ID Cards: Solving a Problem that Dare not
Speak its Name
by Sean Gabb
18th December
2015
(860 words)
By all means, let us think again. However, since no material
facts have changed, I see no reason for reaching the same conclusion as before.
Identity cards are an astonishingly bad idea – so bad that it is hard to make a
case for them with any semblance of good faith.
Undeniably, there are benefits to having a single and
authoritative means of identification. We all need to identify ourselves several
times a week, sometimes more often. There are times when the authorities have
legitimate need to identify us. Fraud appears to be a growing problem – so too
illegal immigration. A biometric identity card would simplify large parts of our
lives. It would smooth many of our interactions with the
authorities.
The problem is that these benefits are not as great as we are
told. Those European countries that already have identity cards do not seem to
have less crime than we have. Certainly, France, which has a comprehensive
identity card system, has suffered much more terrorism in the past few years
than we have – largescale terrorism that gets reported in our news, and a
continuous round of intercommunal violence that is not reported. In most cases,
identity cards are irrelevant to solving these crimes. The problem is less the
identification of suspects once arrested than finding someone to arrest in the
first place. For the rest, identity cards are no more secure than bank cards and
passports and bank notes. Whatever document is issued and has value can and will
be forged by the dishonest.
As for identifying ourselves, most of us already have
passports and National Insurance cards and bank cards and driving licenses. The
inconvenience we face is, at most, trivial.
Against these doubtful or minor benefits, there are the
substantial costs of an identity card scheme. Some of these costs are financial.
Issuing everyone with secure biometric identity cards will be expensive, and we
do already have a large budget deficit. The main costs, though, will be to our
traditional way of life.
Preventing Islamic terrorism is clearly not a main objective
of the authorities. If it were, they would not have opened the borders after
1990, and kept them open. They would also not have done so much to cover up
various kinds of wrongdoing in our Islamic communities. Fighting crime against
life and property is equally not a main objective.
Far more important objectives of the British State, so far as
I can tell, are to stop us from smoking and drinking and looking at pornography
– and to keep us from organising against our increasingly Potemkin liberal
democracy. There is already a vast database, filled with who we are and what we
are doing. Identity cards would be a useful front end to this. It would allow us
to be tracked as we went about our daily business. It could be used to see who
was buying cigarettes or drink, and who was attending meetings of environmental
or identitarian pressure groups.
And the knowledge that we were being watched would change our
behaviour. Raise even the potential costs of nonconformity, and there will be
fewer nonconformists. Would you go to a gay strip club, or to a meeting of the
British National Party, if there was a policeman outside with a pretext for
checking the identity cards of everyone going in? How many cigarettes or bottles
of gin would you buy, if you had to show an identity card at the checkout, and
if you knew the records would be shared with the National Health Service and the
child protection authorities?
In short, identity cards enable a soft totalitarian police
state. To be watched is to be controlled. Without a single concentration camp or
rubber cosh in sight, they will take us into a world that has become a stage on
which we act at all times under the watchful eye of the
authorities.
Look at the history of the debate over identity cards. Every
real or alleged problem we have faced in the past quarter century – football
hooliganism, bank and welfare fraud, personation in driving tests, selling
stolen goods, being drunk in public, terrorism, illegal immigration – has been
made into an argument for identity cards. If another Black Death were to wipe
out a third of the population, the surviving officials in the Home Office would
make this into an argument for identity cards. The problems change. The solution
stays the same. The obvious reason is that the authorities really want to know
what we are doing, and to scare us into stopping.
And so, my response to Messrs Field and Soames is: I will
take my chance with the terrorists; you go back to Westminster and do the job we
elected you to do. This is to protect our lives and property and traditional
rights from a British State that is going, or has already gone, out of
control.
Dr Sean Gabb is
Director of the Libertarian Alliance, an educational charity based in the United
Kingdom. Its mission is to raise awareness of the English liberal
tradition.
.jpeg)