With a few delicate and superficially reasonable words, Home Office minister Joan Ryan today exemplified the government’s dismissive attitude to the discussion surrounding ID cards and its impatient dismissal of fears over its erosion of privacy.
She was speaking in response to criticism from opposition parties of the revelation by Tony Blair, in an email to the 28,000 signatories of a petition against the introduction of ID cards on the Downing Street website, that the police would be able to search the National Identity Register to check fingerprints found at crime scenes. Although Mr Blair insisted that this would enable the police to solve those crimes committed by people whose fingerprints aren’t on their own database, it raises the unsettling prospect of the police having free roam of all the information held on the NIR, together with the inevitable proliferation of innocent people under suspicion.
The qualification that they must check all fingerprints against their own database before requesting permission to access the NIR offers little consolation, as it is precisely the kind of people who wouldn’t have their fingerprints on a Met database that would suddenly fall, in vast numbers, under its scrutiny. Not that the police aren’t already assisted by their ability to access information on a scale that no other country in the world can match. Britain’s citizens are the most heavily surveyed in the world, and the country’s DNA database is also the world’s largest, at some 5% of the population.
However, Ms Ryan’s response was unequivocal, despite the fact that Mr Blair stands accused of contradicting an earlier promise to parliament that police would not be able to go on such ‘fishing expeditions’. “Surely no one would suggest we should put obstacles in the way of police investigating crime”, she said.
The significance of Ms Ryan’s statement lies in its painfully demagogic attempt to exclude discussion on the issue and its ostracisation of the NIR’s doubters, with its implication that those who would oppose or question the massive exposition of personal information to the police are, naturally, assisting criminals. This kind of false dilemma encapsulates the government’s condescending approach, not only to its increasing infringements of individuals’ rights as it seeks to readdress the balance in favour of collective entitlements to security and safety, but also to the debate about those infringements.
It follows a precedent of destructive non-argument set by Mr Blair himself. With reference to his promotion of the NIR, perhaps the most recent example is found in an article he wrote in the Daily Telegraph in November. Mr Blair backed up his assertion that the civil liberties argument against the introduction of NI cards “doesn’t carry much weight” with what he saw as the public’s general acceptance of the use of biometric data. To illustrate this, he cited the two million Americans (roughly 0.6% of the population) who use the “Pay by Touch” scheme, whereby their fingerprints are linked to their bank accounts, and the fact that the scheme is currently on trial here in Britain. Apparently this means that biometric technology is so ubiquitous in our daily lives that the question of privacy has become irrelevant for us.
This is precisely the kind of non-argument that heightens the anxiety which it is supposed to assuage. But perhaps most importantly, its lack of substance points to a disdain for a meaningful engagement with the opponents of the ID card system. Indeed, while they are advanced on the pretext of participation in a discussion, arguments such as this one, and that offered by Ms Ryan, merely suggest an ingrained contempt for debate.
Beau Hopkins
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