ID Cards: Well, They Have To Do Something

Identity cards will almost certainly not now go ahead. But the very suggestion of them was indicative of government's search for something with which to occupy its time when it has refused to exercise its proper role in the tradition that has come down through the Liberals Keynes and Beveridge from the ultraconservatives Colbert and Bismarck.

Instead of protecting jobs (and thus the tax base for public services) by protecting markets in goods, services, capital and labour, and instead of acting both preventatively and remedially against want, idleness, ignorance, squalor and ill health, government erodes the very liberties and other conservative values that its proper social-democratic activities would protect both against capitalism itself and against the Jacobinism, Marxism, anarchism or Fascism into which that system drives its despairing victims by the billion.

Now that one of the greatest ever such erosions of liberty looks like it is not going to go ahead, government should re-focus its attentions on its proper role.