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It is the answer to everything The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has once again pledged to introduce a compulsory national ID card scheme saying that ID cards were an essential tool in the fight against global warming.
Speaking to the BBC today, Mr. Blunkett denied that ID cards were merely a fetish and emphasised that they were a much-needed response to a fast changing world:
“Everbody understands the need to take serious steps to tackle the growing menace of global warming but we cannot even begin to do this without a proper national ID card system”.
Mr. Blunkett was also dismissive of the scheme’s critics:
“These so-called civil libertarians who try to suggest that there is no link between ID cards and global warming are simply dangerous and deluded. They are terrorists in all but name.”
According to a recent opinion poll, every single person in the UK has pledged that they will murder their own children and then kill themselves horribly unless the government issues them with a biometric ID card immediately.
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And to cap it all off, Muslim women would be exempt from being photographed.
Question: would they still have to pay the extortionate £70 to £80 per card if their photograph did not appear on it?
I can’t see the point, either of the ID cards or of the protests against them.
Many people have drivers licences. Many people have passports. Every British citizen has a national insurance number. Everyone in the country who isn’t a citizen (theoretically) has a foreign passport.
If required, the nasty horrible state enforcement agencies can find out what they want about you. Dental, medical records, insurance history, credit rating, criminal record, where you were last time you used your bank or credit card, and so on. It’s not hard.
I think the compulsory ID card is unnecessary because it won’t really permit anything that isn’t already possible. I think many of the objections to it are paranoid, made by people who don’t understand just how much data is held on each of us and just how easy it already is to get it.
So in summary, from my point of view, it doesn’t help the state do anything it can’t already do, and it doesn’t infringe civil liberties any more than they already are infringed – basically it’s not much help to the state and it doesn’t worsen the position of the people.
On the other hand, it will be unpopular because it will cost money, it will be just as easy to circumvent as current ID systems and, to continue the joke, the amount of plastic and power needed to produce 60 million bits of unnecessary junk will in fact worsen global warming (if it is actually taking place, which I doubt).
EG
So the argument is:
We must stop global warming, therefore everyone must have ID cards.
It’s a non sequitur. I don’t see even the most tenuous circumstantial connection here.
Which means I am now a “terrorist in all but name,” I suppose.
Ian Hamet – I think David Carr was having a little joke with us. Irony, you know.
Euan – Agreed. But all other forms of identification are so the card holder may obtain some benefit. For example, with a driver’s licence, you are permitted to drive a car. Identity cards would be compulsory, whereas no other card is compulsory. It bestows no benefit on the holder, but allows the government to demand that you, a freeborn citizen, prove your identity to an all powerful government upon request. This is revolting.
Speaking of revolting leads me on to the issue of Muslim women. They, apparently, are to be elevated above the indigenes and not be required to have their photos taken. After all, it’s not as though there had ever been any female suicide bombers … uh … Oh well, never mind; this act of pandering hands the British the ammunition to defeat the whole fascist enterprise. Go along with the gag.
Everyone who turns up to get his/her identity card should go clad in a veil and claim to be a Muslim woman. Refuse to prove it “on religious grounds”. This should result in a lot of good-natured jollity and the death of the scheme.
can anyone really be so obtuse to not notice david’s article was humor? the dead give away for those who are humor-disabled was the category listing of HUMOUR. doh.
Shouldn’t there be a little veil on the card instead?
Euan, Verity:
“I think the compulsory ID card is unnecessary because it won’t really permit anything that isn’t already possible.”
It’s not the card. It’s the population register and database linkage that goes with it.
I wouldn’t say I was entirely happy about the existing identification and surveillance culture either.
[To get a company bank account for a client recently, I was astonished to discover not only had the signatory directors to be “identified” in prescribed manner, but i>all officers, and the shareholders, and where a shareholder was a trust, the trust deeds were also demanded. (Not that I as a mere company secretary would have any wish, let alone any right, to obtain those.) I somehow doubt they do that with Bank of England Nominees.]
Leaving aside the bully-boys of the state being able to say at every opportunity, “We know where you live,” Official ID will entrench the existing madness by making it oh so much more convenient.
It ain’t funny. Though HMG making a pig’s breakfast of the technology may well be in a sick sort of way–as long as you aren’t one of those deprived of a vote, banned from travelling, unable to cash a cheque, tagged as a child-rapist… or simply wish to live in freedom.
Verity – I sympathise with your point of view, but I think it’s pretty much inevitable that we’re going to get these things whether we want them or not.
