The government stands on the brink of a critical decision. If the Home Secretary gets his way, legislation will be brought forward to introduce some form of national identity cards this autumn. If wiser counsel prevails, the government will shelve the proposals, as they did in 2001 and as the previous Conservative administration did in the mid-1990s.
Ministers of all political persuasions and senior civil servants in a whole range of departments have had a fixation with national identity cards for years. In the case of the former, the reasons are depressingly obvious. ID cards are often presented as a magic bullet solution for a vast and disparate range of social ills.
Want to help the war against terrorism? Here’s a way to do it. Concerned about benefits fraud? Well, this is a tool to prevent it. Need to get tough on illegal immigrants working in the UK? ID cards will sort that out at a stroke.
Of course, when any remotely credible research is undertaken or any vaguely serious thought given to whether these very real problems will be addressed by bringing in identity cards, the answer is a resounding ‘No’. But, tragically, that appears to do little to undermine the intrinsic attraction of the scheme to those in high office.
The approach often seems to be, ‘something must be done. This is something. So, we must do this.’ Floating the possibility of ID cards, conducting a major consultation on their supposed merits and even bringing forward legislation to facilitate their introduction helps to provide an impression that the government is serious about tackling the worries and concerns that are aired in every focus group.
Other possible solutions – real solutions – are frequently more controversial, less headline-friendly, and much harder to explain to a sceptical public. If the government does bring forward a bill later this year, it will go a considerable way to confirming that legislation has now become the highest form of spin.
It’s not just Home Office ministers who have been seduced by the supposed benefits of an identity cards scheme. They are also a bureaucrat’s dream. The mere notion of having a national database storing a range of critical information – social security data, medical history, entitlement to work – all in one place is of enormous appeal to those who are continually drawing up plans to improve efficiency and streamline administration.
This might sound all well and good, until one investigates the track record of the public sector in implementing major technological programmes. To describe the record of the Home Office, in particular, as derisory would be too kind.
The public can have little confidence that a project of this
size and scale would be delivered without a whole string of foul-ups: data entry mistakes, files being mismatched, system crashes and the like. Those innocent people on the receiving end of such inevitable errors can expect to suffer months or years of frustration, financial damage that could be crippling and, conceivably, even the denial of access to critical
state services.
The campaign against identity cards will be seeking to deploy three different strands of argument. First, and most obviously, there are a whole gamut of principled human rights, civil liberties and privacy concerns. Second, there are very powerful practical considerations about the cost and efficacy of any identity card system. Third, there is an appeal to the government’s instinct for survival relating to the possible political and electoral consequences of bringing in an ID scheme. The first and second categories are by far the most interesting, but the third will probably weigh heaviest with the cabinet.
The principled arguments relate to the increasing use of surveillance of innocent citizens by both the public and private sector. Closed circuit TV cameras monitor us in a huge range of metropolitan areas. Databases, detailing everything from our shopping habits to our credit history, are becoming more extensive and more sophisticated by the day. We face a real danger of living in a society where personal privacy is eroded to the point of non-existence.
The worn adage that ‘You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide’ needs to be tackled and defeated head on. It simply isn’t true that because you wish to keep something private, you must be up to no good. There are a whole range of issues that people wish to keep to themselves – most commonly, their age, sexuality, sexual history and religious beliefs – not because there is anything seedy or criminal, but simply because these are private and personal matters. A free society requires a government that
treats the public as citizens, not as suspects. Introducing an ID card – and the vast national database that would inevitably accompany it – is another, and substantial, step to a total surveillance society.
But it is the practical issues that often exercise the public. An identity card system would cost several billion pounds to implement and hundreds of millions of pounds a year to service.
The experience of other Western countries is that this money is not recouped in cutting crime or reducing fraud. In fact, the opposite is often the case. Sophisticated and high-value identification documents provide lucrative employment to counterfeiters, fraudsters and networks of organised crime.
The question opinion pollsters always ask is ‘Do you support introducing ID cards?’
The question they should ask is ‘If the government had £3.5 billion to spend, would you like this money put into a) more police officers on the beat; b) education; c)
the National Health Service; or d) bringing in ID cards?’ Phrased in that fashion, I believe it would become apparent that there is no great appetite amongst the British public for an identity card scheme.
The best hope for opponents of ID cards, however, is not to appeal to the government’s reason but to its instinct for self-preservation. The government has made a whole series of different enemies over recent months. Even if they calculate that those wholly opposed to ID cards account for no more than ten percent of the population, this is a well-organised, determined and growing lobby.
Before the cabinet even considers pressing ahead, they should learn a lesson from the Australians. The national identity card system there was introduced on a wave of public support. This melted away rapidly and turned to widespread dissatisfaction
and open public revolt. The intensity of opposition was so great that the government nearly fell.
Identity cards in Britain could end up being New Labour’s poll tax. If the government is sensible, they will shelve their proposals. And this time, they’ll shelve them for good.