Why are people so alarmed about the reintroduction of identity cards to the United Kingdom? They were such fun last time round – during the Second World War, that is, and for several years thereafter. They made rationing manageable (triple portions of meat for diabetics, on presentation of the additional doctor’s certification) and identifying invading aliens easier (they could easily be faked, however; it became a punishable offence to deface them). This inexpensive, practical scheme required, at first, only six pieces of information: name, sex, date of birth, marital status, occupation, and whether or not the cardholder belonged to one of the “fighting or civil defence services”. The cost of replacing a card came to one shilling (the same amount with which anybody who found a lost one was rewarded), and the government believed that its army of 65,000 registrars could register the entire populace in a fortnight.
By the time of the cards’ abolition in 1952, the situation was more complicated than that, and prone to expensive misunderstandings. A Hendon exporter was fined £50 for going abroad for six months instead of bringing his card to the police station, as requested. A discharged lance corporal was the victim of over-enthusiastic military police, who threatened him with arrest, unaware of changes in the law. Lack of ID cost a man called John Bunyan ten shillings, following a “motor-car obstruction” in Great Queen Street.
Clement Davies, the Labour Home Secretary, had already admitted in 1950 that the system was “quite alien to the English way of life”, and there had been no shortage of cases of people fined for failing, forgetting or refusing to produce a valid card on official demand. The suggestion that the national register should acquire permanence beyond the state of emergency that had inspired it in the first place “was to be deeply deplored”. Bang on cue, on December 7, 1950, along came Clarence Henry Willcock – driving rather too quickly, in fact, for the liking of the local constabulary, along Ballards Lane in North Hornsey. On the spot, Willcock declared himself a “Liberal” who refused to provide the officers who stopped him with his card, and threw the form they gave him on the ground. From protecting a nation liable to all manner of wartime dangers, identity cards had become a possible obstruction, according to the magistrate who tried Willcock, to “good relations between the police and the public”.
Willcock’s case proceeded to the High Court, where his defence argued that the “emergency” which had entailed the National Registration Act of 1939 had been declared over, and therefore the defendant was under no obligation to obey Constable Harold Muckle. “That”, said the Lord Chief Justice, “is a very far-reaching argument.” Too far – Willcock lost the case. His principled appeal was dismissed, but it provoked a debate about the issue. In April 1951, the British Housewives’ League, that well-known cabal of anarchists, staged their own card-destroying protest outside Parliament. It was the freshly elected Conservative government that abandoned the scheme the following February, to the sound of “loud ministerial cheers”, not least at the projected saving of £500,000. Clement Davies publicly acknowledged that the Tories were doing the right thing.
This must be what people sometimes call a lesson from history. Great Britain was about to go to war when identity cards were introduced the first time round; here they come again, with the additional technological fun of “biometrics” (such as fingerprints and retinal scans). Part of their function, we are sometimes told, is to thwart the threat of terrorism. The human rights watchdog Privacy International has shown that in none of the twenty-five countries that have been “most adversely affected by terrorism since 1986” is an identity card system seen as “a significant deterrent to terrorist activity”, although 80 per cent of those countries operate such a system. But never mind; with the new ID card, says the Home Office, twentysomethings who look younger than their age need never be refused by an over-cautious barman again (the Home Office’s website really does give this as one of many reasons for thinking ID cards a good thing).
The Home Office has also claimed that it hopes to protect people from the enemy within – identity fraudsters and thieves – something which must surely concern all TLS readers, steeped as they are in nightmarish Shakespearean tales of confused twins, not to mention Cinna the Poet mistaken for Cinna the Conspirator (“Tear him for his bad verses!”), and non-Shakespearean tales of identity fraudulence, like Martin Guerre and Perkin Warbeck. Again, though, there is reasonable, detailed evidence from a non-government source – in this case, the London School of Economics and Politics – that ID cards will not have much effect on this kind of well-established literary crime. The LSE (whose report also exposed how the potential costs of the scheme have been played down) was not thanked for its pains.
Excepting, then, the incredible notion that the ID card scheme is merely a passing attempt at fund-raising, there remains the possible explanation for the Home Secretary Charles Clarke’s obduracy: that he actually wants to reignite the spirit of the 1950s “Liberals”, and remind everyone of what is and is not “alien to the English way of life”. Opposition has duly turned up, in the form of internet-based emulators of Clarence Henry Willcock and the British Housewives’ League.
Clarke must be delighted by the nation’s generous response; he will be even more delighted to gain the attention of the writer and former arts editor of the New Statesman, Frances Stonor Saunders, whose comments on the whole business have recently gained widespread circulation. Saunders’s books include Hawkwood: The diabolical Englishman (reviewed in the TLS, December 24, 2004) and Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the cultural Cold War, so when it comes to unsavoury political activities, it may be imagined that she knows what she is talking about. The problem, as she sees it, is that people have blithely allowed the scheme to continue, in the belief that it will do little harm to their civil liberties: “you might think that this register [the proposed National Identity Register] is harmless, but you would be wrong to come to this conclusion”.
Private businesses are going to be given access to the NIR Database. If you want to apply for a job, you will have to present your card for a swipe. If you want to apply for a London Underground Oyster Card, or a supermarket loyalty card, or a driving licence you will have to present your ID Card for a swipe. The same goes for getting a telephone line or a mobile phone or an internet account.
So much for Shakespearean twins; this description recalls the disenchanted realms of Orwell and Kafka. Clarke has yet to write Saunders the riposte that her incisive statement demands.
The nearest identity cards got to Martin Guerre or Shakespeare the first time round was the case of an immigrant called Ernst Ehrensperger. A German who had been brought up in Germany and had briefly lived in England during the early 1930s, Ehrensperger was refused a German passport when no record of his birth could be found in his supposed hometown of Munich. He returned to England in September 1939, and appropriated the identity of a man called Ernest Clark, who had been killed in action in 1917. When the English authorities caught up with him, he maintained that he believed Clark to be his real name, in spite of the lack of documentation; his parents had told him that they had adopted him on a visit to England, when he was three years old. In any case, he was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment, and never found out the truth about that ghost, identity.