Britain is one of few countries in the world where you don’t need to carry “papers” wherever you go. Having lived and worked in places where you do, I don’t see it as a major problem. It even has its daft side too – I once gained access to a government owned port in Kazakhstan on the strength of a Nigerian driving licence with a mis-spelled name, but nobody was too bothered about the fact that I was breaking the law by not carrying my passport with me. Oh yes, and I was arrested in Nigeria for not carrying papers too, but that just cost a little “facilitation” and with one bound Euan was free.
I think there is something to be said for the pro-card view of “if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about”. I know that’s not the point, but the point is, IMO, pretty academic.
EG
I have never understood the reasoning that because most other countries have identity cards we should have them. “No identity card,British Eh?”.Why can’t they be like us?
There will be a new administrative offence of not carrying a card,the argument that it won’t be compulsory to carry one is quite frankly a lie.otherwise what use are they? “There now Mr bin Laden you just pop off home and get your card and present it at the Police station”.
Every pox doctors clerk and his dog will demand to see them.how many are bound by privacy agreements like the Inland Revenue for example?
This is New Labour we are talking about,do you really trust Tony the Wonder Dog and his performing fleas to get it right?
Euan Gray
“I sympathise with your point of view, but I think it’s pretty much inevitable that we’re going to get these things whether we want them or not.”
Not if enough people refuse to co-operate. Pre-emptive surrender may be your chosen path but it is not mine.
I may well lose but I will go down fighting.
Funny, after reading the headline, I thought the post was simply going to be “42.”
Let’s face it people we are only a few steps away from
here
Euan Gray – What does getting into some facility in Khazakstan with a misspelled driver’s licence have to do with identity cards? And the amusing little vignette about being arrested for not carrying papers in Nigeria? This was supposed to prove what? Well, that renowned beacon of liberty, law and order and home to tens of thousands of email frauds, Nigeria, has this law, so that’s OK then.
In addition, you seem unable to advance an argument for freeborn citizens being required to “carry papers”. Saying that other countries require it is to say that other countries are even further down the road to government control than Britain.
Peter Bocking, no I don’t trust Tony the Wonder Dog and his performing fleas.
No one else has said anything about the extraordinary pre-concession to let Muslim women off the hook. There are, as far as we know, no white female suicide bombers. All female suicide bombers have been Muslim women. But they’re to be given a free pass because … uh, we have to respect their religion. Maybe they should have to respect the law. Just an idea.
Further, as I have pointed out before, Blunkett is blind. He has never seen a Muslim woman in one of these creepy outfits. Apart from anything else, they could be carrying 10 lbs of explosives under burqas and would refuse to be searched because they’re Muslim. Blunkett is a nutter. He has no right to be creating a special class of people in Britain.
It shows that it’s not always as serious an indication of the state’s overmighty power as many here seem to think. Frequently the rule is ignored, alternatives are acceptable, etc.
Everything posted here has to prove something, be deeply meaningful and logically consistent? That’s as much fun as a discussion on Leninist dialectics. Sheesh.
It just shows (again) there are ways around things. People are flexible. And in Nigeria, extremely and sometimes conveniently corrupt.
EG
I’m with Verity and David on this one. I’ll go down fighting. Euan, I’m sorry, but the old mantra of nothing to hide, nothing to fear just won’t wash. We all (every one of us) has something we would not wish the authorities to know. Whether this could be a problem is at present unknown, because we don’t know what the question may be.
Just for a moment consider this; how would a future government choose to use the database and cards? We don’t know. We also have no way of guaranteeing that they will be benign.
Euan – Are you really suggesting that an English official would take a bribe a la the Nigerians if your your “papers” weren’t “in order”? We are speaking of a technologically advanced country – not Kazakstan and Nigeria, for god’s sake! There aren’t “ways round” trivial infractions in Britain.
Also, knowing the officiousness of English officials – and even people who aren’t officials – it would have to be an awfully large bribe to persuade him to forego the pleasure of saying, “Left it at home did you, sir? Weren’t aware that it’s a legal obligation to carry you ID at all times for presentation to the authorities on request? That’s a likely story and no mistke. Just come along with me, sir. Step this way if you don’t mind.”
They probably already know all about it.
Since when did technological advancement confer immunity to corruption?
I don’t especially like the idea of ID cards, nor am I suggesting that British officials are as open to bribery as Nigerians. I think the cards are unnecessary but probably inevitable.
