Mr Blunkett: his new plans for our liberties

Thanks. But with respect (as they say), Peter, I disagree profoundly with your assertion that private belief should be kept separate from public practice, which seems to me neither practicable nor desirable. A person’s private beliefs (values, adherence to principles or injunctions mandated by a religious or other body, etc.) are bound, and ought, to drive his or her actions in public as in every other area of life. Whether a society is ‘secular’ (as Britain plainly is, notwithstanding the bishops in the House of Lords and the monarch’s separate role as head of the Church of England, all meaningless residues of the past) or in some sense religious (e.g. the US, where a huge majority of the populations professes some form of religious belief and practice, notwithstanding the formal separation of church and state), is really beside the point.

On identity cards, the objection is not mainly to the cards themselves (although many people, myself included, object to any legal obligation placed on us by the state to carry documents of any sort as a means of identification: I claim the right to assume whatever identity I choose at any time of my choosing, provided that I don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses), but rather to the issues (a) of the information stored on the card, even more importantly (b) of the information stored on the proposed national database linked to ID cards, (c) of which officials have access to what parts of that information, and (d)of the citizen’s right to know what information is held on him or her, whether it is accurate, and who has had access to what parts of it. It’s also objectionable that this radical new measure is being smuggled onto the statute book under cover of the ineptly misnamed ‘war on terror’ with which it has virtually no genuine connection. There is no evidence that a system of ID cards and the associated maintenance of information on citizens’ private affairs by the state has eliminated, or even been of significant help in addressing, the threat posed by terrorists. It represents an accretion of real power to the executive at the expense of our civil liberties and privacy, and experience shows that all such power will sooner or later be abused. Sooner rather than later, probably. Plenty of supporting evidence in a piece in today’s Guardian by George Monbiot (with whom I rarely agree) — see http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1274829,00.html.
Brian

From Peter Harvey

[Whether a society is ‘secular’ (as Britain plainly is, notwithstanding the bishops in the House of Lords and the monarch’s separate role as head of the Church of England, all meaningless residues of the past) or in some sense religious (e.g. the US, where a huge majority of the populations professes some form of religious belief and practice, notwithstanding the formal separation of church and state), is really beside the point.]

Maybe I did not express myself as clearly as I should have done. British society is clearly secular in the sense that very few people go to churches and a good number are professed atheists or agnostics. But I was in fact referring to the State and its institutions rather than society in general. The Church of England is an integral part of that State and it won’t do to regard the bishops in the Lords as a historical curiosity. They have a say in the legislative process and they have a privileged platform from which to express their views that their position cannot warrant in a secular state. Moreover, almost every Oxbridge college has a dean who must by law be an Anglican clergyperson, with a chapel that is Anglican; if you wish to be married in your college, as a friend of mine was, it must be by the Anglican rite. A friend teaches at a well-known public school in the north of England, and when I visited him last year he took me to the cathedral and told me how the school went to service there several times a year; as my friend is an Ulsterman by origin, it is improbable that he is an Anglican himself. It an intolerable situation and it is impossible to allow one organisation to have a privileged position and then say that is take it or leave it. It is certainly not equal, to put it mildly.

The position of the CoE also leads to an acceptance of it, even by those who are not members; after all, it’s the national Church. But this very fact makes it more difficult to oppose it and see just how it is ensconced at the very heart of what passes for the British Constitution, whereas the Roman Catholic Church, which is separate from the Spanish State, has to make its own way and do its own convincing (admittedly it has some curious tax concessions, which may not last much longer). The result of this is that ant-clericalism, which has a long and honourable history in Europe, is still alive and well and a surprising number of people here say that they are atheists. In fact, there are regular comments and jokes in the press that would probably fall foul of Blunkett’s proposed anti-anti-religion law. For example, in a cartoon in today’s La Vanguardia a woman is reading a newspaper and saying to her husband ‘According to the Vatican everybody’s evil: feminists, atheists, gays, agnostics, genetic biologists, liberation theologists, pagans, free-thinkers, heretics, divorced people, condom users…’ He replies ‘Apart from the bishops themselves is there anyone who’s good?’ La Vanguardia is far from being radical in its social outlook.

