New Labour

From 2006 Britain will be the first country where every journey by every car will be monitored

The excuse as always is the threat from terrorism. The network will track the movements of every single car in the country, so the majority of people tracked will be innocent of anything. This does not even appear to be a flaw, but is apparently one of their selling points

"What the data centre should be able to tell you is where a vehicle was in the past and where it is now, whether it was or wasn't at a particular location, and the routes taken to and from those crime scenes. Particularly important are associated vehicles," Mr Whiteley said.

The term "associated vehicles" means analysing convoys of cars, vans or trucks to see who is driving alongside a vehicle that is already known to be of interest to the police.

guilt by association, of simply taking the same road as somebody that the police are interested in.

The database already exists and is operational. This is simply extending what is already in place. Some people are going to argue that this, like every other bit of New Labour authoritarianism, is a good thing. They are wrong. They will argue that it will help stop speeding, they are wrong on that one as well, they will say that speeding is unsafe, again wrong, and that speed cameras make the roads safer, wrong according to the governments own statistics.

This will have zero effect on crime. If anything it will cause mroe as criminals will simply either car-jack, or force an innocent to hire a car for them. The innocent person will get arrested, and the criminals get away. As has already happened in the case of Mr Shahid Khan who was forced to hire a car for the killers of Pc Sharon Beshenivsky. He was ignored when he told the police what happened, then later arrested for aiding the murderers!