The Spectator

Joe Biden has dropped ‘vaccine passports’. Will Boris?

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‘The government would love to put issues such as these beyond the bounds of debate by creating an air of national emergency.’ So this magazine declared on 27 November 2004 in response to Tony Blair’s proposal for national identity cards, which had just been announced in the Queen’s speech. Our editor then, Boris Johnson, argued that their very existence would threaten the character and liberty of the country. If you buckle in an emergency, he argued, the principle will be lost for ever. He urged Tory MPs to rebel and crush identity cards which, he later said, he’d abolish if he ever ended up in government.

History now repeats itself. Blair is back, advocating identity cards in the form of vaccine passports or ‘Covid status certificates’. But it’s bizarre, this time, to think of Johnson as the enabler of this scheme rather than its chief critic. The arguments he made then apply now. If anything, they apply more forcefully, given that the identity card proposed this time round is far more expensive and intrusive: a device that would require citizens to share their private health information in order to go to cinemas, concerts, sports venues and so on.

Johnson asked what practical purpose Blair’s identity cards would serve. Can their advocates prove that their introduction would make us meaningfully safer? No serious analysis of Covid status certificates has been published by ministers, who seem fearful of the open debate that Blair, for all his faults, did not run away from. Israel, which is now fully vaccinated, is discovering that for all the theoretical attractions of its ‘green pass’, vaccine passports have been pretty useless in real life and are being widely ignored by businesses and venues.

Having been in front of the argument all those years ago, the PM may end up on the wrong side of it now

Johnson’s other point — made in this magazine and later in his parliamentary career — was about the importance of stopping such technology from falling into the hands of government.

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