ANOTHER VOICE

People must come to recognise the malignity of state power

AUBERON WAUGH

Smart-card driving licences carrying a photo, blood group and endorsements are a brilliant idea. But Transport Secretary Brian Mawhinney denies it is the first step towards a national ID card.

Why not? No law-abiding citizen should object to carrying them.

ID cards will be a big weapon against crooks, illegal immigrants and terrorists.

The sooner we get 'em, the better.

So the Sun addressed its readers on Wednesday, 10 August 1994. Next day Richard Littlejohn put them right in an admirably succinct sentence or two:

I know all the arguments about ID cards, how they are supposed to cut crime, terrorism, driving test fraud and probably indigestion and German measles, too. But don't be taken in. If we ever get identity cards, they will be used to bully, nanny and harass us by the police, government officials and assorted gol- liwog inspectors and muesli wardens. We are being suffocated by the State, treated as imbeciles, to be herded and prodded and controlled.

Mr Littlejohn's sentiments are admirable, but they are delivered in the tones of a romantic libertarian. The English may listen to libertarian rhetoric with a cer- tain indulgence, but they have very little real taste for freedom so far as it applies to anyone else, least of all among the working classes to whom the Sun addresses itself. It is a sad fact that the working classes, by and large, do not much mind being bullied and nannied by the state, and in the north of England they positively expect it.

I am afraid that the original Sun leader, in all its moronic ignorance, came much closer to expressing the view of the man in the street about identity cards, and by 'man in the street' in this context I include the man in the saloon bar, the man in the Turk- ish bath in the expensive health farm and even the 'intelligent' Blairward-leaning, Independent-reading, anti-bloodsports, Home Counties housewife. Pleasant, gen- uinely intelligent people can see no harm in the idea of ID cards. Most other countries have them, without great pain or suffering as a result, do they not? We had them in the war, with no ill effects. Surely it is true that no law-abiding citizen has anything to fear. It will help with welfare fraud, illegal immigration, terrorism . . .

Perhaps I had better spell out why it is that the introduction of national identity `smart' cards under present circumstances would not only mean a catastrophic loss of privacy for every one of us, but also a total- ly unacceptable extension of state power over the private citizen.

I suspect the debate has been cunningly manipulated by the Government by using the driving licence photograph as its trig- ger. Of course there is no reasonable objec- tion to having a photograph on the driving licence, any more than there is any objec- tion to having it on the passport. Nor would such a card, even if plastic, begin to be a national ID card, since half the population doesn't drive. However, the water is mud- died — I say deliberately — by the vague suggestion that at some future date the driving licence might be smartened up by the addition of a silicon chip containing extra relevant information like blood group, previous endorsements, etc.

This suggestion is nonsense. A licence already carries details of previous endorse- ments. If it is to carry further personal information (and blood can be grouped within seconds at any blood bank), it will have to be fed into the chip first from innu- merable different sources. The cost in labour and time is unthinkable. This is deliberate obfuscation. There need be no objection to a driving licence carrying extra information in that form, except that the information would soon be out of date. But a smart card is not a card carrying a chip with information stored in it. A smart card is a card with a magnetic tape which enables the user to plug into a national sys- tem of linked computer banks and discover every single piece of information stored about the cardholder — not just his crimi- nal record, his driving record, his health record, his tax record and his NH1 record, but ultimately his employment record, edu- cation record, his property registration and credit rating and even, before very long, his bank account and cash movements.

The only inkling we have of the power of a 'smart card' is provided by our cashpoint cards. Earlier this year I put mine into a machine in the French West Indies and was told the state of my account at close of business the previous day in Oxford. Multi- ply the single bank computer by a couple of hundred linked government computers and you will see what I mean. Foreigners may have had identity cards for many years but these are humble things to establish identi- ty. There can be no very serious objection to them, even if they carry a thumbprint. It is the magnetic smart card which has the most terrifying potential in the cybernetic balance between information and privacy, freedom and efficient administration or control.

Before discussing the proposition that only criminals have anything to fear from a further extension of administrative efficien- cy and state power, I will give an example which has nothing to do with the power of the state. It seems reasonable to suppose that those seeking to open a credit account will be asked to produce their ID cards for the sake of a credit-rating check. One such firm provides a bad service and you refuse to pay the bill. In revenge it posts you as a bad debtor in the relevant computer, and your ID card ensures you never have credit again.

Perhaps it will take the British a long time to see state power as something essen- tially malevolent, rather than benign. We are a naturally law-abiding race. My elder son, who is a naturally law-abiding person, invited the local housing inspectors to inspect a new staircase he had put into his house, as somebody had told him he should. Four inspectors arrived who charged £70 to pass his staircase, but said he would have to equip his house with expensive and unsightly fire doors and smoke detectors.

Eventually people must realise that there are about two million public employees out there with absolutely nothing to do but make nuisances of themselves, and charge large sums for doing it. To help them, they have been given a battery of ill thought-out oppressive laws over the last ten years which they can apply as mindlessly and as sadistically as they choose. Under this dis- pensation, the concept of the law-abiding citizen has changed somewhat. From being the lynchpin of society, he is now society's fall-guy or mug. The wise man answers no letters from any department of national or local government (unless, of course, he is trying to get money from them, when he has to submit to the whole farce of form- filling and smart cards) and never lets any public employee into his house, if he can possibly keep them out.

But if the country is stupid enough to allow government to introduce these `smart' identity cards, it will deserve every- thing in store for it.