mindhenge

Home - politics - risk - article
Home - society - asylum and immigration - article

Losing at cards

20 October 2003

Civil society is complicated and messy. Giving everyone a piece of plastic with a number on it will not make it less so.

The reported demolition by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of the Home Secretary David Blunkett's plans for a national identity card provides an interesting insight into the way that political decisions come to be made. Mr Straw, when himself Home Secretary, mooted something of the sort in the past, but rejected it on the grounds that there were better ways to spend the money. That was before September 11th; now both the Prime Minister and Mr Blunkett are pushing the idea once more.

Mr Straw intends, apparently, to persist in his objections, and since his is not, on this issue, a lone voice in cabinet it is still quite possible that his view will prevail. On the other hand, the Prime Minister spoke positively of identity cards in his speech to the Labour Party conference. If he has committed himself in his own mind to the project, it will be difficult to shift. So Mr Straw will only go so far in seeking to prevent a colleague from committing folly. If the thing looks like it is going to happen he will shrug his shoulders and get on with his own departmental job.

There is an element of horse trading about this. Ministers always have pet projects and they need the support of colleagues to get them through. So there is a limit to how far one will go to obstruct another's bright idea when they may need the other's support one day for one of their own. That really is the point: ministers backed by the Prime Minister can decide to do something like this because they think it's a good idea, and at no point does the policy have to pass an intellectually rigorous test of its usefulness and feasibility. The rest of us, parliament included, can only watch, and mutter, and rue the day when our hard-earned taxes were so liberally poured down the drain.

So much for the limitations of cabinet government. The row about identity cards is also interesting for what it says about the policy itself. It looks as if the proponents of cards are making a classic problem-solving error and the ministers on the other side are attempting to point this out. But once the mindset of the error is established it is not easy to change.

This is not a trivial issue. The cost, for starters, will run into billions. There is a perceived civil liberties issue. Because of the controversy the Home Office has been running a consultation that was due to close at the beginning of this year, although the report on this has yet to be published. The impression being created is that the general public are fairly keen.

The nature of this consultation illustrates the mindset of the "pro" camp. There are probably three reasons why the Prime Minister and Mr Blunkett are in favour:

because it is something they can actually do;
because it appears to address issues that people are concerned about;
because it appears to have positive associations with the government's general desire to improve the delivery of public services.

And, of course, from the administrative point of view, life would indeed be a great deal easier if everybody carried a card that identified them accurately as who they are, if everybody who could not produce a card could correctly be assumed to have no right to be in the country and if everybody's card carried electronic information that would assist in the provision of services and entitlements. As an administrative premise, therefore, the idea, like motherhood and apple pie, is necessarily a good thing.

The chapter on possible uses for identity cards is suffused with this sort of rosy optimism about the benefits that might flow. To be fair to the officials who wrote it, it only says "might" and "could" and is careful to point out the "might nots" as well. But the list of potential benefits is extraordinary for its length - a great string of essentially secondary uses, compiled apparently in the hope that the sheer number of them will compensate for the absence of anything like the "killer application" that could justify the great cost in money and energy that the introduction of a card would consume.

There is a good deal about better service provision, both public and private. Since most service providers these days are contacted remotely, use of an identity card would depend upon the existence of an accessible database carrying the information on the card. So, when you ring a call centre, instead of giving a postcode you give a lengthy card number. Then, rather than telling you where you live, the person at the other end tells you who you are and where you live. This saves you the trouble of having to spell out your name.

On the question of identity fraud the paper acknowledges that a card would not remove the need for vigilance. Indeed, if the card was forgeable it would make matters worse. On illegal immigration the consultation document is particularly revealing. Buried in the optimism about the benefits of a card system is the suggestion that the need for someone to have a card might reduce the problem by taking away the "pull-factor" of supposed easy access to benefits and services.

The implication here is that the card would be useful in creating the impression among would-be illegal immigrants that there was little point in coming to Britain. The document does not argue convincingly that once here they would be any more prevented than they are at present from receiving benefits or services. They can continue to work, if unscrupulous employers will let them, and to qualify for state benefits they already have to make themselves known to the authorities. So, unless they are to be denied access to libraries or emergency medical help, not much will change.

This is the tenor of the document; An identity card could do lots of things that are already being done, more or less. But only think how convenient it would be to have them all done with one piece of plastic! It is into this cosy atmosphere that the icy blast of Jack Straw's critique blows. His reported objections are essentially practical, focusing upon the cost (possibly £40 per head and, according to the Treasury, constituting a tax if made compulsory), the huge logistical difficulties, all the anomalies (1 million Irish living in Britain; 15 million Britons living abroad); and especially the damaging political consequences if the whole process does not go smoothly. This last point is particularly cogent in the case of a policy designed in part, at least, to play to the gallery. The idea of a card that would deny benefits to a fraudster is attractive until you become one of the inevitable tens of thousands of people who are denied benefits to which they are entitled because of a glitch in the system.

The classic problem-solving error that Mr Straw is pointing to here is the one where, because your problem is complicated, you simplify it and then solve the simple version. Identity cards are the ideal administrative instrument for a perfect, uncomplicated and well ordered society. That does not mean that they make society well ordered if it is not already. Real society, especially in Britain, is messy, complicated and multi-layered. It is full of inconsistencies and anomalies and it has administrative structures that are also all those things in order to support it. That, incidentally, is why there is a civil rights issue when you try to centralise administration or smooth out its procedures. Many people are naturally resistant to being organised, pigeon-holed and bossed around and for freedom's sake society has to be allowed to be a little bit chaotic.

Not that proponents of identity cards are necessarily less messy in their lives. Not, at least, if the logic of their thinking is anything to go by. Among reasons for favouring the idea are murky ones such as bigoted, distorted or just plain erroneous ideas about the prevalence of certain problems that the cards might solve. Stopping illegal immigrants or foreign travellers from making use of the free health service may be a nice thought for some, but its not going to have a dramatic impact on legitimate patients because this problem is, relatively speaking, rather small. Nor is it likely to have much impact on international terrorists, who, presumably, will continue to enter the country on their passports. Whether the inconvenience of having to pay for their health care will deter them is open to doubt.

It is often pointed out that 11 out of 15 E.U. countries have identity card schemes, as if this fact of itself provides a good reason why Britain should have one. A real question the government could consider is whether those 11 countries are more secure and better administered that the other four. If they are, is there good reason to suppose that their identity card arrangements are the reason for this? Or do they have cards just because that is the way in which their particular civil societies have happened to evolve?