We had this debate twenty years ago, you utter cretin.
‘Britain has never been a ‘papers, please’ society,” said Jacob Rees-Mogg, speaking on his GB News radio show last week. “I’ve always loved the quotation from the historian AJP Taylor, who wrote that ‘until August 1914, a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman’. But the world has changed… is it time to sacrifice freedom for administrative efficiency, and bow down to po-faced officialdom?”
This insane, illiberal lunacy was why I started this blog twenty years ago. The morons pushing it claimed that it would fix everything from terrorism to genital warts (okay, I made that last bit up, but you get the idea). ID cards are a solution desperately looking for a problem to fix and appeal to those with an IQ smaller than their shoe size. They make nothing easier and likely as not, make life a damned sight harder. Because we would become a papers please society. Even now, without this monstrosity, we get demands for ID – usually, a driving licence or passport suffices, when, in fact, neither is an identity document and the demand is entirely unnecessary. But if we do get ID cards, along with the bureaucratic clusterfuck of a database that will inevitably be behind it, all the dystopian nightmares we were predicting twenty years ago will come to fruition.
Every couple of decades, the hard-of-thinking trot it out as if it will solve everything, yet it will solve nothing. No, there is no reason whatsoever to give up a little liberty to gain some perceived security.
But on one thing, though, Rees-Mogg is wrong, as are other libertarian politicians such as Liz Truss. Britain is a papers, please society. A YouGov poll last year showed that a majority of the public supported compulsory ID cards, as well as CCTV cameras in every public place and a national database of citizens’ fingerprints. Neither is Rees-Mogg preaching to his base: the same poll showed that Conservative voters were much more likely than average to support all these measures.
That just tells us that the majority of those polled are fucking stupid.
These days, sensible, law-abiding Englishmen tend to demand more from the state than the post office and the odd policeman. They want it to work well and solve big social problems. They want administrative efficiency. They want po-faced officialdom. And they are prepared to sacrifice freedoms to get it.
I am a law abiding Englishman and I want the state to fuck off and leave me alone. I want it to do the bare minimum and no more, in other words, to fuck off and leave us alone. And, no, I am prepared to sacrifice nothing to be surveilled and micromanaged by this Orwellian bureaucracy. I want them all to fuck off and leave me alone. Did I say that already?
A paper last year by Aveek Bhattacharya, of the Social Market Foundation, showed that the public were largely in favour of policies that crack down on their freedoms to gamble, smoke, drink and consume food that is bad. One salient motive seems to be to protect the state from people who might take it for a ride: taxpayers and the NHS should not be burdened, people feel, with those who treat themselves recklessly.
Fuck the NHS. It isn’t fit for purpose and, no, people do not have the right to demand that others refrain to ‘save’ it. We all pay for this monstrosity, so regardless of how we have lived our lives, we have the right to take out what we have put in – smokers and drinkers, for example have paid more than those of us who don’t, so that argument is bullshit – just as the rest of the argument in favour of ID cards is bullshit, just as the argument in favour of face nappies, lockdowns and compulsory vaccination was all bullshit. We live in a post science, post liberty world. Fucking Hell!
But our change of heart may be due to broader factors, too. As society has liberalised, a vacancy has appeared. It used to be that family, neighbourhood communities and religions worked as our moral arbiters, telling us what was right and wrong, what was fair, what we owe to others, and how we should best organise our lives. But these have declined. Could it be that we need the state to stand in instead?
No we fucking don’t. The state is the enemy. It is not your friend. It never was.
So, for fuck’s sake, here we go again…
Never trust a YouGov poll
Because it’s a self selecting sample. Completely unreliable.
And also the creation of politicians….
And they undoubtedly asked leading questions in order to get the answers they wanted.
When Labour get in after the next election, I would like to see if they have the nerve to introduce compulsory ID cards. By that time I will have applied for a new passport (my previous passport expired in 2016), and so will have no need for an ID card. I will refuse to apply for any kind of compulsory ID card. They can fine me or whatever. I will refuse. To hell with them.
And I’ve just noticed that this Graun piece is not accepting comments. Funny that. Could the Graun possibly be worried that most people commenting on this piece would be opposed to ID cards?
Interestingly, the Graun’s followers tended to be opposed last time, so maybe, yes.
Which is, in part, why I never do surveys. That and I’m a paid up curmudgeon.
Many sheeple I know agree with id cards, “Coz it will crack down on illegal immigrants”.
FFS
Either they will be given id cards in which case it will make no difference. Or, more likely, the scummy leftie lawyers will use taxpayers money to get the courts to decide that not allowing illegal immigrants access to services as they have no id cards is against their human rights. Only genuine British citizens will then have to have produce id cards for access to these services, which we have all paid for.
Of course in Scotland and Wales they will have even more idiotic solutions that only hinder the native populations.
In one of the newspapers David Blunkett was saying basically, “If you had listened to me 20 years ago and we had introduced ID cards there would not be the immigration problem we have today.”
How? Those arriving on the beach would be told to get back in the boat because they had no ID card? Those we can identify and don’t want are not returned.
Big Blunkett was a moronic prick then and nothing has changed in the intervening twenty years.
“Or, more likely, the scummy leftie lawyers will use taxpayers money to get the courts to decide that not allowing illegal immigrants access to services as they have no id cards is against their human rights. Only genuine British citizens will then have to have produce id cards for access to these services, which we have all paid for.”
Exactly. Can anyone see the leftie types who infest the State sector suddenly becoming ‘papers please’ gauleiters when faced with their client class of immigrants? Would doctors be turning away the pregnant Asian woman without an ID card? Would councils be telling an ID-less Somali immigrant ‘Sorry, no money or free housing for you’? They don’t enforce the laws we already have on who can access public services, so what difference is having ID cards going to make? Other than a way of allowing exactly the same people refuse to serve legitimate UK citizens because they don’t have the ID required on them at that point?
The funny thing is that the “paper please” thing has been the case on the other side of the channel forever.
Obviously France has no issues with immigration (or Germany,..etc…).
Oh wait…
Whoever thinks the state is the solution to anything is a moron. The state has been “educating” kids for years to believe that is the case so no wonder we are where we are.
It is not going to get any better.
“They want it (The State) to work well and solve big social problems. They want administrative efficiency.”
When has the State ever solved problems social or otherwise? These idiots don’t live on the same planet as the rest of us it seems. As for wanting administrative efficiency, well good luck with that you complete and utter moron, you will never get that from the State, Amazon is a pretty good bet though.
I think I first came across this blog during the NO2ID days. It would be way worse if they get these damn things now given how technology has moved on.
“… protect the state from people who might take it for a ride …”
Yes. We must protect “our precious democracy” from people who might go and enjoy themselves. Given what we saw in lockdowns I don’t doubt that there’s a decent number of people who want this sort of meddling, if they think it’s not going to affect them.
DiscoveredJoys Rule of Law:
Any new law will bear more heavily on the innocent than the guilty.