The temporary eclipse of David Blunkett’s career has predictably done nothing to halt the New Labour government’s helter-skelter progress on their authoritarian “law and order” agenda. The introduction of compulsory national identity cards will still go ahead by 2006. The reasons the Home Office gives for this are quite revealing.
“It will: help protect the UK against terrorism, organised crime, identity theft, illegal immigration and illegal working; allow UK citizens to travel and carry out everyday transactions easily and securely; and ensure that public services are only used by those entitled to them.”
The public fear of crime, especially terrorist crime, comes at the top of the list of justifications of course, but look on a little further.
National identity cards will make it easier for the police to find “illegal” immigrants, mainly by stopping people who “look foreign” on the streets and demanding to see their identity cards. Immigration officers are already randomly stopping people on the London Underground, against protests from Underground workers.
The government also wishes to prevent tragedies like last year’s drowning of Chinese “illegal” workers picking cockles in Morecambe Bay. It will do this by preventing them from working. The Home Office does not seem to have considered that with people desperate enough for work to hide in containers to get into Britain, putting these people even more in peril of being deported will strengthen the control of the people-traffickers and gang-masters over their exploited workforce.
Lastly, the measure seals up its crackdown on “illegal” immigration by making an identity card compulsory for access to any public service. This means that undocumented people will be unable to obtain help of any kind, and doctors and social workers could be prosecuted for helping such people in extreme distress — which some have said they will do.
The measure is similar in its intention to the Dutch law, now several years old, linking the databases of all public services in order to deny them to “illegal” immigrants. Incidentally, the title of this odious piece of legislation — Koppelingswet, or “joining-up law” — sounds impeccably New Labour!
Ultimately it is only by linking the resistance of workers such as those on the Underground, public service workers, doctors, community organisations and, of course, immigrants themselves into a massive protest movement that we will be able to defeat ID cards and reverse the reactionary anti-immigrant agenda of the main political parties.
By Mike Rowley
