Papers, please?

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There are some advantages to the idea of issuing ID cards to all, but unsurprisingly they’re not necessarily the ones which advocates use, nor are they as easily implemented as those advocates have suggested. The sort of electronic ID which is being mooted could make it easier for citizens to access government services, depending on how it is implemented. They could make it easier to prove identity when seeking credit, or buying age-restricted products. They also have some potential advantages in policing, although that only works if people are obliged to carry them. It is precisely that potential obligation to carry them which raises concerns for many, as well as carrying echoes of an unpleasant past. There’s a practical obstacle as well: whilst most of us do have smartphones these days, not everyone does, and even those who do don’t always feel it essential to carry them at all times.

One of the more novel reasons suggested this week for implementing ID cards is that it would allegedly help to reduce the ‘pull factor’ of the UK economy, which means that the UK apparently attracts migrants because they find it easy to get work in the black economy. To say that I’m unconvinced about the logic of that would be an understatement. If people are able to get work in the black economy without a NI number and without paying PAYE, then what exactly is the mechanism by which the need to have electronic ID changes that? An employer prepared to take on a member of staff without that person demonstrating the right to work in the UK is no more likely to demand to see an ID, whether physical or electronic, than (s)he is to demand a NI number. It’s called the black economy for a reason.

I’m not a huge fan of the idea of ‘British values’, largely because I’ve never seen a clear definition of them which is anything like uniquely British nor which comes close to matching the observed values of those who claim to espouse them. But given that they are supposed to be a thing, to the extent that I understand what that thing is there’s something very un-British about any move towards a ‘Papers, please!’ type of society. And there’s something very dishonest (another breach of those same values?) about a claim that doing so will reduce migration. Authoritarians always want more control over citizens, and this looks like another attempt to get that, using whatever short-term crowd-pleasing argument comes to hand.