Darren Rhodes
2004-04-15 08:15:21 UTC
From the Spectator Magazine Link here
<http://www.lewrockwell.com/spectator/spec271.html>
Contempt for liberty
Identity cards threaten law-abiding citizens more than they threaten
terrorists, says Peter Hitchens. Their introduction would signal the end of
privacy - and of England
The arguments in favour of identity cards are empty and false. The Prime
Minister says there are no civil liberty issues involved in their
introduction, when he means that nobody in his gutless Cabinet is prepared
to put up a principled fight on this issue. He himself does not know what
liberty is. Nor, clearly, does David Blunkett, who is planning to introduce
legislation that could force everyone in Britain to have identity cards
within five years. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens,
says he wants ID cards to combat terrorism and illegal immigration and urges
us to accept his case because he is a senior policeman.
The matter is supposed to be more urgent than it was because of the recent
mass murder in Spain. The obvious fact - that Spanish citizens have carried
identity cards for years - does not seem to have occurred to those pushing
identity cards as a means of protecting us from terrorists. Nor do they seem
to have considered that most of the 11 September hijackers were in the USA
on perfectly valid visas. Professional terrorists, often with the aid of
state sponsors, can usually be guaranteed to have the most convincing papers
of anyone in the passport queue, and the cleanest records. It is you and I,
normal human beings, who are the ones likely to be held up because some
computer is convinced that our eyeballs do not match the records (the fabled
biometric scanning technology is actually nothing like as infallible as its
promoters claim). Anyone with recent experience of the Passport Office or
the DVLA will not be soothed by assurances that all will be well.
As for illegal immigrants, the most significant thing about them is that
once they are here it is all but impossible to send them home under existing
international law. The government knows this but prefers to keep quiet about
it. But that is why, when the police find obviously illegal arrivals
clambering out of lorries at midnight, they give them the address of the
nearest social services department and the Home Office immigration office
and wave them on their way. There is no point in doing anything else. How
would compelling British subjects to carry identity papers in any way alter
this fatuous process? It is the failure to halt undocumented migrants at the
frontier that needs to be remedied, a task which the government simply
shirks. Identity cards are not even a substitute for a proper immigration
policy. They are a wicked attempt to use New Labour's own failure to justify
a nasty attack on freedom.
The other great argument, that compulsory registration would in some way
combat crime, is similarly vacuous. What difference would it make? There is
no evidence that it has any effect on crime levels in any of the many
countries where cards are already compulsory. Given the almost total absence
of patrolling police officers from the streets, who would check for cards
anyway? Or would we have to submit to constant random round-ups and
roadblocks? And what would they prove? A man on the way to a burglary with a
valid identity card might well be left to carry on, while a respectable
citizen who had left his card at home might equally end up spending a night
in the cells. Given the inability of courts and police to convict, criminals
' identity cards will look just the same as everyone else's. Too many of our
politically correct police prefer to pursue the co-operative middle class
than to confront actual, frightening wrongdoers. It is easy to guess who
will be asked for papers and who will not, if they are ever imposed upon us.
The case for cards simply does not add up. It never has. That is because its
real purpose is one nobody would ever vote for - a profound change for the
worse in the relation between the individual and the state. As things stand,
any official has to justify himself to us. The police, for example, must
show warrant cards and wear numbers so that we can identify them. This is
the right way round and is an important part of living in a country with
limited government, where power is subject to law. It is, in fact, a living
proof of the presumption of innocence. We need have no business with the
state provided that we act within laws, which we have ourselves created to
govern ourselves. This is why we in these islands do not carry internal
passports, whereas almost everyone on continental Europe does. We are not
compelled, as they often are, to register with the police before we can be
connected to the electricity supply, or to show personal documents when we
purchase travel tickets. The power that identity cards give to officials -
to interrogate, obstruct and pry - is limitless, and they will use it.
Sadly, the last such episode in our history is largely forgotten. Most
people, on being told that identity cards were compulsory during the second
world war, think the measure was justified by the fear of invasion. This isn
't true. They were actually demanded, in 1939, not by the Home Office but by
the Ministry of Health, on the pretext of ensuring that people responded to
conscription. By the time they were issued, everyone of military age had
already signed up for service anyway, but the cards were still imposed. Why?
When I searched the newspaper archives for any instance of the cards aiding
the capture of a spy or a fifth columnist, I could not find a single one.
