Tracking and "fortress Britain"

The Register is reporting the Prime Minister’s latest description of the ID card scheme. It’s looking more and more draconian.

“we need identity cards both for foreign nationals and for British nationals. If we want to track people coming in and out of our country and to know the identity of people who are here, then that is what we have to do.”

Yes, that was “track people”. Despite the continual denials that this is what the Government intends, we have it from the horse’s mouth: one of the aims of the ID card legislation is so that the Government can keep an eye on where we are and what we’re doing. But it actually gets worse than that. The PM’s basic contention is that the ID card will stop illegal immigration. The article in The Register analyses this claim to see how it could work, and concludes that it could, possibly, if everything goes right for the technology. But the price that we will pay is frequent, intrusive ID checks. The only way to use ID cards to find people who don’t have them is to demand that the card be presented often – which means that it would have to become routine to “identify ourselves” several times a day. And for the Government to cross-check all that data for anomalies, holes and fakes.

The Immigration and Nationality Directorate, it was revealed last week, does not currently pursue overstayers, because mysteriously, when they’ve tried they’ve generally found that they’re not at their last recorded address. If they happen to trip over your aunty from Trinidad who forgot to go home they’ll probably send her back, but mostly she’s safe…
As we pointed out earlier, Mr Tony didn’t get specific about how ID cards would be applied to this situation, but for the sake of argument we’ll speculate a little then just pretend that It Is So. Equipped with massively extended resources…IND and police SWAT teams operate intensive ID checks, pass controls and area searches, netting large numbers of immigration offenders. Alternatively, the Government pipe-dream of ID cards becoming your ‘don’t leave home without it’ passport to life, commonly used by individuals to validate transactions several times a day, becomes a reality, and the illegals are flagged up by the electronic national ID checking network instead…
The criminals, the fugitives who know you’re looking for them, those who adopt false IDs, and those exist below the system’s radar are all going to be a lot harder, but if the checks are intensive enough and go on long enough, then quite a lot of them can be scooped up. If, that is, the supply of new illegal immigrants can be shut off. But as we’ve seen, even with e-Borders fully deployed there is no obvious way that this can be achieved.
Which leaves Blair’s plans to solve the immigration question through the application of IT with difficulties on several levels. The border defences themselves will be expensive to keep up, will put non-immigrant travellers through annoying hoops, but will do little to impede would-be immigrants coming in under false pretences and/or false documentation. They will give the UK a biometric database of a reasonable percentage of the future defaulters, but these can only rationally be tracked down in-country via fairly repressive controls which again will impact heavily on the rest of the population. These measures will produce a large (and, assuming the supply is not shut off, continually growing) group of candidates for deportation, and as these will likely abscond if released, they must be detained until – Well yes, until when? And where? If their country of origin can be confirmed, and if a repatriation agreement exists with that country, then they can be deported. But they may not admit where they’re from, the country in question may not accept that they’re from there, or may just plain not be willing to accept them…
So even if Fortress Blair performs as specified (remember we’ve only been pretending it will), we’re left with a growing pile of people we can’t send back because nobody will accept them. So what do you do? Keep them in camps forever?

Are we worried, yet?

pax et bonum

Article posted at 7:34pm on 22 May 2006
Category: Politics, General

Yes. And it would be “target groups” who’d be asked to present their id cards far more frequently than anyone else, which would just add to problems of resentment against the state.

I have travelled by car with many people in my time and 6 times been stopped by the police. On 5 of those occasions it was when my friend who is black was driving (and he was innocent of any wrong-doing on each occassion bar one, when he was, admittedly, speeding slightly in a 30 zone -which I do not excuse – but I mean….)

Ruth () (URL)
5:35pm on 26 May 2006