THE KIDS AREN'T ALRIGHT

News that children as young as 11 could have their fingerprints taken and stored on a government database has met with predictable uproar from woolly liberals, hippies and Parliamentary opposition parties, as a further step towards a complete surveillance state.The plan, mooted as part of preparations for biometric passports and identity cards, could, says everyone who doesn't agree, herald the end of the presumption of innocence.

The story's this. As of 2008, all adults who apply for new passports will have their fingerprints recorded in the National Identity Register. But top civil servants are worried that some youths with child passports, valid for five years, could then be travelling on passports without biometric details when they turn 16.

That's carte blanche to commit crime and blow things up. Clearly.

So, to make sure all passports held by those over 16 have biometric details, the Identity and Passport Service proposes a fingerprint database for 11 to 15-year-olds. They estimate that they will take the fingerprints of 295,000 children who apply for passports in 2010, and that eventually 495,000 youngsters a year will be getting inky fingers.

Of course, if you had a massive new database of fingerprints, what other uses could you find for it. Hmmmm...wouldn't the police, for instance, find it useful?

Yes, say the hippies and the Jesus sandal-shod geography teachers and the Conservative Party, and it's the death knell for the presumption that everyone is considered innocent before they are found guilty.

But wait a minute. If we have the resources to nip things like crime in the bud, shouldn't we all be sleeping a little sounder in our beds?

I think so. In fact, I don't think the Government is going far enough.

Rather than having an age of criminal responsibility - currently applied to 10-year-olds - let's introduce an age of criminal inevitability and arrest anyone suspected of being 10 years old.

Habeas corpus could do with a revision, too. It would be easy enough to pass. For starters, it's Latin so how can anyone in state education nowadays possibly know what it means?

Getting rid of it needn't burden the overcrowded prison system. Ten-year-olds can already be easily incarcerated at home for the price of a PlayStation, a daily dose of fizzy drinks and industrial-sized packs of Cheesy Wotsits.

Thanks to the best efforts of the anti-conker Nazis of the Health and Safety executive, drivers conducting 60mph conversations on their mobile phones and scare stories of a paedophile on every corner, a fair proportion of under-16s are already institutionalised in every way but name by their concerned parents, so to implement lock-downs at home by stealth law could hardly be easier.

So, I say, ban habeas whatsitcalled.

Who in their right mind would complain when you look at the evidence, anyway? Ten-year-olds are a shifty lot by their very nature and the streets would be a safer place without BMXs and scooters strewn across the doorways of newsagents and footballs flying around public parks. I don't trust them, personally, with their scabby knees and pockets full of dead daddy longlegs, Panini stickers and recommissioned, decommissioned Kosovan firearms.

I admit, I have some personal reasons for locking up 10-year-olds and throwing the wardens away. A brush I had with a member of the tweeny underclass still makes me wake up screaming. I was in a supermarket a few years ago when I saw a lad of about nine filling his pockets at the pick-n-mix.

Rather than making a scene, I thought the best approach would be to sidle up to him and quietly but firmly tell him to stop what he was doing.

So I did.

But was this young Fagin ashamed but appreciative of my tact, my attempt to quietly put him back on the right track? Did he say "thanks mister, it's a fair cop. I was lost, g'vner, but now I'm found out"?

Did he hell.

Seemingly deranged, mouth foaming from a gobfull of sherbet lemons, he lobbed a handful of rhubarb and custards in my face (which, by the way, are sharp and smooth in all senses, especially if you get one in the eye) and then offered me outside for a fight.

He actually wanted to have a street fight with me, a man three times his size and eight times his weight.

Now, in a situation like that, a number of questions whizz their way brainwards.

Such as, is he bluffing? Because if he isn't, he's probably pretty tough and not going to observe the Queensbury rules. So how badly will he hurt me? Are we talking nursing a bruised shin, or being fed through a straw for the rest of my life?

That aside, the law's a bit hazy on the whole adults fighting with children thing and anyway, it's not very, well, dignified, is it? Never mind if the adult in question thinks he stands a good chance of losing.

So, instead, I stood at the picking-a-fight-n-mix, pride dented by sharp-edged boiled confectionery, thinking of options.

"Right," I finally said, "I'm going to tell on you."

I sloped off pretending to be in search of a responsible, hopefully gun toting, member of staff but really looking for an exit to leave by or a crack in the Earth's crust to leap into with the sound of "ooh, shown up!" ringing in my ears.

In the sober light of five years later, I concede that it's probably a good thing that our great government would never take an ego bruised by a mini-criminal as a recommendation to rush out ill-thought new laws.

They would never do that, right?

The idea to fingerprint, rank and file our children in a society that is already under more surveillance than any other country in the world is just 'blue sky thinking', nothing sinister. If you think your civil rights are eroding faster than the cliffs of the south coast you're paranoid. If you say so, expect a knock on the door.

Take their word for it. It will never happen. Until it does.

Anyway, personally speaking, I'm tremendously reassured by such a forward looking, nothing to hide government. I look forward to further 'blue sky' debate, such as bringing back hanging, and abolishing the vote.