But I did discover cases of black-market trading in stolen cards, including
one so large that it ended up at the Old Bailey. Half a million people,
unsurprisingly, managed to lose theirs. Imagine the hours of queueing and
form-filling that led to. There were also cases of officiousness by police
officers and others oppressively demanding to see the papers of citizens.
Once the war was over, this jack-in-office pestilence continued to grow long
after any possible excuse for it was gone. The cards were not even of any
use to the innocent person arrested by mistake. In 1945 Charles Jarman, a
senior official of the National Union of Seamen, was held by police for
hours because they absurdly suspected him of having taken part in a
smash-and-grab raid. His valid identity card, which might have suggested to
any intelligent person that the detention was ridiculous, was no help at
all.
Perhaps the most poignant case in the files was of a Jewish furrier, Meyer
Rubinstein, who was prosecuted in May 1950 because he had never registered
his identity and so had never held a card. Presumably he had feared, in the
dangerous days of 1939, that the mere presence of his name on an official
register might one day cause his death. Who can blame him? The meticulously
registered Jews of the Continent were rounded up with great ease when the
time came, one of the few recorded and incontrovertible results of efficient
national registration. Even so, it is interesting that Mr Rubinstein had
managed to live undetected for 11 years in a Britain more regulated,
centralised, recorded and regimented than at any time before this one. He
was, however, one of the last victims of the law.
Soon afterwards, Mrs Joyce Mew of Tunbridge Wells refused to show her card
to a pettifogging rationing officer who knew perfectly well who she was (you
know the type). The case went to court and Mrs Mew was vindicated, to the
delight of many who were sick of demands to identify themselves in this way.
Even so, the government still refused to get rid of them until 1951, when
that unlikely hero of liberation, Lord Justice Goddard, sided with a
motorist who was asked by police for his card even though he had committed
no offence. Goddard growled that the police were legally entitled to behave
like this, but they ought not to be. 'The duty to produce a card,' he said
in words which Sir John Stevens might note, 'tends to make people resentful
of the acts of the police and inclines them to obstruct the police instead
of to assist them.' That did it. The cards were finally abolished and
millions of people gleefully tore them up.
In the intervening half-century, the Cold War compelled Western governments
at least to pretend they were in favour of liberty, since we were officially
battling against Soviet tyranny. The fact that Soviet citizens had to carry
internal passports was a rather strong argument against introducing them
here, much though the creepy authoritarians at the heart of the Home Office
must have wished they could emulate the Russians. Now the 'war against
terror' operates with a different ideology. It is not freedom our masters
are now protecting, but 'security', that fuzzy blanket of a word justifying
all kinds of monstrosities and misdeeds. Some think that the events of 11
September justify the suspension of scepticism about this (why, exactly?).
But Anthony Blair's enthusiasm for increased state power and contempt for
liberty - which he now links to the Manhattan massacre - long predates those
events. It was in September 1999 that he told a Labour conference, in a
passage about compulsory drug-testing for all arrested persons, 'It is time
to move beyond the social indifference of Right and Left, libertarian
nonsense masquerading as freedom.'
Mr Blair and his nasty government are actually one of the most powerful
arguments against allowing the introduction of identity cards. Their
tactics - to introduce supposedly voluntary cards but give themselves the
legal right to make them compulsory without a further Bill - are fishy and
reprehensible. But that is not the worst of it.
Some think that, because of the great number of specific identity documents
we carry, a single state-sponsored document would merely simplify our lives.
But the whole point about bank cards, passports, driving licences, office
passes and so forth is that they are limited to one purpose. A state
identity card would enable any government which chose, piece by piece and on
grounds of 'security', to combine tax, criminal, employment, health and even
education records in one place. The idea that 'if you have nothing to hide,
you have nothing to fear' would only apply if you had no concern whatever
for your own privacy. When I ask those who say this to send me their medical
details, bank statements and salary slips if they really have nothing to
hide, they tend to decline. Why, even the Prime Minister's own exam results
are a semi-official secret.
People who upset this government already tend to find that supposedly
confidential information about them mysteriously leaks into pro-Labour
newspapers. Imagine all the ways it is possible to use or abuse such
information once you have everyone's personal affairs on a central database
and Whitehall is full of morally illiterate apparatchiks trained in the
search-and-destroy methods of New Labour. Imagine the same pestilence
spreading throughout an increasingly unaccountable state machine. It would
be the end of privacy and, incidentally, the end of England.
Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday. His book The Abolition
of Liberty is published in paperback this month by Atlantic Books.
