I was very surprised listening to tonight’s Question Time when the student panellist claimed that AC Grayling had compared the government’s proposals for ID cards to the Nazis tattooing numbers on concentration camp inmates. I’m not a great admirer of Grayling, nor a proponent of ID cards, but I found this hard to believe, so I googled. I didn’t find that precise comparison, but I did find this:
The main pushers of an identity surveillance system—the biometric data companies who stand to gain billions—tell us that the iris and fingerprint details that will link you to the computer that stores your address, medical records and so on can be stored on a chip the size of a full stop. This can be implanted in your earlobe, ostensibly to protect against loss or theft, and read by a device similar to a barcode reader. I asked David Miliband what the difference is between this and a number branded on your arm.
I don’t know whether Grayling has used the metaphor more strongly. Here there is a rhetorically effective but logically sloppy move from a proposal for identity papers for all citizens (proposed) through the physical embedding of a digitally encoded identity chip (not proposed) to a clear historical allusion to the ways in which ethnic and other sectors of the population were branded as animals by those who regarded themselves as superhuman. The student may have misquoted him, but I can;t help feel that Grayling is complicit in his misrepresentation.
I think identity cards change the balance between the citizen and the state in ways which compromise freedom, and dishonour our national history and identity as a free society. I think in practice they will be ineffective in matters of serious crime, and disproportionate in matters of trivial crime. But the attempt to move from this to the use of a branded number to dehumanise a minority of the population is shabby, sloppy and fundamentally dishonouring of those who were so branded to use them as a cheap political point.
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Actually he was spot on. The grey inhabitants of the Home Office barracks want us all to be tagged and counted in and out, whatever we do (read the ID cards Act if you don’t agree: that is exactly what it says will happen). Logically it is just a short step to being branded at birth, just like cattle. Don’t forget that the Home Secretary, without reference to Parliament, can designate anything to be an identity document, can make any event a registrable event and add any information he/she likes to the NI database (including your religion). The Home Secretary can also control your right to live by, without challenge, withdrawing your card.
That looks like paranoia to me. There is a significant difference between carrying a universal (i.e. for everyone) ID card, and branding a minority of a population like animals.
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