Identity Cards: Blunkett is still wrong 

We are being forced to fight a long and testing rearguard action against this mad, misconceived, authoritarian measure.  John Wadham, now no longer at the helm of LIBERTY, fought a steady and principled campaign against a long series of Home Office attempts - under both Tory and Labour Governments - to create an ID-card regime.  My hope is that LIBERTY will continue its principled opposition.

Let me try to set out the case against ID cards, in cool, intellectual terms.

I say the case rests on three high pillars of reason.

I   Individual sovereignty, freedom from state surveillance. 

In the UK we have the historical privilege of having started with the John Stuart Mill presumptions, forged well before the emergence of the modern all-embracing "nation state".  Most English ideas of individual freedom - freedom of religion, association, expression, freedom from oppressive arrest and prosecution - had already emerged before the French Revolution, thus pre-dating the suffocating assumptions of the nation state of continental Europe.  Intellectually, every new state intervention has had to be argued against the presumption of virtual anarchy, certainly a powerful individualist "liberal" slate of presumptions.  It is not a bad place to start, in the protection of precious civil liberties.  In England, authoritarian initiatives have always been given a tough passage - except in time of war.  The worst assaults upon UK freedoms have in recent years occurred in Northern Ireland, where the fog of war has all-too-often obscured understanding. But we should be grateful that in UK politics there is no presumption of state beneficence, of any inherent primacy to be attached to the public interest.  The traditional English approach has been to assign a heavy burden of proof to the advocates of any new authoritarian measures.

I therefore ask - "What is the evidence that carrying Identity Cards brings significant advantages in the management of State or other societal functions?"  It is clear that States with identify cards (France, Germany, Spain) have been no more or less successful in countering international terrorism than we have been.  It is said that the new card would be a "Benefit Entitlement Card", and no more.  But what is the evidence that the proof of benefit entitlement, in any sector, constitutes a serious problem which cannot be tackled by more targeted, less oppressive measures?  The Home Office is the perpetual proponent of these measures, which would certainly keep tens-of-thousands of civil servants permanently employed in checking, issuing and re-issuing, up-dating and verifying - not to mention the size of the Fraud Squad that would be needed for this scheme alone.

No convincing administrative case for the carriage of Identity Cards, under whichever name they may be "spun".

II  Risks of Abuse of Power

The hurdle of proof must be raised very high, because we all know that local Police forces would abuse such an ID system if it were every created.  I say that, as a pro-Police lawyer and boringly law-abiding citizen. 

I know perfectly well that the Police have, in an increasing mobile society, profound difficulties in the arrest of criminals and in bringing proof of their guilt - they will use any device, even unscrupulously, in order to achieve their ends.  For the poor, the ill-informed and the excluded, the introduction of an ID-card system would spell greater oppression at the hands of local police, a nasty deterioration of their quality of life.  If the systemic advantages of such cards were to be so overwhelming that these disadvantages should be accepted, that would be a different matter. 

• But they are not.   No such case has been made.

III  The need for effective migration management

Social institutions and state systems will increasingly have to be designed to accommodate higher rates of population change, varying from city to city, region to region.  Fortress territories like Japan* are bound to be by-passed by countries with more welcoming philosophies, more open borders.

• It would be absurd, at this stage in the development of international institutions, to introduce a device which owes more to the collectivist Police methods of 19th century Prussia, Russia and other totalitarian regimes than to the traditional individualism of the British.  Identity cards are a conceit of war and oppression, to which authoritarian regimes have become inordinately attached, without ever having to prove their objective utility.  They reflect the closed-system policing of a century ago, when every village "Bobby" also know all the thugs, rowdies, crooks and drunks of the village.  Ah, those halcyon days...

In the UK we should be leading the world in the development of police techniques better suited to a modern, mobile, travelling, fluid world - retaining their sensitivity to personal freedom and the sovereignty of the individual. 

• It's a matter of respect.

781  11 August 2003