders who actually know what they are doing, they are absolutely not having access to my telephone.
In the end Companies House agreed that they would let me identify myself without the App, as long as I could identify myself adequately, although they warned me that it was a time-consuming process and I should really download the App. They would ask me some questions that only me and them knew the answer to, and if I answered correctly, they would believe that I was really me.
Feeling rather uneasy, I agreed.
Readers, they wanted to know all sorts of things.
They wanted to know how much we had paid off on our mortgage. I had no idea, and had to ferret about in the drawer for the last letter from the bank. What was the credit limit on my Barclaycard? Then they wanted to know when I opened my bank account. They gave me a choice of days. Was it the seventh of September two thousand and six? Or the eleventh of September two thousand and six?
There was a box to tick for Don’t Know, but when I ticked it, it told me bossily that in that case I would be obliged to download the App, and I had jolly well better know or I would have cyber-surveillance in my telephone for ever.
Fortunately it was a multiple choice, because they were clearly better informed than me.
There were several similar, pryingly-uncomfortable questions, to which they had absolutely no business whatsoever knowing the answers. Some secrets should stay between me and my bank manager.
Eventually, to my relief, they agreed that I was really me, and let me off the hook with what felt like a caution.
After that I had to do it all over again, pretending to be Mark, so clearly the system is completely rubbish because it had no problem whatsoever in believing that I was Mark as well. It was even easier than when I had been me, because I had already looked up the mortgage and the credit cards and didn’t need to bother hunting through the files again.
It was very horrible indeed, and I came away feeling slightly nauseated.
If at any time a couple of dozen more people feel like marching, I think they can count me in.