June, whom I married o9ver a year ago, now has three identities in practice. As my wife she is June Smartt, and is happy, I hope, so to be. She can open new accounts in that name; even this is a bit difficult because under our domestic regime I pay for utilities. She still retains various acounts in her old name and finds it so much easier not to change. And for some purposes she is Meenagh-Smartt because colleagues wished to say that although married she was still the same person they had elected. Does anyone think that the administration needed to cope with this will be quicker than the terrorists’ grapevine? And yes I do, God forgive me, still want to write John Smith in some hotel register.

From Peter Harvey

[On the second, about multiple and alternative identities that identity cards won’t be able to cope with and indeed will try to eliminate, I can only say, “hear, hear”. Why should I, and everyone else, not adopt whatever identities we might choose to suit changing circumstances or indeed a passing whim? So long as we don’t change identities in order to defraud others or to pervert the course of justice (which are already criminal offences), why must we be deprived of this harmless liberty?]

Why indeed, when citizens of other countries that use ID cards are not so deprived? Here you can use whatever name you like provided that you do not do so for fraudulent or criminal purposes; actors, writers, and other artists do so all the time, as of course do people chatting on the internet. You are, however, required to use your correct, legal name in making a tax declaration or applying for a driving licence for example, which seems quite reasonable. I would feel deceived too if I found that a newspaper article was written under a pseudonym without the newspaper making that clear (but more about this below) and all contracts require all parties to provide proof of identity, the numbers being written into the contract; this is a very sensible precaution. As for booking into a hotel under a false name (which exerts a curiously strong influence on the British psyche even forty years after the reform of the divorce law), there is nothing in law to prevent anyone from doing so here. It is common for one member of a couple (not both) to be asked to present an identity card on booking into a hotel. No doubt under the dictatorship the police collected these routinely, but even then the boom in mass tourism in the 60s must have made this an impossible task. The point, though, is that a hotelier is in the business of providing unsecured credit to complete strangers, and it does not seem unreasonable from a business point of view for him to want to know who he is dealing with and to have some means of positive identification for possible future claims; and if a self-declared John Smith pays with a credit card in the name of Fred Jones, a hotelier must surely be justified in wondering what is going on. On the other hand I find it rather worrying to think that British hotel registers are publicly available for examination; this seems a considerable breach of privacy.

Spanish names are rather different from British ones and the form that is actually used may be rather different from what is expected. Every Spaniard has two surnames (paternal and maternal first surnames in that order) and is commonly known by the first of these alone. However, the order of these names can be reversed when the birth is registered and people often choose to be known by their second surname: the Spanish Prime Minister’s name is José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, but he prefers to use his more distinctive maternal surname; when Durão Barroso arrived in Brussels he was asked which surname he wanted to use, and replied that he didn’t mind but that Barroso was probably easier than the nasal vowel in his first surname. On the other hand, a Spanish journalist called Julio Parrado was killed in Iraq; in fact his name was Julio Anguita Parrado and he was the son of the leader of the far left party IU, but he chose to use his second (maternal) surname in order to establish his own professional identity without any association with his father; that seems reasonable.

Women do not change their names on marriage here, but a married woman may choose to call herself “de [husband’s surname]” in addition to or instead of her own name. Add to that the fact that under Franco all Spanish women had to be called María, and they are often known by the name of the particular Virgin after which they are named (Montserrat, Pilar, Dolores, Nieves, Mar, etc.), and that Francisco Javier is just as likely to be known by one name as the other, and it is obvious that there is immense scope for variety and even confusion in how Spaniards name themselves.

Those who are prepared to exchange freedom for security deserve and will get neither!
Cheers
t

I agree entirely. It seems to me absurd to suggest that a person’s actions, especially in such a thorny ethical thicket as politics at the highest level, can or even should be divorced from his or her religious and/or philosophical beliefs and values. And it goes way beyond any sense of obligation to convert non-believers, anyway never a terribly strong suit among Anglicans appartently.

