We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The Guardian reports:
All asylum seekers who fail to register with the government should be deprived of access to British schools and hospitals, the former cabinet minister Stephen Byers said yesterday in a controversial speech designed to reassure working class voters that Labour understood their concerns about immigration.
At his monthly press conference yesterday, Tony Blair promised that the government would go further on asylum, and said he thought identity cards were right in principle even if the logistical cost was daunting.
In principle there is a case, in my view, for Britain moving towards … ID cards. However, there are huge logistical and cost issues that need to be resolved. It’s worth looking – which is what we are doing – at how you can resolve them, but it’s not a quick-fix for the system because of the amount of time and the logistical process in introducing them.
Mr Byers, in his proposals on illegal entrants who fail to claim asylum, proposed that all employers should get automatic fines of £2,000 for each illegal immigrant found at work.
This would make the body creating the demand for labour – the farmer, hotel or restaurant owner, multinational company or government department – take responsibility for the people employed on their behalf. Special squads should target known areas of illegal working.
Andy Duncan over at Samizdata.net gives 20 reasons why ID cards are wonderful. Frankly it’s a fraud, he can’t provide even one…
Who’d have thought it? The UK Department of Health has said ID cards are the best way for removing health tourism from the UK government’s dreadful National Health Service (NHS). What a coincidence that the Home Office, which has been struggling for decades to find a problem necessitating an ID card solution, are trying to introduce just the very thing. And at this exact moment in time? Fancy that.
And here’s the best part. State-subsidised UK family doctors already refuse people access rights to their medical lists, if they don’t have the correct UK citizenship qualifications or residency permissions. Yes, the very people whom the ID card is supposed to prevent abusing the glorious wonders of the NHS, are already prevented from abusing it, at least up to the point the government is prepared to stop them. And whatever happens, the Department of Health have said, nobody will ever be refused emergency treatment, whatever their circumstances.
So currently, without ID cards in place, all those whom the state deems invalid for NHS treatment must go to Accident and Emergency departments, which will treat everyone who turns up regardless of status. And in the envisaged ID card NHS future, all those whom the state deems invalid for NHS treatment must go to Accident and Emergency departments, which will treat everyone who turns up regardless of status. Err…Doh?
The only solution to stop ‘health tourism’, where hapless British taxpayers are forced to subsidise the health needs of various global parasites, is to abolish the NHS. Immediately.
That way, everyone pays for what they need, or insures themselves against what they might need. And Britain can start becoming a welcoming place again, which people only come to for its wet Welsh weather and its fine Breakspear ales, rather than trying to sponge off our coerced goodwill after fighting their way through malevolent Blunkettesque security, at the ports of entry, before finding the nearest organised crime ID card forger.
Is this solution too simple, or should I be strung from the nearest lamp-post for daring to suggest that the great white elephant of our wondrous National Health Service should be slaughtered right here, and right now? String me up, baby. It can’t come a moment too soon.
Via Samizdata.net
Tony Blair, at his monthly press conference, has just been asked whether he supports compulsory National Identity Cards.
He replied “In principle there is a case” and that he felt it was the right way forward in “the long term”.
However he also stressed that there are “huge logistical and cost issues” involved and that this was “not a quick fix” to issues such as asylum seekers.
Maybe I’m being too optimistic but I find this equivocation encouraging. It does tend to support the view that Big Blunkett’s plans are being put on the back burner.
The depressing thing is that the only problems Blair can see with ID cards are logistical and cost issues. No mention of privacy and civil liberties, those things simply don’t seem to matter.
I quite often stumble across snippets of news which touch upon so many big themes and ideas that they would easily support an entire political thesis. As it is, and as it’s blogging here, I shall confine my comments to the mere immediate and obvious.
And I suppose the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from this item is that the Home Office is not the only department of government to have embraced the desire for ID cards:
The Department of Health yesterday called for the use of identity cards to prove entitlement to free care as it acted to put an end to “health tourism” – the exploitation of NHS loopholes by visitors from abroad.
