Seven Oaks Magazine.

Walk down any British High Street from London to Liverpool and you probably wouldn’t know it if you hadn’t already been told. Drive past the ubiquitous ring-road retail parks which have come to symbolise a peculiarly new British way of life dedicated to the twin pleasures of home improvement and pizza consumption, and you see still less evidence of it. Yet, according to Tony Blair and his Home Secretary, David Blunkett, Britain is a country at peril — a country which runs the risk of becoming knee deep in asylum seekers, immigrants, and apprentice terrorists any day soon, unless it administers some quick legislative remedies.

To that end, a draft bill to create a secure national identity card scheme to “ensure the U.K. and its citizens are equipped for the challenges of the twenty-first century” was finally published by the British Home Office last week. Identity cards are expected to be phased in beginning with 2008 at a cost of £3 billion, with a decision to make individual biometric cards mandatory by 2013. Refusal to register would not result in custodial sentences — Blunkett doesn’t want opponents to become “martyrs” — but will carry a punitive fine of up to £2,500 under the Home Secretary’s plans. A six month ID card trial evaluating three different biometric identification methods is now underway in Glasgow, Leicester, London, and Newcastle.

“The primary reason for having ID cards is not because we believe they will stop terrorists,” the Home Secretary said at the launch. “It will contribute towards the overall task of prevention, but it will not guarantee that we will not be hit.” Despite his and the government’s better public relations attempts at dressing identity cards up as a swift response to the Madrid attack, the bill was in fact published after a six-month consultation phase. Of course, not everybody is convinced by Blunkett’s alarmist posturing. According to a report published by human rights group Privacy International to coincide with the draft bill launch, almost two-thirds of known terrorists operate under their true identity. Group director Simon Davis also said, “Our report examines the actual evidence, and finds that the likelihood of an ID card preventing a terrorist attack are virtually zero.” Describing the legislation as “draconian and dangerous,” Davis predicted a defeat in the House of Lords.

Liberty, the British civil liberties and human rights group, has claimed that the protracted implementation is due in part to the opposition of at least five Cabinet members who believe the creation of a national identity register — linked to “biometric” cards carrying features including facial recognition, iris images, and fingerprints — will further erode individual privacy and create further ethnic tensions due to minority groups being signalled out for special treatment. Liberal Democrat shadow home secretary Mark Oaten has drawn up a 10-point rejection of the identity card scheme pointing to the government’s appalling IT implementation track record and the massively over budget systems introduced in a number of other agencies, including the Child Support Agency, Courts Service, and the Passport Office. (A report published by the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society days after Blunkett’s announcement claimed that the U.K. continues to waste billions on IT projects. According to the American Standish Group, the U.K. IT project success rate has doubled — to 34 per cent.)

Only the Conservative Party has seen fit to give the scheme a cautious welcome. Responding to the draft bill, Oaten said, “The Home Secretary is leading towards an expensive and flawed piece of plastic. This will do little to tackle terrorism and the £3 billion would be better spent on more intelligence and policing.” Oaten also warned of the potential for racial discrimination in policing and in public services, and called on the Tories to quit stalling and indicate their support for a cross-party coalition, which could defeat the bill in the Lords.

Identity card implementation is just one spoke in the wheel of a wider Home Office raft of policies which might be said to be the bulwark used by a Labour government beset by criticism from the Left for its unwavering support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, as well as stinging attacks from the Right on issues of crime, immigration and, of course, Blair’s very recent and abrupt European Constitution referendum volte-face. Speaking to the Confederation of British Industry in a speech in London one day after the identity card announcement, he said that the identity card plans were “perhaps the most important significant new measure on the horizon.” Although Blair’s speech to the employers’ organisation was ostensibly designed to allay their E.U. accession fears of being swamped by marauding citizen hordes from the new eastern European member states, identity card plans were drawn up by the U.K. Home Office within two weeks of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. Identity cards, government reasoning goes, will reduce crime, keep out illegal immigrants, and prevent terrorism.

Blair himself contradicted the myth of the U.K. as a honey pot for asylum welfare mothers and economic immigrants in his speech to the CBI’s captains of industry. He noted that the U.K. is not a particularly high migration country, with lower levels of foreign-born nationals as a proportion of its total population than France, Germany, or the U.S. Nonetheless, the spectre of September 11 looms large over U.K. policy decisions. In March, Sir Brian Barder resigned from the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, claiming that a number of court rulings gave the Home Secretary “such wide discretion as to make his powers virtually unaccountable.” Lord Woolf, the most senior judge in England and Wales, fiercely criticised government plans to limit the right of appeal for asylum seekers, saying they were “fundamentally in conflict with the rule of law” and a “blot on the reputation of the government.” Woolf has attacked government plans to create a supreme court and considers Blunkett’s incursions into the judicial arena as being such a threat to judicial independence to merit a written constitution protecting judges from political interference. (Legitimate immigrants learning English might want to take note that the title is “Home Secretary” and not “draconian Home Secretary” as the current common usage would suggest.)

Yet, Blunkett’s one-size-fits-all “gateway” card will act as a criminal spur to forgers hoping to take advantage of a system that does away with the need for multiple form of ID to access state services. If anything, the disingenuously named entitlement card will open the floodgates to identity fraud — creating a black market in fake identities on a scale not yet seen in the UK. The government claims to have the backing of the British public, pointing to a recent MORI poll which found that 80 per cent of Britons are happy to carry cards at all times, and 60 per cent favour allowing the police new powers to order identity card presentation at a police station within a week where the card is not available. What about human rights? Seventy-three per cent said they have little or no concern at all about any negative impact on their human rights.

In the same MORI poll, only one in three thought identity cards would prevent illegal immigration, with 21 per cent of the mind that it would help in the detection and arrest of criminals. Only 16 per cent believed identity cards would help combat terrorism. Oh, and 58 per cent of those questioned said they were “not confident” the government would be able to introduce the system smoothly. Almost 60 per cent said they would change their minds if they had to pay for it —£35 is the figure floated up by the Home Secretary — hardly what you would call a resounding vote of confidence in the scheme.

Take a walk down those same High Streets and past those same retail parks and you’ll realise only all too well that Britain is indeed a country at peril of losing what few civil liberties haven’t been lost to legislation like the Anti-Terrorism, Crime, and Security Act passed within weeks of the September 11 attacks. In a country with no written constitution, there is no need to dress up the continuing war being waged on civil liberties in the name of freedom behind disingenuous “Patriot” Acts as is the case in the U.S. You simply shut the stable door once the horse has bolted.