The rather worrying implication is that there are dangers in electing (or being landed with) a national leader whose beliefs and ethical code are not ultimately open to rational argument, and whose conviction of his or her correctness is reinforced by a belief in supernatural endorsement. Blair, Bush…

[But not] Brian
https://barder.com/brian/

Hello: Tim Weakley again. I’ve been following the dialogue on identity cards with interest. Surely we need to establish a firm point of departure in this discussion; namely, under what circumstances can the authorities at present require a citizen to establish his identity, and by what means may it be established? I suspect the average Briton is pretty vague about this matter – I’m sure I am – but perhaps you and all m’learned friends who read Ephems can comment. I can construct plenty of scenarios in which the police could, reasonably in my opinion, speak to me or stop me and ask me to identify myself. I may look like (or even be) the person described as being near the scene of a crime of which I know nothing around the time it was believed to have been committed. I may be pulled over because my car is similar to the one described as a get-away vehicle in a robbery or as having been driven dangerously. My car breaks down near the gates of a nuclear power station and I am spotted loitering, waiting for the AA van: clearly, a suspicious character, possibly a terrorist casing the place. What documentation would, in the absence of a national identity card, be acceptable as reasonable proof that I am who I say I am? I’ve just looked in my wallet and all I have that gives my name, apart from my signed Dundee City Libraries card, is my driving licence. What should a person who is too old, too young, or too disabled to drive or who simply doesn’t own a car show the police, and is it legally required for the cops to accept it? I’m blowed if I carry my passport everywhere, nor do I usually carry a wad of bills addressed to myself! Come to think of it, my driving licence says (truthfully) that I was born in Egypt, and the fellow in the little photo looks a healthy light brown, so perhaps I’d better just show my library card… but I really would like to think they could identify me quickly if I was knocked unconscious in a street accident.
So for these reasons I have on principle no great objection to being issued with a card saying I am who I say I am, provided the only items on it, clearly legible, are (1) photo; (2) name; (3, optional) maiden name; (4) date of birth; (5) tax or other ID number (I see no harm in this, it’s already known to a good many branches of officialdom); and (6) address, though getting the last updated (no charge, of course!) would be a bore especially for people who for perfectly respectable reasons move often. I’m not sure, though, what inviolable precautions could be taken against either forgery or identity theft: for the latter, perhaps an encoded piece of information, known only to oneself but readable by an Official Machine, of the type one is sometimes asked to provide when registering for on-line banking: maternal grandmother’s maiden name, name of first school, etc. In any case I would insist on two things.
First, there should be no other encoded information whatsoever. The card confirms that you are who you say you are: that’s all. In this connection, perhaps our greatest guardian of civil liberties is the teenage computer buff and electronics whizzkid, who, given the possibility that his and his friends’ and families’ cards carried encoded stuff, would not rest till he had read and decoded everything (with the aid, no doubt, of code-cracking algorithms downloaded from the Internet). Imagine the stink if it turned out that a large proportion of Mr. Blunkett’s shiny new cards said ‘has a police record’, or ‘politically unreliable’ or simply ‘troublemaker’, even if the details were not spelled out. Or ‘hypochondriac’ or ‘layabout’, for that matter.
Second, the card should be in law a sufficient proof of identity in all situations and not just in dealings with the police. The card would be acceptable at airline check-ins, for example. Banks should be required to accept it when one opens an account. My wife (that notorious money-launderer, or laundress) still seethes about the difficulty she had in opening an account in her maiden name, although she could prove who she was born as and where, who she married and when, and that she is still married, and to the same person, and where they live.
By the way, can anyone remember: how did we get on with the old pasteboard ID cards, 1939 to ca. 1950? I lost mine only a few years ago. I know there were forgeries, but were there any confirmed cases of mistaken identity, and did any spies and fifth columnists thrive undetected?