I agree that the use of the data on them may be malicious. On the other hand, define malicious. Some people object to the use of biometric data in, for example, calculating insurance premiums. But this already happens, albeit on a less detailed scale – health insurers want to know about your family history and past health, car insurers want to know about your driving and medical records, etc. Surely as good capitalists you can’t object to corporations maximising their profits by minimising their exposure to risk, can you? The State might use the data to assess propensity to crime, for example, or so some would argue. If a certain category of people commit a disproportionate amount of crime, and if you happen to fit into that category, you might get examined in more detail, I suppose.
But that’s not a state thing, one might expect a security corporation in an anarcho-capitalist society to try the same thing. “Hey, don’t worry, it’s just your customer reference number…” I mean, how much information do private corporations hold on us? Does anyone here quibble about that? That could be misused too.
I don’t know. I am yet to be convinced of the arguments either for or against the concept.
Frankly, I doubt if the vast majority of people will actually carry them around all the time. I would expect that the enforcement of punishment for not carrying them will in a shortish time simply be overlooked as there will be too many offenders to deal with. However, that doesn’t mean the law will go away or anything.
EG
Actually, now we see the draft bill, it does seem to be the answer to everything, being a classic enabling act. They’ve done a lot more work on this than the average scratch bill. It is important to them.
The Secretary of State (read: the Home Office) can do more or less whatever, whenever. Including, rather fabulously, making people into un-persons by removing them from the Register. Enforcement of compliance (as distinct from punishment for misuse) will be by chunky civil penalties, so none of that tiresome trial and proof stuff.
I haven’t spotted yet where it permits the creation of false identities for Government use, but since that would be essential for spies and secret police, the capacity must be in there somewhere.
You have an uncommonly high regard for their level of competence.
These are the folk who gave us the passport fiasco – among others.
According to BB this is to be a new, clean database.
I repeat, we all have something we don’t wish to share – and they don’t know everything about us at the moment.
Mark Ellott: “We all (every one of us) has something we would not wish the authorities to know. Whether this could be a problem is at present unknown, because we don’t know what the question may be.”
Quite. But it is currently really difficult for the authorities to collate the information that may be nominally accessible to them about us under the RIP Act, without some unifying key. That key–a bureaucratic surveillance holy grail–is provided by an index of the population that is one-to-one and onto the populace. Which is what The Register is, or is intended to be.
Once your home, car, tax, NHS, employment records (…phone, and ISP accounts, bank, credit cards, organisation memberships…) are keyed to the The Register, then they don’t actually have to be stored by the state to be available to it. Cards, I reiterate, are a sideshow.
There is a fundamental difference between the multiple, partial, fragmented, ad hoc identities that we all have at the moment, which are created largely voluntarily by us as individuals and emanate from us, and the unitary, compact, state-endorsed, state- controlled (and potentially state-withheld) model of ID as the index and permit of a data subject. Our natural identities are fuzzy things arising out of our various relationships. We are different things to different people, and there are incoherences, errors, contingencies, differences of emphasis or presentation, that mean not everything matches. The Register seeks to replace this with ONE dominant relationship–that with the state–and demands (through penalties for “false” ID) that there’s no discontinuity.
It seems not to be widely remarked–and it is a subtle point to grasp–but Mr Blunkett and his cohorts in many countries are trying to change what it means to be a human being.
Guy Herbert writes :
Mr Blunkett and his cohorts in many countries are trying to change what it means to be a human being
Resistance is futile: you will be assimilated.
I’ve downloaded the consultation doc/draft bill, so I can read it for myself. One of my colleagues saw this and said “you’re going to read that? you must be mad”. So I pointed out to him that it was attitudes such as his which result in government passing draconian legislation. “I spose so” he meekly responded, like the good little sheeple he is.
We are Borg, perhaps.
I prefer: “I am not a number, I am a free man.”
Guy Herbert, in his post before last, illuminates a dark, shadowy corner that we haven’t looked at before – on this blog. He is correct in implying that we are all multiple personalities to some extent, even to the state. We are drivers. We are credit card holders. We are mortgage holders, etc. We hold these identities discretely, for the convenience of ourselves and those who have accorded us these facilities – not for the convenience of the state.
Blunkett intends that these little conveniences all be melded together into a “person” who is answerable to servants of the state. It is all so off centre.
How does Blunkett think these cards are going to give the government a handle on terrorism and potential terrorists? As I said before, how many white women have been suicide bombers? None. The only female suicide bombers (so far) have been Palestinian women targetting Israel. So, who gets a free pass as far as photos are concerned? Not white women, but Muslim women, of course! – as Blunket worships at the multiculti altar in defiance of reason.
