'PAPIEREN, bitte!" The totemic police-state plan for identity cards, launched by Tony Blair as the flagship initiative of the New Labour totalitarian regime, was abandoned last week by Alan Johnson in the latest of the U-turns that have recently char
acterised the death agonies of Gordon Brown's government.
Or so the headlines might suggest. The reality is that the most sinister elements of this tyrannical scheme were always submerged and much of that toxic substructure survives intact to menace our liberties. The other reason why celebration is not in order is the fact that the greater part of the money allocated to the identity card scheme and its related bureaucracy is irrecoverable.
Never have the totalitarian aspirations of the arrogant, overblown state been better exemplified than in this Orwellian plan to catalogue all citizens on a National Identity Register. While the notion of the police or other busybodies stopping people and demanding to see their identity cards was an emotive issue, the chief threat to liberty always lay in the National Register.
This enormous database, designed to store unprecedented amounts of information about everybody in the country, has not been cancelled. It is the National Register that has already swallowed vast sums of money: the government admits to an overall cost of £5 billion; the London School of Economics calculates the true cost will be between £10bn and £20bn. That is an unconscionable amount of money, squandered to no better purpose than facilitating further invasion of our privacy by the intruder state.
Significantly, even Alan Johnson has admitted it was a mistake to try to represent ID cards as a "panacea" for combating terrorism. Germany and Spain have ID cards and they have proved ineffectual as a security measure, as evidenced by the Atocha station bombings in Madrid. The real purpose of ID cards was to make us all pawns of the government: they are the ultimate expression of the monstrous concept that the state is the master and we are its servants, rather than the reverse.
The primary challenge of 21st-century politics is to implement that reversal and reduce the state to its subservient role as the small-scale instrument of the public will. That will never happen in a society where the over-mighty state keeps detailed records of its citizens. The proposed ID cards would have stored 49 items of information about the bearer: no democratic government is entitled or needs to acquire so much data.
Nor would it enhance our security, in any sense. Recall the innumerable breaches of security committed in recent years by government agencies: the personal details of 25 million people and bank details of 15 million lost by HM Revenue and Customs; data on three million learner drivers similarly lost by the DVLA; the government is leaking like a sieve. For expert hackers, criminals or other interested parties the situation would be idyllic: the government does the spadework by collating undreamed-of amounts of information about every individual in the country, then the pirates move in and scoop the lot.
It was an open secret that forgers in the Netherlands were already tooled-up to produce perfect replicas of ID cards. Even if they are never imposed, the National Identity Register and passports incorporating isometric data will abolish privacy for an ever increasing percentage of the population.
It was a concern that the proposed ID cards might eventually incorporate RFID technology, already in use by the London Underground, able to scan cards with a hidden sensor without swiping them. What if passports eventually include this sinister facility? In any case, the possible future introduction of compulsory isometric passports for every citizen would amount to ID cards by the back door.
The most important resource in fighting the advance of the police state is the citizen's will to do so. In that context, it was depressing that some people welcomed ID cards for their "convenience". Helots who nestle willingly in the arms of the nanny state betray our legacy of hard-won liberties.
It seems likely the next government will be Conservative: that offers little reassurance. The Tories may be denouncing ID cards now as "Labour's bad idea", but five years ago they supported them and they would retain the Identity Register. Politicians are the enemies of freedom – though they impertinently aspire to impose a veil of secrecy over their expenses claims, they want to store the DNA and isometrically record the iris of the eyes of members of the public. Curbing their power-hungry pretensions is now an urgent priority.
