teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...

I don’t often stray off topic - in fact this is my first time - but I felt that I must vent my spleen about the outrageous decision made this week by UK MPs…

In two years time, UK citizens applying for passports will also be compelled to pay for an ID card which stores biometric identification and around fifty pieces of information about the individual. This ‘creeping compulsion’ - making ID cards compulsory by linking them in with other things such as driving licenses, access to health, passports, etc. is a slippery slope. We already live in a country which has the highest density of CCTV cameras in the world and the police are beginning to track our movements on major roads by reading our number plates - all in the name of ’security’ and preventing fraud.

Let’s go back to fundamentals, shall we? The role of the state is to protect individuals. The introduction of ID cards, it has been argued, will make the UK a more secure and safer place. How, exactly? As the NO2ID campaign asserts, less liberty does not imply greater security. It has been independently judged that the terrorist attacks on London of 7 July 2005 would not have been prevented if ID cards were already compulsory:

I can’t think of many terrorist incidents, in fact I can think of very few… that ID cards would have brought to an earlier end…
I certainly don’t think the absence of ID cards could possibly have any connection with the events of last July…
There may be a gain from the security viewpoint in the curtailment of civil liberties, but Parliament has to be the judge about whether the proportion is right…Liberal Democrat peer Lord Carlile, who conducted an independent investigation into anti-terror laws, and who was initially in favour of ID cards.

The Tube bombers would have been able to get ID cards - do we really doubt that? The government needs to explain how ID cards will stop terrorism as, short of random checks by police on every UK citizen, I can’t see how they could.

But of course the government have argued that ID cards will bring with them other, additional, advantages. One of these is the alleged problem of identity theft. Just how many people have their identity stolen each year? How does having 50+ pieces of information on one card make it less easy to steal someone’s identity? Does the fact that a small number of people unfortunately are victim to identity-theft crime outweight civil liberties? Not in my book. It is proposed that by 1 July 2008 you will be required to show your ID card when paying by debit or credit card. What happens if you lose your card?

Another alleged advantage is prevention of benefit fraud. The government admits that 95% of such fraud is not ID fraud but ‘misrepresentation of circumstances’ - i.e. lying about medical conditions. If I say I can’t work because my back hurts or I’m depressed, how will an ID card force me back into work?

The prevention of illegal immigration is another claimed advantage of the introduction of ID cards. Those entering the UK illegally don’t have the requisite documentation anyway, so how is introducing another condition going to prevent them. Many immigrant workers take jobs that UK-born people are unwilling to take - menial jobs which are necessary but unpleasant. Whilst I’m not in favour of illegal immigration, the introduction of ID cards is not going to make this problem and others go away.

You could have the most secure database in the world, but it has to be accessed by someone. As was proved in a case two years ago, if you can’t trust the people operating the database, the whole system falls apart. And what happens if someone enters incorrect information into the database? How do you prove that it is wrong without being majorly inconvenienced and feeling like a criminal in your own country?

After reading this, you may be thinking that ID cards might be challenged due to invasion of human rights. However, the UK lacks a written constitution, so it’s a lot harder to prove that a law infringes fundamental rights. Some may argue that other European countries, such as Germany, France and Belgium have ID cards and no major problems. However, in Germany centralisation is forbidden and when one gains a replacement card, the two records are not linked. Belgium uses ultra-high encryption and local storage to protect privacy and data-sharing. The Home Office plan is opposed to both of these implementations. In other parts of the world - such as Australia and the USA - which have ID cards, they have far worse problems of identity theft, and this is precisely because of their reliance on a single reference source.

So I’ll be opposing the introduction of ID cards, and I suggest you do too. I won’t become a martyr for the cause, however, because I can’t - the government’s made sure of that. Refusing to have an ID card will be a civil, not a criminal offence, so all that would happen is that I would be fined until I became bankrupt. And when the time comes and I disagree with the idea, I won’t even be able to leave the country. Great.

As one commentator has put it:

It’s the nature of governments to continually increase their power, and it’s the responsibility of the people to limit a governments power to the absolute minimum required to fulfill its function.

I agree entirely.

Related Links:

• NO2ID
• At-a-glance: ID card plans [BBC]
• ID cards in other countries [BBC]

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