Will the compulsory ID card lobby ever give up? For more than two decades it has been trying to exploit every national crisis to push its product on the country: terrorism, violent crime, Covid and now illegal migration. Apparently the answer to all of them is to force all of us to carry about a digital ID on our phones.
Digital IDs will do precisely nothing to slaughter the real swine in this case: the European Convention on Human Rights.
What difference would that make? Will boatloads of illegal migrants now be turned back mid-Channel because they are unable to show coastguards their digital ID? Er, no. Will asylum applications be speeded up so that those who fail can be returned much more quickly? No chance. Will it now become possible to return foreign rapists and murderers to their home countries once they have completed their UK prison sentences? Forget it – digital IDs will do precisely nothing to slaughter the real swine in this case: the European Convention on Human Rights.
Keir Starmer is said to be sympathetic to an argument made by Emmanuel Macron: that migrants are flocking to Britain because they find it easy to work illegally here. The reason, thinks Macron, is that Britain, unlike France, does not have a compulsory ID card system. Yet we do have an ID which signals our right to work in the UK: a National Insurance number. If you cannot produce one of those, no above-the-board employer is going to offer you a job. That is not to say that there are not illegal workers who have been taken on by dubious employers who operate below the radar of HMRC and other authorities. But the introduction of digital ID would do nothing to stop that. If you are not going to ask your employees for a NI number, then you are not going to ask them for their digital ID either.
All that would be achieved through digital ID is to create new offences – and to generate money-making opportunities for the companies who ran the system, which is the real reason behind it. No ID on you, sir? Sorry, you can’t get on this train/ enter this bar/ come into this concert. Can’t show a police officer your ID? That’ll be a £100 fine. Can’t access your ID because your phone has run out of charge? Sorry, that’s no excuse, Sir. It’s your responsibility to ensure your phone is working.
Proponents of ID cards tend to present their adversaries as nutty right-wing libertarians who object to the very idea of government, but the real objections are far more mundane. ID cards would create yet one more layer of bureaucracy, one more form of malfunctioning technology which we would be forced to navigate. And to what purpose? They would have done nothing to prevent any of the terror attacks of the past two decades, which were committed by people who did not try to conceal their identity, only their intentions. We might have stopped the Manchester Arena bomber, on the other hand, had a security guard at the venue not been reluctant to raise his concerns for fear of being branded a racist. IDs wouldn’t have prevented muggings and murders either – although an increase in stop and search might have done. They would have done nothing to end Covid sooner – the vast majority of people were always going to have a vaccine; there was no need to bully the vaccine-shy by trying to restrict their movements. And now they would do nothing to tackle illegal migration.
Sorry, but we shouldn’t fall for this latest push for ID cards. It makes no more sense than any of the previous attempts to push them on us.
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