Observations on ID cards

Even after 30-odd years in Britain, there are things I still find baffling about this country. You can probably guess what most of them are: pickled eggs, wearing socks with sandals, William Rees-Mogg, that sort of thing. However, in common with most other Europeans, I also do not entirely understand, first, the widespread opposition to the introduction of identity cards, and, second, that the opposition should include so many left-wing commentators.

It's not that I believe ID cards are a particularly good (or bad) thing, though most continental Europeans would probably find daily life slightly less convenient without them. Rather, I believe they are a particularly irrelevant thing. I do recognise that ID cards could be used by the police as an excuse to harass vulnerable people such as refugees and asylum-seekers. But that is a very specific, and ultimately fixable, issue. My problem relates more to civil liberties taken as a whole and in general.

The most common argument I have heard against ID cards goes roughly like this. In the absence of a written constitution and a Bill of Rights, the state has no right to retain information on its citizens simply for the purposes of identification. Citizens are obliged to reveal their identity only in two sets of circumstances: when they want access to particular state provisions, and when they have committed a crime. The rest is (or should be) silence, anonymity and freedom.

First of all, this argument seems to me bizarre. It suggests that the citizens of an advanced industrial nation are, in effect, a merry band of forest-dwelling freemen, emerging into the glare of state supervision only as and when they damn well please, and who then slip back into some strange state of anonymous liberty.

However, the argument also ignores at least two pertinent facts. First, there are so many points of contact - daily, even hourly - between citizen and state that it is, to all intents and purposes, impossible to exist without revealing your identity. Second, those who have an interest in knowing who you are, and who possess the means to know it, know who you are already. In fact, they probably know where you live, too.

The proper response, therefore, is to insist on an equivalent, reciprocal and legally ensured access to knowledge about who exactly "they" are, and what exactly is the nature of their business with you. Call it "reverse supervision". Call it a Bill of Rights.

I grew up in Sweden, a broadly social-democratic political setting typical of much of the Continent, where the constant interaction between citizen and state is in itself no particular cause for alarm, so long as the law and the constitution are robust enough to allow the citizen a sufficient degree of transparency, protection and, ultimately, redress. In other words, the problem is not that the state knows your identity, and in some instances has a right to ask you to prove it, but rather, what it does with that knowledge, and what you know about what it does.

I have tried on occasion to adopt the anti-ID-card argument as my own, because it has all the accoutrements of a thought-through libertarian stance, and rings all the bells as a civil-rights and anti-statist response. It sounds right - particularly so in the past few years, when civil liberties have been pushed ever further into the margins, while daily life and personal space seem to be increasingly hardening into issues of law and order.

But I find that the ID card question keeps shrinking back into a simple matter of a piece of plastic. If any civil-rights stick has a wrong end, surely this is it. All the energies needed these days to protect civil liberties would be better spent on arguing for increased openness and accountability on the part of the state - not on the fantasy that, if you sit perfectly still over there in the corner, they might not notice you.

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