Patrick Crozier has seen a round in the ongoing debate regarding state imposed ID cards… and he did not like what he saw.
Please don’t ask me why I was watching Richard and Judy (a sort of British ‘Oprah’) the other day but I was. They were having a discussion on ID cards with Tony Blair’s Big Buddy Lord Falconer on the pro-ID card side and Mark Littlewood of the pressure group Liberty putting the case against… and Littlewood lost.
I had better explain the way the argument went. Falconer said that it was all about cutting down on social security fraud and immigrants working without work permits. Falconer made a mistake in insisting on calling it an Entitlement Card (shades of the Community Charge) but otherwise he did fine. “Nothing to worry about” was the message.
Littlewood made two points. The first was that it didn’t work – there was plenty of experience on the Continent to show that was the case. The second was that it would be used by the police to harrass and intimidate members of racial minorities.
I have to say I didn’t find this particularly convincing. There is a rather odd belief in Britain that Continentals do everything so much better than we do. This is allied to the even odder belief that to criticize anything the French or Germans do is tantamount to xenophobia. To any “progressive” the argument simply won’t wash.
And as for the harrassment argument I am sure any self-respecting policeman can find ways to harrass people ID cards or not.
Which got me thinking – how would I make the case against ID cards? Well, for starters, I wouldn’t make it by making appeals to abstract notions like freedom and liberty. From what I can work out the vast majority of the British public simply have no concept of the term let alone a desire to see it preserved or extended.
The problem is that if you abandon abstracts you have to start talking in practicalities. You could mention that it is expensive, maybe a billion or so, but frankly in government spending terms that’s peanuts. And anyway, it does kind of miss the point. We are trying to make the claim that ID cards are a bad thing not merely an expensive thing which might do some good but that the costs outweigh the benefits.
You could say that it will prove very useful to future dictators and tyrants. But no one in Britain (outside libertarian circles) believes that will ever happen. “Goose-stepping Nazis here? Don’t be daft!” would be the attitude.
So, what on earth should we say? I think it is best to consider where the drive for ID cards comes from. Falconer himself said it: social security fraud ie the state and immigration ie the state again. This is a state policy to patch over the failures of previous state policies.
I think this is the line of attack that is likely to work best. Something along the lines of: “Isn’t it amazing. For a thousand years we Britons have been amongst the freest and most prosperous peoples of the world. In all that time not once outside a grave national emergency has our government ever forced us to possess identity cards. Even Bloody Mary had no use for them but this government does. What does that say about this government? I’ll tell you what. It tells us that it is uniquely incompetent…”
Well, that’s my stab.
Patrick Crozier
Yes, it’s an important argument to do well in.
I rather think that having a handful of respectable people say in advance they will go to prison rather than ever carry a compulsory identity card might prod memories of free behaviour in Britons.
Also, pointing out that it violates the presumption of innocence, by creating a crime of not carrying papers showing you have the approval of the government.
We should repeat again and again that it is not the government’s place to demand we prove to them who we are but our right that they prove to us who they are.
How about repeatedly calling ID-card introduction ‘compulsory tagging’ and refusing to call it anything else?
I wish to tell about my experience living in a land (Israel) that has Id cards. I find they are quite useful in many situations. As to the downside – providing a tool of oppresion to potential tyrants – that is a danger too, but maybe a little exagerated -meaning – tyrants are indeed a danger, but they fare pretty well also without ID cards.
In Israel you get a ID number when you are born, and a card at 16. It is a useful means of identification in many situations where you want to be identified, such as in school, applying for a job, signing a contract, or withdrawing money from a Bank.
The Government has a data base where they keep your name, ID number, religion, name of parents, wife(s) and children, date of birth and address. The address is what you declare it is, and usually unrelated to where you actually live.
Other government institutions, like social security, the army, electricity company, telephone companies, schools, universities, courts, the police, health care providers, dentists – they all have data bases as well.
A lot of information about an individual can be obtained by mining these data bases, but that is related to modern information technology, not to the fact that you have an ID number.(You can search data bases using any key.)
It is computers and data bases that changed the way we live, invading what we used to think of as our privacy. Computers won’t go away, and we have to adjust. The ID number is not the decisive, or even the influential factor.
On the other hand – neither is it particularly useful in preventing any type of fraud. You can perfectly have a false ID card, and it is very hard to discover it. Like most government enterprises, it is inefficient and unreliable.
I would oppose ID cards, but not so much out of great fear of a sinister and tyranical Government, but rather out of opposing all government enterprises, especially expensive and useless ones, like most of them.
With respect to Jacob’s experience, I can only say thank goodness photo IDs were invented — else how would anyone ever have been able to enjoy such newfangled delights as going to school, getting a job, signing a contract, or withdrawing money from the bank?
I’m with Mark on taking a refusenik stance. After 9/11 my state, New Jersey, unveiled plans for a new digitized drivers license with a biometric identifier, and I swore to the remaining 1.3 neighbors who don’t think I’m a nutcase that I would never carry one (I don’t even carry a photo license, Jersey being one of the few states still allowing such quaint things).
The legislation passed and the new licenses were due to be put into circulation at every driver’s next renewal after 1 January 2003 (me — end of February; my wife was to remain a free citizen until sometime in 2004). Yet, as I contemplated increased cardio health through forced two-wheel transport, squabbling about the de-privitization (yes, de-priv — a whole ‘nother issue, as we say) of the motor vehicle agency threw the tagging plans into temporary chaos, and I see from the renewal notice in Friday’s post that I shall have four more years of photoless and iris-less four-cylinder “privileges”.
My bike and I have an appointment for 2007.
