It’s time for the British to embrace ID cards
UK National Identity Card 2009
When Mrs Thatcher exiled me to Geneva in 1979, the Swiss office that registers foreigners called “Contrôle de l’habitant” gave me an ID card. I never carried it. It stayed in a bedroom drawer during my 15 years working out of Geneva before entering the Commons. My then French wife had one. When she wanted to vote she did not have to show a polling card but simply turned up at the polling station and showed her ID card to get the voting paper.
In many years of working and living in Europe, no-one has asked me for an ID card. Yet to read the Guardian and Daily Telegraph whose columnists of Left and Right are united in seeing ID cards as some kind of arrival of the Nazi state in Britain, they are an evil un-British concept designed to let the state bureaucracy control the sturdy Englishman and English woman.
Other European nations, some with much stronger citizens’ rights traditions and protections, have no problems. I saw a Swiss MP confront Liz Truss at a seminar on immigration 2-3 years ago in Davos. He asked her: “How can you control immigration when you don’t even want to know who is in the country? From a Swiss point of view (and we have pro-rata many more asylum seekers than the UK) we just don’t understand the English refusal to know who is within your borders.”
A UK ID card was passed into law in 2006 over the usual Tory and LibDem objections. But then disaster struck. It was given to the Home Office to implement. The curse of Marsham Street struck. Home Office officials and ministers wasted 4 years faffing around before issuing them. A person who believed in the Civil Service blob might be convinced this was deliberate sabotage by Home Office functionaries.
From time to time after the ID card law was passed I would ask Home Office ministerial friends what happened to the ID card legislation. I was told: “We are working on seeing if we can get social security and other information onto the cards.” I politely suggested making the best the enemy of the good was not a sensible way to fulfil an election manifesto commitment or turn the express will of Parliament into law.
Then Tony Blair left No 10 in 2007. Team Brown showed no interest in the ID card law and so nothing happened until the first months of 2010 when you could get a UK national ID card — the same size roughly as senior rail pass or bank card — from the Passport Office. For a couple of months I used mine for political trips to Europe instead of a passport.
On one occasion, at the French passport control at the St Pancras Eurostar terminal, the French official looked suspiciously at my UK ID card. “C’est quoi ça?” I explained it was exactly the same as a French ID card used by the French in place of passports to travel around Europe. “Ah, enfin les Anglais devient intelligent!” he grunted as he waved me through.
About 70,000 were issued. Had the Labour Home Office rolled them out after the law was passed in 2006, several million would have been in our wallets. But the cabals of Euro-suspicious Home Office officials and very weak ministers just let it drift. Keir Starmer’s new Chief Secretary Darren Jones, please note. So when Theresa May became Home Secretary in 2010, she found that by scrapping ID cards she could win Brownie points with Tory, UKIP and LibDem militants who believed they were an alien European plot to control British citizens.
Now we are proudly alone in Europe in having no form of identity issued by government — not even drivers licences or council tax bills — to prove everyone in Britain has a legal right to be here. The absence of ID cards is a gift to the criminal people smuggling gangs. They are a gift to low pay employers who don’t want to pay NI or the National Living Wage to workers, many of them migrants desperate to get any work at any wage.
The argument that the state should not have this information seems odd. Every day my iPhone transmits to private firms here and globally endless details of who I am, what I buy, where I travel, what I do, even what I say or think. But for the anti-ID cards passionarias, democracy has no right even to know who is in Britain to prevent greedy bosses exploiting poor refugees willing to take any work to earn a little money for food, accommodation, or to nourish their children.
Now the talk is of an electronic ID card. OK: let’s trial that. I have my NHS App which is clunky and sort of works. A simple ID card should also be possible. I still reckon there is a case for a wallet sized ID card, like the Irish travel card which has to be renewed every five years for travel around Europe as well as ID inside Ireland. Those who don’t want them can travel on their Black Irish passport which stands out with its brutal 1930s colour from the gentler, friendly Burgundy EU passport.
They won’t be a magic solution, but easy for shop security staff to ask to see one if they are uncertain about anyone entering a store. No-one should be able to rent a room, get a job, obtain an NI number, or put children in school or use the NHS, without one.
It won’t be a miracle cure to the problems of mass uncontrolled people movement, since the 21st century wars created so many failed states and opened the floodgates to limitless migration. But it would show Britain being serious about the need to know who is in our county.
Denis MacShane was Labour MP for Rotherham 1994-2012 and is the former Minister for Europe.
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