Identity Politics

Identity cards have been the solution in search of a problem at least since Michael Howard was Home Secretary, Shadowed by Tony Blair. Ever since, British politics has been largely defined by the unseemly bidding war between them. Now calling for digital ID, Blair is still at it. Blair did in fact secure passage of the Identity Cards Act 2006, but so little came of it that when it was repealed by the Identity Documents Act 2010, then that was unamended and unopposed, without even any compensation for those who had forked out for the cards. Did you ever see one? It was supposed to have been about terrorism, as everything was in those days, but the latest excuse is the boat people, as it is for everything these days.

Yet just as all the 9/11 bombers had had genuine identity documents, and just as identity cards had done nothing to prevent the Madrid bombing, so the small boats are coming from France, which already has identity cards. The real targets are elsewhere. Both traditional conservatives and the populist Right are at last waking up to the fact that they are as much enemies of our rulers as the rest of us. They would be endlessly ordered to show their digital ID as surely as would be the working class and the youth from which they were in any case largely drawn, as surely as would be trade unionists and anti-cuts campaigners, as surely as would be environmentalists and peace activists, and as surely as would be ethnic minorities and the religious minorities that all religions now were.

The next General Election will be in 2029, but at present the polls point to a replication of Durham County Council, with a Reform UK majority and with the Liberal Democrats as the Official Opposition. Both of those parties should declare that they would not only vote against digital ID in this Parliament, but also repeal that legislation in the next.