© 2004 The Spectator.co.uk
<http://www.lewrockwell.com/spectator/spec271.html>
Contempt for liberty
Identity cards threaten law-abiding citizens more than they threaten
terrorists, says Peter Hitchens. Their introduction would signal the end of
privacy - and of England
The arguments in favour of identity cards are empty and false. The Prime
Minister says there are no civil liberty issues involved in their
introduction, when he means that nobody in his gutless Cabinet is prepared
to put up a principled fight on this issue. He himself does not know what
liberty is. Nor, clearly, does David Blunkett, who is planning to introduce
legislation that could force everyone in Britain to have identity cards
within five years. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens,
says he wants ID cards to combat terrorism and illegal immigration and urges
us to accept his case because he is a senior policeman.
The matter is supposed to be more urgent than it was because of the recent
mass murder in Spain. The obvious fact - that Spanish citizens have carried
identity cards for years - does not seem to have occurred to those pushing
identity cards as a means of protecting us from terrorists. Nor do they seem
to have considered that most of the 11 September hijackers were in the USA
on perfectly valid visas. Professional terrorists, often with the aid of
state sponsors, can usually be guaranteed to have the most convincing papers
of anyone in the passport queue, and the cleanest records. It is you and I,
normal human beings, who are the ones likely to be held up because some
computer is convinced that our eyeballs do not match the records (the fabled
biometric scanning technology is actually nothing like as infallible as its
promoters claim). Anyone with recent experience of the Passport Office or
the DVLA will not be soothed by assurances that all will be well.
As for illegal immigrants, the most significant thing about them is that
once they are here it is all but impossible to send them home under existing
international law. The government knows this but prefers to keep quiet about
it. But that is why, when the police find obviously illegal arrivals
clambering out of lorries at midnight, they give them the address of the
nearest social services department and the Home Office immigration office
and wave them on their way. There is no point in doing anything else. How
would compelling British subjects to carry identity papers in any way alter
this fatuous process? It is the failure to halt undocumented migrants at the
frontier that needs to be remedied, a task which the government simply
shirks. Identity cards are not even a substitute for a proper immigration
policy. They are a wicked attempt to use New Labour's own failure to justify
a nasty attack on freedom.
The other great argument, that compulsory registration would in some way
combat crime, is similarly vacuous. What difference would it make? There is
no evidence that it has any effect on crime levels in any of the many
countries where cards are already compulsory. Given the almost total absence
of patrolling police officers from the streets, who would check for cards
anyway? Or would we have to submit to constant random round-ups and
roadblocks? And what would they prove? A man on the way to a burglary with a
valid identity card might well be left to carry on, while a respectable
citizen who had left his card at home might equally end up spending a night
in the cells. Given the inability of courts and police to convict, criminals
' identity cards will look just the same as everyone else's. Too many of our
politically correct police prefer to pursue the co-operative middle class
than to confront actual, frightening wrongdoers. It is easy to guess who
will be asked for papers and who will not, if they are ever imposed upon us.
The case for cards simply does not add up. It never has. That is because its
real purpose is one nobody would ever vote for - a profound change for the
worse in the relation between the individual and the state. As things stand,
any official has to justify himself to us. The police, for example, must
show warrant cards and wear numbers so that we can identify them. This is
the right way round and is an important part of living in a country with
limited government, where power is subject to law. It is, in fact, a living
proof of the presumption of innocence. We need have no business with the
state provided that we act within laws, which we have ourselves created to
govern ourselves. This is why we in these islands do not carry internal
passports, whereas almost everyone on continental Europe does. We are not
compelled, as they often are, to register with the police before we can be
connected to the electricity supply, or to show personal documents when we
purchase travel tickets. The power that identity cards give to officials -
to interrogate, obstruct and pry - is limitless, and they will use it.
Sadly, the last such episode in our history is largely forgotten. Most
people, on being told that identity cards were compulsory during the second
world war, think the measure was justified by the fear of invasion. This isn
't true. They were actually demanded, in 1939, not by the Home Office but by
the Ministry of Health, on the pretext of ensuring that people responded to
conscription. By the time they were issued, everyone of military age had
already signed up for service anyway, but the cards were still imposed. Why?
When I searched the newspaper archives for any instance of the cards aiding
the capture of a spy or a fifth columnist, I could not find a single one.
