Saturday 27 December 2014

Finding something to hate about ID cards

ID cards and Jacqui Smith
Jacqui Smith said ID cards would protect against identity fraud and illegal working 

It is fairly seldom that the two great currents of political feeling in this nation find common cause. Consider the two eternal instincts. On the one hand, you have the freedom-lovers, the libertarians: the sort of people who want to decriminalise heroin, let short-sellers do what they will, and think nothing of wearing their football shorts without their Y-fronts. On the other, you have bossy-boots Britain: the quiet, decent mass of good burghers who know Prison Works, that if the cost of our safety is a soupçon of our freedom that is not too much to ask, and whose verdant lawns, diligently trimmed with nail-clippers, line the quiet byways of our nation.

At last, these two strands - twined as they are in our national character - have found something on which they can agree. Loss-adjuster, in brotherhood, shall at last shake hand with hippy. Golf nazi shall lie down with squatter. Right-thinking representatives of both these positions can find intelligible reasons for opposing identity cards.

It is possible to be against ID cards because they are too repressive - and, with equal fervour, because they are not repressive enough. Here is a subject that can unite us. Libertarians loathe them on principle; disciplinarians in practice.

I'm of the first school of thought. I think it is a cheek that any government should demand proof of who I am. The reason police officers wear their numbers on their chests is that the power we vest in them needs to be transparent and answerable. The state serves the citizen, not vice versa. And that means the state is answerable to the citizen - not just at the polls, but in the street. Not vice versa. In a repressive society, the coppers know who you are, but you don't know who they are.

More practically, the ID card scheme is not about these naff old bits of plastic - be they adorned with bull and stars or Union flag - so much as it is about the vast database that it establishes. Nobody imagines, for the moment, that Gordon Brown's crew wants to lock up ginger-haired people, or ban smokers from using the NHS. But the best bulwark against any of his successors getting bright ideas - against the abuse of such a database - is not to allow it to exist in the first place.

And, since the primacy of cock-up over conspiracy is an established fact of life, consider the likely effects of such a database even if not used with evil intent. Just how good is HMG at cost-effective IT procurement? The initial budget for the NHS's new computers, initially £2.3 billion, went up to £20 billion - and it still didn't work. How good is it at getting its data right? The National DNA database, which contains only (only!) five per cent of the population, has fully half a million wrong entries in it. And how good is it at protecting that data? I say only "disk" and "lost" and "oops".

Let's approach it from the other end, though. Let's say we believe firmly that the innocent have nothing to fear. Let's say we think the way to control immigration is not with passports at the borders, but with ID cards in the high street.

Let's say we think that the existence of ID cards will cause bin Laden's batty bomb boys, as one, to give up on Britain as being altogether too tough a nut to crack; and that our homegrown radicals, halfway through shooting their martyrdom videos, will glance down at their ID cards, grow misty-eyed at the sight of "Dieu et Mon Droit", and give the whole jihad up as a bad lot.

Let's say we believe that employers will cease using illegal labour, sick-note scroungers will lumber from their beds, and that our great national industry of identity fraud will wither on the vine.

In that case, we'd want this ID card to be pretty damn totalitarian. We'd want every mother's son in the country fingerprinted, and retina-scanned, and DNA-tested, and every last bit of it encoded on this card, so anyone caught without one could be immediately slung in chokey or encouraged to swim the Channel. We'd want it watertight, wall-to-wall. But this scheme will be as watertight as a colander, as wall-to-wall as a rug.

As the Home Secretary said this week, if they can't get all 10 of your fingers, what the hey. If you've been in the country for less than three months, you don't need to carry one (and, as Right-wingers are always complaining, once you're in the country, it's not so hard to vanish). And they're hedging back towards making them, at least initially, "voluntary" for the native population. What sort of a police state, I ask you, is that?

As I say, you can be against these cards - as I am - because they are too repressive, and you can be against them because they aren't repressive enough. Oddly enough, I reckon it's the latter argument that's most likely to swing it.


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