From Planet 170

Identity Cards — Identity Crisis

by Philip A. Thomas

The proposed Identity Cards Bill will do nothing to prevent terrorism and is a serious encroachment on our civil liberties.

Surveillance is a crucial feature of modernity. It is embedded in everyday life particularly because of state and corporate interest in you. Your privacy and individuality are diminished by the increasingly inquisitive mixture of private and state involvement in your very being. Rapidly improving technology provides the electronic capacity to trace, store, analyse and predict your routine activities. The distinction between your public and private activities is blurred. For example, more and more becomes known about you as you make telephone calls on your mobile and land-line, as you buy food and other items with your credit cards, as you walk through electronic turnstiles, take out library books, stroll down the high street, claim state benefits, visit the doctor, travel abroad, and drive your vehicle around the country. Your “footprints” which include your age, sex, marital status, salary, car, address, purchasing needs and habits are recorded and evaluated. They may be sold to those who, in turn, would sell you insurance, holidays, mortgages, loans, magazines, cars, and other items you have neither requested nor necessarily require. In addition, the state is preparing to establish a Nat-ional Register to accommodate “you” and it will allow access to your file to various public and private agencies. The authorisation for this Register is tucked away in the Identity Cards Bill which is currently going through Parliament.

Despite the plethora of news sources, particularly through digital television, we remain locked in a state of “knowledgeable ignorance”. Norman Daniel, the British historian, defined this position as one where the means to know otherwise while available to a few, is not publicly accessible. This contrasts sharply with the current, popular statement that we suffer from “information overload” as a result largely of internet access to the world wide web. The missing explanatory element hinges on media misrepresentation and in particular upon unavailable key information held by state authorities. Despite the much lauded, but limited and hugely delayed, Access to Information Act the information available to the public has been carefully trimmed to ensure that state secrets, as defined by the state, remain just that. The description that the UK is the most secret and surveilled democratic state remains true.

Knowledgeable ignorance is currently exercised, as Edward Said demonstrated in Orientalism, in regard to our understanding of Islam and Muslims. The popular representation of Arabs and Muslims as primitive fanatics, bloody barbarians, unthinking martyrs, zealots, corrupt, effete sensationalists and, today, as terrorists pervades the current Western media and even scholarship over the centuries. Awareness of Islam’s rich culture, poetry, literature, architecture, and religious divisions is dangerously limited. In truth, that civilization is anything but orthodox and monolithic. Nevertheless, this fact receives scant attention. For many people Muslims are nothing more than murderous “towel-heads” or suspicious neighbours. In the USA a survey conducted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and published in October 2004 showed that more than one fourth of the respondents agreed with stereotypes such as “Muslims teach their children to hate” and “Muslims value life less than other people”. When asked what comes to mind when they hear the word “Muslim”, thirty-two per cent of respondents made negative comments (“America and the World”, commondreams. org). It is argued by such scholars as Samuel Huntington, that there will be an inevitable clash of civilizations and this conflict must be won by the West as the price of failure is too great to contemplate. Victory demands that the terrorists must be defeated, at whatever cost. The rhetoric of freedom, democracy and liberty is being espoused by leading politicians on both sides of the Atlantic as justification for the global activities of the leading nation-states of the “free world”.

As I write, I listen to the new Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, declaring that “we are in a state of emergency”. This is untrue, we are not. Accepting that a state of emergency has traditionally involved politically declared armed conflict with another nation-state, the current situation does not demand such challenging language with its subsequent and consequential state responses. Were Clarke correct we have also been in a state of permanent emergency at least since Cromwellian times in Ireland. Secessionist “terrorists” in one form or another have operated there and in Britain since the seventeenth century and indeed operate there at this moment. Calling events, or a period of time, an “emergency” is not a semantic word game. The consequences are significant and far reaching. A state of emergency is radically different from that of normality and different rules of governance apply. Emergencies are also temporary. Thus, what is acceptable in an emergency within a democratic structure is unacceptable within a period of normality.

We also know, from bitter experience, that state-declared emergencies may produce hasty, ill-judged and ineffective response laws. Even in peacetime, legislation such as the Dangerous Dogs Act proved to be a nonsense. It was passed in haste because of media-inflamed concerns about pit bull dog attacks. Much more serious has been the series of anti-terrorist Acts of Parliament, commencing with the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1974 which was introduced in great haste after the Birmingham bombings which killed 21 people. However, it is interesting to note that Roy Jenkins, then Home Secretary and the man who promoted the Prevention of Terrorism Bill, stated three days after the bombings that “I do not see advantage in a system of identity cards, which apart from creating difficulties for ordinary people would be extremely expensive and largely inefficient.” More recently, the Anti Terrorist, Crime and Security Act 2001, quickly passed in the after-heat of 9/11, produced the shameful imprisonment of foreign nationals in Belmarsh Prison which also required the UK’s derogation from the European Convention of Human Rights. The condemnation of this practice by the highest court, the House of Lords, produced an astonishing response from the executive. The Home Secretary proposed the new power of house-detention without trial which would be extended to British subjects and continue to include foreign nationals. Indeed, one of the Bellmarsh detainees will opt to remain in prison rather than go into the proposed form of isolation. Each anti-terrorist Act has increased police powers, reduced the rights of the individual and often angered or isolated target groups such as the Irish, immigrants and, most recently, Muslims. The stereotyping involved here challenges the belief and commitment to the UK, and its stated values, of those identified as members of a “dangerous class”.

It is within this social context of “emergency” and fear of strangers that current policies, especially on immigration and asylum, must be considered. In particular, we now face a further diminution of our personal rights by the introduction of Identity Cards. Exactly two years later we face the imminent introduction of the ID Card should the Identity Cards Bill be enacted before the forthcoming election.