Contempt for liberty

Identity cards threaten law-abiding citizens more than they threaten terrorists, says Peter Hitchens. Their introduction would signal the end of privacy — and of England

The arguments in favour of identity cards are empty and false. The Prime Minister says there are no civil liberty issues involved in their introduction, when he means that nobody in his gutless Cabinet is prepared to put up a principled fight on this issue. He himself does not know what liberty is. Nor, clearly, does David Blunkett, who is planning to introduce legislation that could force everyone in Britain to have identity cards within five years. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, says he wants ID cards to combat terrorism and illegal immigration and urges us to accept his case because he is a senior policeman.

The matter is supposed to be more urgent than it was because of the recent mass murder in Spain. The obvious fact — that Spanish citizens have carried identity cards for years — does not seem to have occurred to those pushing identity cards as a means of protecting us from terrorists. Nor do they seem to have considered that most of the 11 September hijackers were in the USA on perfectly valid visas. Professional terrorists, often with the aid of state sponsors, can usually be guaranteed to have the most convincing papers of anyone in the passport queue, and the cleanest records. It is you and I, normal human beings, who are the ones likely to be held up because some computer is convinced that our eyeballs do not match the records (the fabled biometric scanning technology is actually nothing like as infallible as its promoters claim). Anyone with recent experience of the Passport Office or the DVLA will not be soothed by assurances that all will be well.