King of Contempt

Tony Blair will be remembered for his deluded attempt to introduce ID cards, writes Robin McAlpine

I was sitting in Barcelona with a Spanish friend.  It must have been summer 2004, because the Madrid bombing had taken place. My friend had been browsing the internet and had learned that Tony Blair wanted ID cards in Britain to fight terrorism.  She couldn’t believe this was being taken seriously.  “After all”, she said “we had ID cards and the only help they proved to be was in identifying the corpses”.

Which was when the third argument put forward for ID cards fell apart.  Or perhaps it was the fourth?  In fact, I can’t remember when it all started – weren’t ‘benefit entitlement cards’ being proposed before September 11 2001?  What I do know is that the proposal now on the table is Bond-villain-sized; the cards are small. Each will hold 51 separate categories (not pieces, categories) of information linked to a giant national database which will be accessed by an enormous network of card readers, possibly requiring retina identification, and potentially to be used any place you might need to prove your identification.  This includes paying for your groceries because theres no pretence that these cards won’t be there for use by any big business that wants to ‘identify’ you.

ID cards do not prevent terrorism – after Madrid even ID supporters have given up on that one.  ID cards will help ‘streamline benefits’ in the way that call centre technology ‘streamlines’ explaining that your bill is wrong.  Which is to say in theory only.  ID cards will sort out the immigration problem?  What, like passports?  And identity technology will combat identity fraud? A kind of fraud almost entirely enabled by identity technology?  ID cards started out costing £3 billion.  They are now up to £6 billion.  Anyone who tells you they’re going to manage to keep this in single-figure billions is kidding you.  And in any case, where our notoriously techno-phobic Prime Minister is sure it will all work fine, IT experts have very serious doubts – unsurprising given the number of giant-IT-project-goes-badly-wrong examples of recent years.

In any case, I don’t trust them because they are lying to me.  They say they are voluntary except in four circumstances – you want a driving license, you want a passport, you want to claim any kind of state benefit or you intend to live for more than five years.  They think I’m an idiot.  They think I’ll believe that as soon as I have my card, the bad people won’t be able to do anything to me any more.  I, on the other hand, imagine gangsters with a pocket full of ID cards and a bag full of severed thumbs.

Schemes which require people to register their identity are hardly new. Wherever you find people in power who are either a bit too paranoid or a bit too contemptuous an ID scheme is seldom far away.  The more power, the more paranoia, the more contempt, the more identity matters. It is why dictators are so keen on registers, lists and names.

Tony Blair isn’t a dictator, but he is our very own King of Contempt.  He thinks we get everything wrong – opposition to war, opposition to Trident, opposition to nuclear power, opposition to American foreign policy, opposition full stop. 

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