It’s back, it has another excuse, and it’s still an extraordinarily bad idea
~ Rob Ray ~
In a very specific, eye-rolling-and-muttering-obscenities sort of way, there’s something almost comforting about the reliability of the civil service (usually backed up by Tony Blair because the guy just. can’t. let. go) in its attempts to apply political necromancy to the forcing of ID cards on everyone in Britain.
There have been endless excuses made up for them over the years despite their unpopularity with both left and right, from their WWII imposition (rolled back on the grounds they were too socialist), to Blair’s 2006 attempt to introduce them on bizarre grounds of “easing travel” (as though passports don’t exist) and now again, this time to “curb migration”.
The real reason, clear to anyone cynical enough to be even slightly distrustful of State motivations, has always been entirely obvious — the police and security services want them, to enable the harassment of people who don’t fit.
And that’s certainly not just migrants, though no doubt the idea would be a wonderful method of aping the disgusting treatment meted out to sans papiers unfortunates across Europe. The people who’d get an ID card-related battering would very much include those born and raised in good old Blighty. Rough sleepers, chaotic individuals, habitual dissenters and indeed anyone else police don’t like the look of would be made available for rounding up and putting on the database.
It’s a security-State obscenity which, if Britain had anything approaching a collective soul, should cut to the quick. Free-born you surely are, now show me yer papers.
Public opinion across the board is lukewarm on the concept and in the political sphere, as a Freedom colleague noted to me in conversation, there are some very awkward potential implications:
“To me that once again shows how little the government takes Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement into consideration. How exactly does the government intend to force British IDs declaring Britishness on the half that consider themselves Irish?”
Quite. But perhaps the most glaring argument against the Identity Card is a more modern one than such simple classics as “piss off you nosey prick”, or “fuck you I’m not British”. Increasingly the role the civil service and police would like it to play is redundant.
The Police National Database, implemented (as so many shady systems are) on a promise of protecting children from abuse, contains four billion items of data encompassing 13 million people, with an explicit brief of combating, among other things, modern day slavery and people trafficking.
Quietly slipped out last November was a vaguely-worded “end of life transformation” of the system.
It’s not hard to see where that’s going. It’ll move to the Cloud, incorporate AI for pattern search and facial recognition, and plug in to lots of other databases for maximum oversight. It’s the dream of any security state — a Panopticon applied to the whole country. Every citizen and migrant with their own file and full biometrics instantly accessible to any bored copper looking to take out their frustrations on an unsuspecting civilian.
In such a world the invasiveness and pettiness of ID cards begins to look almost quaint, a relic from the wandering minds of old soaks rattling around in the bowels of London’s political Gormenghast.
But on the back of such relics grander tyrannies are built, and that is why, once more, they need to be staked, set aflame, and buried at the crossroads.
Image: Pachyderm11 on DeviantArt
