ID Cards: How Fair Is That?

Welcome readers of The England Project. You're here because we've just signed on to the 1952 Committee. For those who don't know about this, you can find out about them here. Please do so, because the issue of compulsory ID cards is an important one, at least for Brits concerned about their civil liberties. (And when someone who regards any position to the left of Donald Rumsfeld's as suspiciously liberal uses a phrase like 'civil liberties', you've got to know England's in trouble.)

The dying days of this Parliament are being used to hack away at all sorts of basic freedoms. We've already lost the right to life, and in the coming weeks, Britain will take another huge leap toward the Labour's goal of a bigger state filled with smaller people when the vile Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill becomes law. For that, we have a petition -- Go here and sign it, if you please. We've also got an article on this subject out on Faith and Freedom. Go here for that.

But with so many annoyances heading our way, it seems we're in danger of digressing. So. Let's talk ID cards.

The arguments for these things (or, at least, the arguments Labour are using to batter away at opposition to them) are that ID cards will be used to track crooks and terrorists. This 'tough on crime' stuff is causing problems for what's left of the Conservative Party (think 'Republican Party, but neutered'), who daren't point out the obvious flaws with the policy for fear of seeming soft on crime and terrorism. Being soft on the erosion of basic freedoms doesn't appear to be something the Conservatives worry about these days. It also hasn't helped that Tory leader Michael Howard wanted to introduce voluntary ID cards himself when he was Home Secretary back in the 90's.

Still, we do battle with the government we have and not the government we might want, so let's push on and have a look at why Labour are so keen on sticking us all with biometric ID's. Do they have some kind of secret plan to trap us all in an Orwellian nightmare? Do ministers lie awake at night fretting they don't have the power to monitor our movements every time we walk around the corner to buy a pack of cigarettes? Well, no, not really, though they do keep telling us they'd rather we purchased bioactive yogurt drinks instead.

You see, this being Britain, we don't live so much in fear of being crushed to death by the jackboots of the thought-police as persuaded, one piece of restrictive legislation at a time, that maybe our lives were not really worth living in the first place.

ID cards are a case in point. Somewhere, at the bottom of this issue, is a sensible policy. This is as follows:

In Britain today, there are more than 60 million people. Some of them are felons and some are would-be terrorists. In an ideal world, we'd be able to identify and monitor the activities of these two groups without causing annoyance to the general population. If you’re a troublesome, hook-handed foreign national, you should get to carry a nifty biometric ID card. That's because you don't belong here. If you belonged, you'd be a British citizen. Which you're not. If you’re a convicted crook, you get the same treatment. That’ll teach you to get on the wrong side of the law.

On the other hand, if you belong to neither of these groups, then fine, you can go merrily on your way -- You haven’t caused any trouble, so the state won’t trouble you.

Such an approach would seem to be both sensible and, importantly, fair. It also has much to recommend it. The state could create something like the sex-offenders register, and use it to track the sort of people we really don't want to have on the loose, but seem to be stuck with all the same.

In time, we might even be able to do away with the cards altogether and simply implant repeat offenders and dubious foreigners with biometric tags. That way, when two or more little red dots of Islamist rage met up on an MI5 radar screen, someone in body armor could be dispatched to seek an explanation. Or a head.

The problem with this, of course, is that the troublesome groups we need to keep a closer watch on are also beloved by the sort of people who give Blair his parliamentary majority. Suggest to the average Labour backbencher that we deprive a repeat offender, or worse, an Islamist nut, of his right to slip into dangerous anonymity and they'll be caterwauling about abused human rights faster than you can say Noam Chomsky.

But here's the catch, and it's a biggie: Do it to everyone, regardless of wrongdoing, and the left will smile contentedly and pass the legislation without a murmur.

What this comes down to is a difference of opinion between leftists and conservatives over the meaning of 'fair'.

To conservatives, one demonstrates fairness by ensuring that crime and terrorism incur the censor of the state -- You do something wrong and you're the one who suffers for it. To the left, however, it means that if one person steps out of line, the whole of society does the suffering.

In Britain, we have a long and proud tradition of doing things this way. Our health service has become the envy of no one by forcing the lowest possible standards of care onto the entire population. Successful schools are to be given their unfair share of disruptive yobs on the off-chance the little scrotes might benefit from higher educational standards, even as they are more likely to drag them down. Burglars are afforded the same right to self-protection as the people whose homes they invade.

ID cards are just another step down this road. That some people should be scrutinized because of their actions is a fact, plain and simple, but filtered through the twisted logic of leftists, this principle is being transformed into a scheme that removes liberty from everyone. It's only fair.