But I did discover cases of black-market trading in stolen cards, including
one so large that it ended up at the Old Bailey. Half a million people,
unsurprisingly, managed to lose theirs. Imagine the hours of queueing and
form-filling that led to. There were also cases of officiousness by police
officers and others oppressively demanding to see the papers of citizens.
Once the war was over, this jack-in-office pestilence continued to grow long
after any possible excuse for it was gone. The cards were not even of any
use to the innocent person arrested by mistake. In 1945 Charles Jarman, a
senior official of the National Union of Seamen, was held by police for
hours because they absurdly suspected him of having taken part in a
smash-and-grab raid. His valid identity card, which might have suggested to
any intelligent person that the detention was ridiculous, was no help at
all.
Perhaps the most poignant case in the files was of a Jewish furrier, Meyer
Rubinstein, who was prosecuted in May 1950 because he had never registered
his identity and so had never held a card. Presumably he had feared, in the
dangerous days of 1939, that the mere presence of his name on an official
register might one day cause his death. Who can blame him? The meticulously
registered Jews of the Continent were rounded up with great ease when the
time came, one of the few recorded and incontrovertible results of efficient
national registration. Even so, it is interesting that Mr Rubinstein had
managed to live undetected for 11 years in a Britain more regulated,
centralised, recorded and regimented than at any time before this one. He
was, however, one of the last victims of the law.
Soon afterwards, Mrs Joyce Mew of Tunbridge Wells refused to show her card
to a pettifogging rationing officer who knew perfectly well who she was (you
know the type). The case went to court and Mrs Mew was vindicated, to the
delight of many who were sick of demands to identify themselves in this way.
Even so, the government still refused to get rid of them until 1951, when
that unlikely hero of liberation, Lord Justice Goddard, sided with a
motorist who was asked by police for his card even though he had committed
no offence. Goddard growled that the police were legally entitled to behave
like this, but they ought not to be. 'The duty to produce a card,' he said
in words which Sir John Stevens might note, 'tends to make people resentful
of the acts of the police and inclines them to obstruct the police instead
of to assist them.' That did it. The cards were finally abolished and
millions of people gleefully tore them up.
In the intervening half-century, the Cold War compelled Western governments
at least to pretend they were in favour of liberty, since we were officially
battling against Soviet tyranny. The fact that Soviet citizens had to carry
internal passports was a rather strong argument against introducing them
here, much though the creepy authoritarians at the heart of the Home Office
must have wished they could emulate the Russians. Now the 'war against
terror' operates with a different ideology. It is not freedom our masters
are now protecting, but 'security', that fuzzy blanket of a word justifying
all kinds of monstrosities and misdeeds. Some think that the events of 11
September justify the suspension of scepticism about this (why, exactly?).
But Anthony Blair's enthusiasm for increased state power and contempt for
liberty - which he now links to the Manhattan massacre - long predates those
events. It was in September 1999 that he told a Labour conference, in a
passage about compulsory drug-testing for all arrested persons, 'It is time
to move beyond the social indifference of Right and Left, libertarian
nonsense masquerading as freedom.'
Mr Blair and his nasty government are actually one of the most powerful
arguments against allowing the introduction of identity cards. Their
tactics - to introduce supposedly voluntary cards but give themselves the
legal right to make them compulsory without a further Bill - are fishy and
reprehensible. But that is not the worst of it.
Some think that, because of the great number of specific identity documents
we carry, a single state-sponsored document would merely simplify our lives.
But the whole point about bank cards, passports, driving licences, office
passes and so forth is that they are limited to one purpose. A state
identity card would enable any government which chose, piece by piece and on
grounds of 'security', to combine tax, criminal, employment, health and even
education records in one place. The idea that 'if you have nothing to hide,
you have nothing to fear' would only apply if you had no concern whatever
for your own privacy. When I ask those who say this to send me their medical
details, bank statements and salary slips if they really have nothing to
hide, they tend to decline. Why, even the Prime Minister's own exam results
are a semi-official secret.
People who upset this government already tend to find that supposedly
confidential information about them mysteriously leaks into pro-Labour
newspapers. Imagine all the ways it is possible to use or abuse such
information once you have everyone's personal affairs on a central database
and Whitehall is full of morally illiterate apparatchiks trained in the
search-and-destroy methods of New Labour. Imagine the same pestilence
spreading throughout an increasingly unaccountable state machine. It would
be the end of privacy and, incidentally, the end of England.
Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday. His book The Abolition
of Liberty is published in paperback this month by Atlantic Books.
© 2004 The Spectator.co.uk