So if potential suicide bombers don’t need to have their photos taken for a notional national ID card, then what is the point of a national ID card other than control? Mr Blunkett’s arguments should not be tossed aside lightly but, as Dorothy Parker once said, thrown aside with great force.
David Blunkett’s a control freak, like his boss and like all socialists. His ID card has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with state control.
How is identity to be established for the purposes of creating an ID card? From existing ID. The information going into the system is limited by the quality of the source.
ID cards will not work. They cannot. As Bruce Schenier has pointed out, the failure mode is not the law-abiding but those who are determined to outwit the system (such as terrorists). No ID card system in history has been immune to forgery. Unfortunately the discovery process of finding out how hopeless the system is will cause a lot of grief to innocent people along the way.
And another question I keep asking, to no avail: what of Britons who are not ordinarily domiciled in the UK? I spend maybe 10 days a year in the UK. Do I have to get an ID card? From where? And why should I? And do you honestly think I will? (Answer: not bleedin’ likely.)
It fails for a few but works well enough on the many to be a valuable tool of control for government. It is of no consequence that the bureaucratic conception of compact identity is flawed, it can still be broadly imposed.
Whether or not The Register works as advertised doesn’t really matter as long as the authorities do not admit that it doesn’t. Which can be kept up for a very long time once people not in the system don’t officially exist and/or are defined as criminals. And meantime it can still be mostrously oppressive. (Winterized wheat, anybody?)
Here in the U.S., specifically Pennsylvania, the state was recently in the center of a controversy in which fake driver’s licenses were issued to a slew of foreigners.
Besides that, this is a prime example of why a national I.D. will never solve everything — fake I.D.’s. They have been made before, they are still being used, and this will just be another opportunity for their manufacturers.
Before 9/11, there was a supermarket you could go to in Houston and outside inthe parking lot, there were people touting any fake ID you wanted or needed. It was all perfectly open. Everyone knew where to go and this little group of people had a good reputation for quality.
Similarly enterprising people exist in Britain and they will be producing identity cards which are indistinguishable from the government’s within 20 minutes of the first official ones being issued.
If Blunkett knows this, he is a knave. If he doesn’t know this, he is a fool.
I notice Herr Blair has been uncharacteristically quiet about this. As it’s not a thrilling “initiative with which he wishes to be personally associated”, he’ll let Blunkett carry the can. But as we know, nothing happens in the one-man British government unless it sprang from the glorious brain – I use the word loosely – of Herr Blair and/or Imelda.
It’s NOT the card that matters. It’s The Register. If you lot don’t get this, then there’s really no chance with the mug punters.
Yes; one more lump pf plastic, chipped, biometrically-keyed, or otherwise will be readily forged. (Which is why in due course it will be discovered to be essential to link more and more types of records and install more and more people scanners.) In the absence of a population Register, an ID-card is irritating, bad in principle, but not a real threat.
With a population Register, even if the people-scanning isn’t very good (and it won’t be for a while), the state has still succeeded in transforming the nature of identity and multiplying its power many times over. Once there’s a Register and it’s accepted then the means of tying it to bodies can be cards, subcutaneous implants, barcode tatoos, whatever.
This isn’t just something Blunkett made up on the spur of the moment. It has been a long-term goal of a variety of departmental policies for well over 20 years. The politicians appear to believe that it is a response to their short term requirements. Peter Lilley wasn’t conned, but New Labour has a deep-ingrained trust in the power the state to do good.
Guy,
You make a good point — that a national ID means nothing without a register. It has been brought up in a recent lawsuit in the U.S. brought by John Gilmore, a dedicated libertarian. He argues that those boarding a plane should be checked for weapons, not checked for ID, because there is no national register, reducing ID cards to what I labeled them — symbols of the state’s influence.
Ian Hamet was twitted at the beginning of this thread for taking David Carr’s suggestion seriously. Poor chap.
Had he waited we would all have seen Mr Carr for the great prophet he is and Mr Hamet as his harbinger. By Thursday Richard Starkey and Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (who didn’t get their grants by suggesting their subject is only of theoretical importance), were writing in The Guardian’s science section–not, note, John Vidal’s Wednesday enviro-lunacy–that:
QED.
Wait for government claims that ID-cards are vital for the struggle against global
terrorismwarming.Oh yes… of course… how could I be so blind! It has to be integrated with a worldwide system that tracks everyone’s movements (all that fuel-burning travel) and domestic habits (power consumption).
iwanna know someone