So, we’re about to introduce a compulsory ID card system that will require the development and maintenance of a comprehensive dataset of all UK citizens and residents. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a valuable commodity, that information – and as Ross Clark pointed out in The Spectator, “no one can assume that our information will never at any point be sold to private interests. That is, after all, exactly what already happens with the electoral roll, at least the public-facing side of it”. More to the point, we are just seeing the aftershocks of a whole series of hacking episodes – in some cases by clever teenagers – of big companies, including Jaguar Land Rover, M&S, the Co-op, all of them acutely embarrassing and very, very costly. Today we learned about the hack of a group of nursery schools which meant that the pictures and personal details of a number of tots are out there on the dark web. So, precisely what guarantees are there that the much larger and more complex database required for a national ID scheme would be proof against the same ingenious and unscrupulous agents?
And is anyone entirely happy that this information is going to go on our smartphones? I lose mine occasionally (plus, they seem to get stolen fairly regularly in London) – and effectively my life is put on hold until I get a replacement. Why must we all be forced even more to live our lives on these devices? The Government says that it has plans for people who don’t have smartphones… let’s see what they have in mind.
I say this as one who was previously all for the idea. In the 1990s, Michael Howard, as Tory Home Secretary – the best PM the Tories never had – used to call the leader writers on this paper, of whom I was one, to lobby us about the introduction of (non-digital) ID cards. We all liked him but sneered at the idea – terrifically un-British, quite foreign, this sort of thing. Well, I thought differently about it after the extraordinary levels of immigration we have seen over the last ten years. The French government quite correctly pointed out that there were powerful pull factors that caused migrants to make for the UK from France – a perfectly safe country if it really was persecution they were fleeing. One of those pull factors was the ease with which illegal migrants could get work when they were here. So, the argument is, if we make it necessary for anyone here legally to have the equivalent of an ID card, that should sort out the legitimate jobseekers from the illegal migrants.
There is the uneasy sense that the government is taking ever greater control of our lives
Trouble is, it will still be possible for individuals here illegally to get work when they arrive. Jobs in the gig economy are hard to regulate; people can end up working in the black market quite easily without anyone being the wiser, and the dismal truth is that because of their precarious position, their wages will be rubbish and their conditions grim. But for the desperate, that’s an acceptable tradeoff. And while the digital ID will make it harder for illegal immigrants to get respectable work, there will still be employment out there. Certainly it’s an argument for such a system of digital ID for jobseekers, but it has to be part of what the Home Office used to call a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants whereby access to public services – non-emergency healthcare, children’s schools, housing – is restricted for those who actually do have the right to be here.
But there’s a further consideration. Actually two. One is the uneasy sense that the government is taking ever greater control of our lives; some people feel that their freedoms are being encroached on. And the second? Why should we all have to sign up to this digital Behemoth just because the Government can’t get its act together on the small boat crossings? If Labour hadn’t been in such a hurry to close down Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda scheme – which was actually starting to have a real deterrent effect – then it might not have had to resort to this digital cosh. It seems a bit much that all of us must pay the price for its incompetence.
Melanie McDonagh is a columnist for The Standard
