SOURCE Peter Hitchens – DailyMail
It would be really useful to the authorities if we all had barcodes tattooed on our foreheads at birth. After all, if you have nothing to fear, and have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide, or so they say – and we will come to that. But there is much more to life than the convenience of state bureaucrats sitting behind desks. And my guess is that, even if we did submit to such indignities, we would still spend a huge part of our lives queuing to get through officious ‘security’ checks and filling in forms.
And this is one good reason Lord Blunkett is as wrong now as he was 20 years ago when he tried to introduce Identity Cards, a supposed cure-all for our problems whose supporters never think very hard about the subject. If they did, they might wonder why they are always called ‘ID’ cards for short. What does the ‘D’ stand for? Nobody knows.
In the same way, nobody can explain what use they would actually be. For certain, they were less than no use at all when they were imposed on this country at the outbreak of World War Two in September 1939. I have combed the archives for any evidence that they ever helped uncover a spy-ring or anything of that kind.
Though you will not be surprised to learn that a black market in stolen cards quickly sprang up, or that half a million people managed to lose theirs in the first two years of the war.
They would, of course, have been very useful to the Nazis, had they ever arrived, in rounding up Jews and other persons they wanted to kill. In fact a Jewish furrier, Meyer Rubinstein was prosecuted in 1950 for never having obtained a card, presumably because he feared that putting such an obviously Jewish name on a national register would be his death warrant. Note that he managed to live happily without it for ten years, and also that the cards still existed in 1950, five years after the war had ended. They only disappeared after increasingly officious abuse of them by the police.
They were also worse than useless in protecting the innocent or in clearing up bureaucratic misunderstandings. In one famous case, the Seamen’s Union leader, Charles Jarman, was held by police on ludicrous smash-and-grab charges even though his card showed him to be a man of standing and hardly likely to involve himself in such a crime.
A Joyce Mew won a case in court after refusing to show her papers to a rationing office busybody who, after supervising her wartime provisions over a counter for years, knew perfectly well who she was. Our recent experience of Covid restrictions, weird surveillance of dissenting journalists including (apparently) me, and the police sunbathing squad warn us that such things could easily happen again in modern Britain, only with added helicopters, CCTV cameras and internet snooping.
Winston Churchill’s Tories eventually ordered the card’s abolition in February 1952, after yet another angry court case. The Daily Mail of February 22 that year recorded: ‘Many people did what they have been longing to do since they were issued – they tore them up.’ In fact, the ghost of identity cards lingered for years, for many of that generation found that their new NHS numbers were their old National Identity numbers, lasting until quite recently. But what had in effect been a Bullying Licence for Busybodies had been cancelled.
Most continental countries have had such cards for so long that nobody remembers when or why they began. I’d guess most of them go back to Napoleon Bonaparte and his obsession with registration and reorganisation, but many unfree European states needed no outside encouragement to keep careful lists of their subjects and to give their heavy-handed police powers to demand their documents. In most cases these nations began life as despotisms, in which the state was above the citizen’s head rather than beneath his feet. And a brisk period of German occupation no doubt boosted the identity business.
The key thing about these countries is that they have never had any need to justify treating all their citizens as if they were suspects. They just automatically do so.
Here, we do things differently. Those few miles of salt water which separate us from the continent caused us to develop wholly different traditions. Above all, we are all presumed innocent. If the government wants to interfere with us, it must justify itself to us, not the other way round. Here, as Lord Blunkett swiftly found, you cannot just do what you want. This irritated the Blair government. The people Lord Blunkett dismisses as an ‘angry minority, obsessed with the myth of state surveillance’ and as a ‘vocal minority who accused me of attempting to mastermind some sort of Orwellian deep state surveillance’ had a point.
Lord Blunkett’s argument that we all accept specific forms of identification is a feeble one. Each of these, from our National Insurance number to driving licence or credit card, is for a particular purpose. The holders of our private information have it for one reason, and one alone, not to use as they will. But centralise it in a single card, and the institutions of the state have immense power.
In the Blair years there were one or two odd cases – a journalist who had caused the government some trouble over the Iraq war who suddenly faced questions about his tax affairs from a pro-Blair newspaper; a woman who complained to an opposition politician about her NHS treatment, who then found that confidential information about her had leaked into the public domain. No wrongdoing was proved, but you see what power the state could have over us, if everything it knew about us was all in one place.
Then there is Lord Blunkett’s touching alleged concern for the current levels of immigration across the Channel. Oh, yes? Let us never forget the 2009 revelation by the Blairite apparatchik Andrew Neather that New Labour had ‘a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the UK Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’.
It is quite true that if this country was as bureaucratic as, say, France, it might be harder for illegal immigrants to find work or homes. But has Lord Blunkett not heard of the dark economy? There are ways of evading identity cards and (I hate to mention it) it is not impossible to forge them.
As long ago as 2006, despite its identity card laws, France’s government estimated (it did not know) that there were between 200,000 and 400,000 undocumented migrants in the country, with perhaps 100,000 more arriving illegally each year. The French also expel thousands each year, as we barely do. But it would be absurd to claim that their identity system keeps illegal immigration under control.
I suspect Lord Blunkett, a former Home Secretary, knows this all too well. But his old socialist trust in the benevolence of the state still, alas, flows through his veins. He should get over it.