Though the guys at Spiked are used to dealing with the half-hearted socialism of Blair's government, I think that Brandon Robshaw's proposal could fly even in our (ostensibly) more liberty-minded country. He makes an excellent point.

What's wrong with a national DNA register?

My knee-jerk reaction is to worry about the immigrants. Would people not born in Britain be forced to submit their DNA for police use? If so, then one of the objections that Robshaw skirts through use of the already mandatory heel test for infants would actually stand.

There's an interesting albeit unlikely doomsday scenario on the flip side of this coin. If non-natives were exempted, the relative ease with which they could avoid police detection (theirs being, eventually, the only DNA not on file) could precipitate the development of a highly-sophisticated criminal class.

All non-natives would be suspected of belonging to that class, and obvious foreigners would be both feared and discriminated against. Well-connected plutocrats could hire the real criminals as assassins or thieves.

(Holy etymology! Neal Stephenson was right about "assassins" — it really does come from the Arabic word for "hashish user.")

Anyways, I think it's a solid idea, even if some of its more far-fetched ramifications make me want to go write some sci-fi.