The "liberal" Guardian once again leads the way in New Labour's "modernisation" of Britain. Peter Preston was editor of the Guardian from 1975-95. =====
The case for ID cards is now overwhelming We have so many bits of plastic already - one more won't hurt Peter Preston Monday October 1, 2001 The Guardian So, as a white-faced world carries on waiting, what will all good civil libertarians be doing this week? Packing their bags and heading for Brighton to demonstrate against David Blunkett's sudden passion for national identity cards? Perhaps. But let's do logistics first. Shall we sample the delights of public transport? Better remember the bus pass and railcard, then. Or loyally pump the fuel of confidence back into the market economy and go by road? Better remember the Shell card that runs up air miles points and that new photofit driving licence - plus your faithful Mastercard in case you have to buy friends an unscheduled lunch. Better nip down the road with the cashpoint card to stock up on fivers. And, of course, if you want to poke a nose anywhere inside the hall, better string a spaghetti of party IDs around your neck. Oh, and just to be safe, I always take my passport and my Scotland Yard press pass and the separate card that gets me into the Guardian building. It's kind of reassuring to feel fully stocked when you run the gauntlet of video cameras and sniffer dogs. It helps you stick your chin out and look innocent. Some debates, in short, are simply overtaken by history. Life, just going on, sees them fade into practical irrelevance. A national identity card, one more among hundreds bulging in high street wallets? No wonder, on the latest polls, that 86% line up in favour. Any residual principle is lost in an ocean of plastic. I've stood on the sea walls of opposition for too many years, but now it's time to move on. I think David Blunkett is right to bow to the inevitable. Terror, to be sure, corrodes and warps the rule of law. Northern Ireland has done that insidiously for three decades. (Whatever happened to the sharp, clear lines which governed contempt of court?) We'll have to go over Blunkett's emergency package clause by clause when it comes. But we shall also have to put one thing together with another, to remember what it was like before September 11. The argument for identity cards is a general one, embracing European integration, illegal immigration, benefit fraud and Yardie crime as well as terrorist strikes. And, with two vital caveats, it has become overwhelming. These things will be generally useful. They will be useful, first and most benignly, because they reflect the reality of this European world. Our neighbours just across the Channel, partners in an open market of goods, services and jobs, have always despaired of securing their borders. Thus the checking is done inside their countries, with cards as a virtual passport for travel throughout the union. We, by contrast, hugging our island heritage, hang on to our checks at the port of entry without supposed need for identification beyond. A reasonable scenario circa 1955; a delusion in the globalised age of Eurotunnelling and Easyjetting. And, if the threats we face are global, too, then the path has to head for harmonisation. Cooperation doesn't stop at Calais. It's useful to know, with tolerable certainty, who someone is and how he got to be where you found him. It's useful to know whether he's cheating the taxpayer. It's useful to make fraud a little harder. It's useful, pursuing a serious criminal, to have a centralised way of tapping into his other networks of purchase and travel. And it's brilliantly useful to be able to find, beyond peradventure, that any suspicions or prejudices you had were groundless. Identity cuts two ways and the positives are real. Negatives? They come by the bushel, rolling towards the home secretary this week. But the difficulty is that they are just that: negative. Consider a few of them. Identity cards won't stop terrorists because there's no card on earth, no matter how sophisticated, that can't be forged. Maybe. But that's a counsel of despair, a case for scrapping passports tomorrow. And anyway, there's no unshakeable rule which says that all future terrorists will be hi-tech billionaires; nor much in the emerging evidence against Bin Laden's associates to indicate that the pen-knife gang came from some James Bond dream academy. Identity cards don't stop crime. Naturally not: nothing stops crime. But some useful things make it a tad harder to get away with. Identity cards encourage the persecution of racial minorities and alienate the police from the communities they serve. A real point, embraced fervently enough a few years ago by the Association of Chief Police Officers to make Michael Howard swallow his half-baked plan. Negative again, though: it nods and winks and says we know what our cops are like, so they had better not be let loose on some plasticated trawl down the mean streets of Tooting. Answer: if they can't be trusted, do something about that lack of trust. Don't do nothing. So to the crunch and the caveats. There's a heartrending Iranian film called The Circle doing the arthouse rounds at the moment. It follows a succession of women fresh out of prison and lacking identity papers. They are the fearful, persecuted victims of a harsh bureaucracy. They can't get money for food, shelter or hospital treatment. And that's the precise rub here as Messrs Blair and Blunkett prepare to argue that you won't be able to get state help or medicine without a card. What happens when the first dozen illegal migrants die in agony for want of a doctor? Logic is no help here. We either approve of illegal immigration or we have to draw a line. But we also, I think, have to remember that London and Manchester aren't satellite cities of Tehran. Our bureaucracy is supposed to serve a caring, concerned democracy. It is supposed to offer efficiency with a human face. It is there, under political control, to strike a balance. That can be done - and Mr Blunkett, with some courage, will take a balancing step on Wednesday by announcing a scheme which allows and encourages immigrants who seek a better life (and not just asylum) to come here. One weasel bit of cowardice past removed. So, in its way, will be the creation of a Britain where cards are an instant affirmation of rights to live and work equally. But that will take more than a stroke of some ministerial pen. It will demand an efficiency that the chaos of current asylum seeking and the flatulence of port security gives no current hint of. It will demand more courage. What are these millions of fleeing Afghans seeking but asylum? It will demand a democratic monitoring which has a heart as well as a head. The card, in our fractured world, is only a beginning. The debate has indeed moved on - past "whether" and "why" to the hard rocks of "how". Full article at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,561016,00.html Michael Keaney Mercuria Business School Martinlaaksontie 36 01620 Vantaa Finland [EMAIL PROTECTED]