To avoid problems of racial discrimination everyone would have to show their card before they received non-emergency treatment.
In the meantime the prospect of proving identity or residency by showing a passport or a utility bill is being considered.
No surprises there really. HMG is running out of money so cutbacks in largesse are the order of the day (okay, today) and, in the first instance, that means no more free health-care for foreigners. In the fullness of time this restriction will extend to the elderly, children and, quite possibly, the sick.
We also now know (as if we didn’t already suspect) that ID cards are not just Mr.Blunkett’s obsession but a technocratic fetish that has gripped our entire governing elite. I wholly expect to see successive government departments producing their own niche raisons d’ID card’ over the coming months.
There is a damn good argument that can be used to undermine the state here but, in order to wield it effectively, our friends on the left are going to have to embrace that time-honoured (but generally despised) libertarian truism about public ‘services’ eventually becoming public ‘masters’.
‘Free’ ends up being very expensive.
I disagree with those people who claim that Tony Blair is delusional or psychotic. I think he might have a better grip on reality than many of his detractors claim. For example, he appears to be under no illusions about how unpopular both he and his wretched government have become:
Tony Blair has put off the launch of a plan to compel every Briton to hold an ID card in response to fears that it will turn into an expensive and frustrating assault on liberty.
But why should this exercise prove either ‘expensive’ or ‘frustrating’ if, as Mr.Blunkett assures us, the ‘vast majority’ of the public are in favour of the scheme?
I suspect that the truth is grubbier but no less welcome. A weakened and frightened Tony Blair realises that if Blunkett is allowed to press ahead with his despotic little plans the result will be widespread civil disobedience and a PR disaster.
Maybe we can still win this.
Statewatch has a good exposition of the issues surrounding ID cards in the UK historically. At least in those days MPs put up some fight for “our freedom from being challenged on every occasion to produce something to prove that we are certain persons”
Aneurin Bevan MP, 1947, from the government benches in the House of Commons:
I believe that the requirement of an internal passport is more objectionable than an external passport, and that citizens ought to be allowed to move about freely without running the risk of being accosted by a policeman or anyone else, and asked to produce proof of identity.
I’ve no time (but someone here should definitely try to make the time) for a longer response to this article by Stephen Robinson in the Telegraph.
Its title – “Identity cards won’t stop the terrorists: they’re only a fig leaf ” – will do for starters.
A fascinating story. John Gilmore is incensed about the requirement of showing identification to fly. And he is furious about something that happened to him recently, when a lapel button landed him and his travelling companion on the tarmac.
My sweetheart Annie and I tried to fly to London today (Friday) on British Airways. We started at SFO, showed our passports and got through all the rigamarole, and were seated on the plane while it taxied out toward takeoff. Suddenly a flight steward, Cabin Service Director Khaleel Miyan, loomed in front of me and demanded that I remove a small 1″ button pinned to my left lapel. I declined, saying that it was a political statement and that he had no right to censor passengers’ political speech. The button, which was created by political activist Emi Koyama, says “Suspected Terrorist”. Large images of the button and I appear in the cover story of Reason Magazine this month, and the story is entitled “Suspected Terrorist”.
The narrative is good and the point made brilliantly. You can just picture the Station Manager who had to deal with the ‘unruly’ individuals, we all met her type at one time or another. The truth is that it is people at the ground level, so to speak, that help to impose the rules of a potential police state in the name of convenience and other peoples’ well-being. Without them even the most oppressive government would not last long…
Via Cassel: Civil Liberties Watch
A Telegraph reader from Brussels writes:
As a Briton who has lived in Belgium for more than 26 years, I am possibly more “identity card conscious” than most and can see where these things can lead. Apart from the references to a photograph (which my card bears) and biometric data (which my card does not), I have seen no reference to other information to be recorded on the proposed British card.