Trying to out-argue this without reference to liberty is as daft as trying to argue against murder on the principle that all the blood will ruin the rug. It makes you look stupid and unprincipled, and it’s open to unanswerable counter-arguments (“so murder them outside”) that dstroy your smoke-screen and leave you either belatedly clinging to the real point, or conceding without ever bringing it up. Liberty is the point. Enslaving everyone to catch some crooks is wrong.
If you cannot stand on principle, you have lost the argument before you begin.
Julian
If I tried your argument on my “normal” friends this is the response I would get:
What’s so good about liberty?
Are you seriously trying to tell me that having to carry an ID card is the same as being clapped in irons? and
Well, actually I think catching crooks is a jolly good thing. If ID cards help that then I’m in favour of them. If you have nothing to fear you have nothing to hide.
The other problem with ID cards is that they become an absolute form of identity, therefore once the criminal classes manage to forge them they become useless as they can no longer guarantee that the holder is who he says he is.
the fact is that liberty is the only defence, not just the only sound one.
Citizens in proper democracies have a right to be there without accounting for themselves. They are born to it or granted the right if immigrants.
The argument being used in favour can be dealt with simply by agreeing all incomers be required toi carry ID until they obtain citizenship, and that all welfare recipients must be ssued with a special claimant’s photo ID as soon as their statius has been recognised.
The fact is that the system can and will be abused if it is made universally compulsory. No government can resist exploiting such powers if given them.
In South Africa, where I now live, ID is compulsory (it’s a passport-style book). Before the last election, it was used to disenfranchise a large number of voters through a new electoral law insisting the older “books of life” would no longer be acceptable at the polls.
It soon dawned on the opposition that those without the new-style books were older, mainly – but not exclusively – white voters. The Constitutional Court backed the government argument . This was followed by bureaucratic chaos as people attempted to obtain the new books, throwing the Home Affairs Department into panic as its delivery fell far behind.
A salutary lesson in why this type of all-encompassing info gatherng on idividuals by the state should be resisted.
This ID document, if it goes ahead in Britain, will soon be demanded by banks, lenders, businesses,public libraries and every other enterprise, and driver’s licence or other ID will not be accepted as proof of identity.
One argument against ID cards, which might be effective against liberty-sceptics, I heard from a policeman, who was speaking on the phone-in following _Any Questions_. He said that he would never carry anything which showed his address, because it was known for muggers to hospitalise their victims, find their addresses on something in their wallets and then go and burgle their houses, which were more likely to be empty.
It suggests a simple retort to anyone who uses the “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” refrain: “But you do have things to hide. One example is the times when your house is empty. Can you think of any more?”
Tim,
You see – when I let an apartment (for example),
I check the identity of the renter through the ID card. That you do not need one and can just use a driver’s licence, or a social security card, or whatever, or hire some detective to make sure, is really a comfort.
The use of ID numbers is a symbolic, silly, teutonic-bureaucratic notion. You can have a good data base using just the name and birth date as unique key.
I would suggest that privately owned, commercial, voluntary system of ID cards could be useful.
My name is William Joseph Beck III. I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on November 27, 1956.
My Socialist Insecurity number is 430-21-4093.
Anyone can use it, because I don’t.
Let go of the rope, ladies and gentlemen, and let the state fall on its ass.
Liberty has to come back into fashion as a value. There’s nothing else that can work. There is no argument based on utility that can out-crimefight a policeman (or at least a camera and microphone) in every room in every house, and taps on every phone, and all letters opened. And there is no way to argue liberty is good except to argue is is an individual good, and hence that the individuals rights must trump the state’s.
If the british public has closed its ears to freedom, then it will not remain free. Trying to trick the public into liberty cannot but fail, and discredit liberty further into the bargain.
Patrick wrote [hypothetically quoting friends]:
“If you have nothing to fear you have nothing to hide.”
That’s the essence of what the county clerk said to me when I refused to put my SSN on my passport application. It swayed me not.
U.S. passports are actually great private identity documents, since they are trusted but don’t list an address and are not instantly (or even easily) traceable.
Emotionally, I dislike the concept because, as a man of hono(u)r, I have never concealed my identity nor do I expect to do so in the future. If someone wishes to find me, he might do so by searching real estate records or certain professional rolls. If honest men should need to go into hiding, we will have much more to worry about than government I.D. cards, which will most useful and defending against alien intruders.
I think Andy’s point about ID cards helping criminals (while helping the state control law-abiding people) is an excellent one.
If ID cards are so effective against crime, why do so many countries with compulsory ID have higher crime rates than Britain?
I also believe we should extend the argument abroad and start to talk to ordinary people in countries (such as on the Continent) where ID cards are regarded as totally normal and as indispensible to life as lungs. Europeans’ apathy and pro-state submissiveness is actually being used by the pro-ID-card steamroller inside Britain.
Yet when I talk to East Europeans, for example, their first response is sheer disbelief. A country where the police cannot stop you and demand your papers? How can it possibly function? When they look West they have always seen the Germans first.
As they start to realise countries like Britain and the US are really free in that respect still, they start to get quite excited, curious, and see the point of resistance at once.
East Europeans well know what police states are, yet realise now after ten years that freely-elected governments can also be interfering and arrogant.
We should not ignore the chance to preach to the unconverted – some of them turn out to be better allies of freedom than we might imagine.
The arguement from liberty aside, the major flaw of ID cards are that as usual they hurt the law-abiding and do not catch the law breaker. Most good fake ID comes from bent state employees. Are there no such persons where you live? No one with money or personal problems who can be suborned to provide blank real forms? As with guns the lawless will obtain bent ID and walk away unscathed. The law abiding will be hassled to “prove” the rigor of the State police apparatt.