The debate about ID cards is back and this time the advocates of us having such things have added new weapons to their armoury - alongside stopping illegal immigration and being really convenient (until you lose the damned thing) we can add preventing the rare and unusual act of voter fraud and providing a simple way to administer state systems. There won't even be a physical card, say some ID fans, you'll just be issued a number. At the back of my mind the opening credits of The Prisoner spring to mind - "I'm not a number, I am a free man".
At the heart of the need to produce identification is the idea that we cannot trust the person in front of us to behave honestly. Every transaction requires some sort of identification process because of the remote possibility that somebody is going to cheat us. Take, for example, a simple thing like collecting a parcel. For most of my adult life, all this has required is that you take the card popped through your door by the postman or delivery company to the place where the parcel has been taken and they hand you the parcel. Now - and this is used as the most common argument for demanding ID at the polling station - we have to produce some sort of photo ID and proof of address as well as the card the postie delivered. This is daft - the card was delivered to you and should be sufficient. Unless, that is, there are cunning thieves following delivery vans, breaking into houses, stealing those cards and going to collect them.
The government rather likes it that you don't - or aren't allowed to - trust your neighbour. The idea that, in a community, people know each other and trust each other doesn't fit with a state directed system. Take voting - the presiding officer for the past few years in Cullingworth lives in the village and has done for a long while. She knows a lot of people here and, along with local polling clerks, can be trusted to only question those folk who raise some sort of doubt. Most of the people lining up to vote arrive with a poll card (delivered to their house by the council) and ID fans seems to believe that there's another cunning set of miscreants going round nicking poll cards so they can impersonate voters. This might occasionally happen but I prepared to bet that it won't be happening in Cullingworth. We should be trusting our Presiding Officer, trusting the poll clerks and trusting the vast majority who are not about to cheat anyone.
In an environment of trust, especially trust established over a long period, there is less need for government protection. My exchanges and interactions with friends and neighbours don't require government oversight to make sure nobody is cheating. The sad thing is that this sphere of genuine community has shrunk and shrunk - we stopped trusting the local shopkeeper to know whether or not young James is over 18. Or, more to the point, trading standards officers shifted their focus away from product safety and towards the enforcement of arbitrary age limits on an ever growing range of products. And because of this enforcement, the shopkeeper stopped selling these products without a proof of identity (and age) - the days of sending the kid to the pub to get jug of ale for grandpa are well and truly over.
Government - and by this is mean the Kafka-esque structures of bureaucracy and control not the politicians we elect who pretend to direct these structures - likes the fact that mistrust makes its controls and enforcement necessary. It suits bureaucracy for us to be issued with numbers and for those numbers to be demanded in order to access simple services like collecting a prescription from the chemist or signing up to a GP. And the bureaucrats will point to examples of abuse (carefully gathered for this purpose) to show how absolutely essential it is that the sub-postmaster, pharmacist and GP don't trust us. There'll be mistakes, example of abuse and the old canard of illegal immigration all paraded before us to explain why you will need to produce a photo ID to enter a pub in Bingley.
As a conservative, I believe that trust sits at the heart of our idea of community. We cannot have a true community - it's merely a space shared by unconnected individuals - unless the people in it have trust in their neighbour. There's a lot of evidence - mostly from the USA - that people are beginning to look again for that idea of community. Partly it's a sort of wistful remembrance of times when "ID please" wasn't such a common sound but it's also a recognition that successful places are founded in large part on a shared idea of what the place should be and much of the sharing here relies on trust. Without trust of neighbour - on a scale wide enough to make a difference - loving where you live becomes a solitary pastime rather than a shared mission.
It may be that we can't get those days back, a time when filling in a form and handing over some money was sufficient to open a bank account, when a boy could buy fags for his mum because the shopkeeper knew who he was and knew his mum, and where the publican could keep an eye on three 15-year-olds knowing they're better and safer in his pub than they'd be at the back of the park with some cans. It may be that automation leads to a need for a single universal number but we should, at least think seriously about how we restore the idea of trust and community in a world where systems assume that everybody, all of the time, is up to no good. And maybe we should ask the government - and those subject to government enforcement - to start trusting us again?
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4 comments:
Add in the fact that the really bad guys know how to circumvent all of this ID stuff so it just ends up making things difficult for everyone who is trustworthy.
We already have a potential single universal number, the National Insurance Number, which should be the consistent link for all interactions with government (Passports, Driving Licenses, NHS etc) rather than different numbers for each. Its existing format has capacity for 15 billion unique records, more than enough for 1,000 years, even with the current level of immigration.
Once adopted as the single standard, that could then be used to validate on-line almost every need for positive ID, linking selectively to age, address, photo, biometrics etc. The police already use a 'Lantern' device to identify fingerprints on-line - linked to an NI biometrics database instead, anyone could be positively identified by any authority in seconds - and no-one even needs to carry a card.
Why keep re-inventing the wheel?
The problem (one of the problems) with Anon 2023's idea is that NI numbers and given out willy-nilly to anybody who asks, whether they've any legal right to be in the country or not - presumably because to challenge anyone would be "racist".
And I doubt they have capacity for 15 billion records anyway, I bet there are some structured elements to those numbers. Though I've never been bored enough for long enough, to try to work out what they are!
Anyway, what part of "we don't want ID cards" do you not understand?
Peter,
I (Anon 2023) offered a solution which would not require any ID Card ever to be issued or carried, but which would still enable positive ID in any circumstances. What part of that objective is a bad idea?
How the authorities choose to manage the allocation of NI Numbers is a separate issue, one which could easily be solved if the will was there. Just because they are currently incompetent doesn't mean it always has to be that way.
The capacity is clear - the numeric component gives 999,999 units, three alphabetic characters each offer a maximum range of 26, leading to a total of 17.5bn unique records - however, that would be reduced by removing potentially 'confusing' letters like L and O, so we'll settle on around 15bn because that's more than enough. Simple really.
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