My card also shows my marital status, my address and an expiry date. References to the £39 fee for the card have all implied that it would be a one-off charge – however, if it follows the pattern of cards here, this charge will be payable for a new card whenever one moves house, marries, divorces or is widowed, or, if none of those things occurs, after a certain number of years.
In addition, since here the card is issued at a commune (borough) level, moving to a different commune can involve the requirement to produce such things as a “Certificat de Bonne Vie et Moeurs” (Certificate of Good Character) from the police in your last commune.
As if this wasn’t enough, the system then requires policing. A friend of mine, a woman living alone in a large house, decided as a safety measure to add a couple of fictitious names to the doorbell, to make the house seem more populated. She then discovered that the commune employs people to go around noting the names on doorbells, and comparing them against the local register. The only way she could stop the commune hassling her about these two “illegal residents” was to remove the names.
The Telegraph reports how the ease with which Britain’s asylum system can be abused has been revealed by an undercover investigation showing the scale on which immigrants are cheating the state.
The investigation found that identity checks supposed to prevent fraud are not working. Instead, illegal immigrants can easily obtain fake identities that allow them to work or claim benefits illegally. In one instance, a reporter from the BBC Panorama programme secretly filmed an asylum seeker who was making hundreds of pounds a month renting out the three-bedroom house he has been given by his local council in Birmingham.
The undercover reporter for the BBC Panorama, Claudia Murg, found that the finger-printing system introduced in an attempt to prevent multiple applications for asylum appeared not to work. It did not pick up the fact that, shortly after her first asylum application had been rejected, she made a second in a different name – even though her fingerprints were on file under both identities.
We, at White Rose, have maintained that measures proposed by the Home Office such as fingerprinting, ID cards and other biometrics technology for recording individuals’ identity are only as effective as the ‘human infrastructure’ surrounding them. The government’s attempts to introduce ID cards are nothing more than evidence of the state’s propensity to control the lives of the ‘honest citizens’ since they are incapable of stopping those who abuse of the system.
The Telegraph reports that the Conservatives yesterday joined civil rights groups in voicing opposition to the Government’s proposals to introduce compulsory identity cards and criticised David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, for masking his true intentions behind “spin and obscurity”.
Plans to announce the scheme in the Commons before Parliament rises today have been shelved – officially because of pressure on parliamentary time – but the Home Office said yesterday that the proposals for the ID card were “progressing well”, with an announcement expected in the autumn.
Oliver Letwin, the shadow Home Secretary, said he remained “highly dubious” about any move towards a compulsory ID card.
The issue of an identity card is too important a one, with too far-ranging implications for our liberties, for the Home Secretary to resort to spin and obscurity.
Home Office estimates of the cost of the scheme range from £1.6 to £3.14 billion but Simon Davies, of Privacy International, says the true cost will be very much higher. Mr Davies led a campaign against an Australian ID card in the 1980s. Initially the plan was popular but opposition grew strongly when the scheme was finally unveiled and the government was forced to abandon it.
We know from industry estimates that a ‘smart’ card with biometric information such as the one proposed will cost well over £100 per head, so the final cost will be more like £5.5 billion.
This is a high risk political gamble for David Blunkett. He knows that popular opposition will mushroom once people understand the implications of the card, so he is being meticulous in concealing his ultimate ambitions.
White Rose readers will surely appreciate being told, if they don’t know it already, that a short posting by Gabriel Syme about compulsory ID cards, and about White Rose’s campaigning against them, was put up at Samizdata.net last Sunday.
The point is the comments, of which there have been 22 so far (Tuesday evening). The worst of the comments about anything on Samizdata are the usual abusive or incomprehensible nonsense (and the worst of them of all get deleted), but the average is good, and the best are often outstandingly interesting and informative, fully worthy to be postings in their own right on the average blog.
The ID card debate can get subtle, and lots of these subtleties are teased out in these particular comments.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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