ID cards are a bad idea that never goes away. Back in the late 2000s I had a lot of fun attack blogging, not always coherently, the then Labour government’s plans to make everybody carry them. Now, with the inevitability of death and taxes, the current Labour government is bringing them back.
The feeling in Whitehall is that ‘the national mood has moved on since Tony Blair’s plans for ID cards were abandoned in the 2000s.’ They have a point – you can’t imagine a massive opposition campaign like No2ID rising against Starmer today.
Oppose ID cards on principle and the smart people will have some fun with you. English liberty! Ho-ho! John Bull! Freeborn Englishmen! Ha-ha! They will tell you that, in fact, the British tend naturally toward authoritarianism and will accept pretty much any inconvenience in the name of law and order, national security, or public health. And they too have a point: a poll done in July 2021, at the tail end of the pandemic, showed 25% of respondents wanted nightclubs to be closed permanently; a further 19% wanted a permanent 10pm curfew.
I can accept that English libertarianism is a minority culture in the UK, akin to the Lions Club or the Humanist Society. I also accept that ID cards do not constitute a major infringement of our liberties. I can live with compulsory ID. We will not wake up in Keir Starmer’s woke dystopia.
But I do think compulsory ID constitutes some infringement of liberty. I am not convinced that we need to know how many people are living in this country at a given time, and in the best possible world some people will be working illegally. The forms get longer every year, the state makes you jump through more hoops, and nothing tangible changes.
I am also struck by how weak and uncompelling the arguments for ID cards are.
It will be just like using a passport! So we might as well just use passports.
Other countries are doing it! Different countries are different. What works somewhere doesn’t always work everywhere.
It will address the concerns people have about illegal immigration. No it won’t. The usual suspects will complain whatever happens.
Of course this whole post may be strictly academic – our record of long term grand projects indicates that there will not be a national rollout of ID cards in my lifetime. The whole project will go the way of HS2 and the Northern Powerhouse.
I am still against ID cards in principle though. Maybe it’s more a cranky instinct than a principle, but it is there.
Max Dunbar 