Identity Politics

The case for national ID cards is once more being promoted enthusiastically by the Labour Party and this time by the liberal press as well. And once more the arguments are the same: it will help fight crime, it will reduce benefit fraud, it will squeeze the black economy etc. The suggestion that ID cards will help solve the immigration "crisis" isn't exactly novel, but it is now the headline. What remains fascinating whenever the topic comes up is the complete absence of evidence (speculative assessments by the Tony Blair Institute notwithstanding) to support any of its claimed benefits. What makes it doubly fascinating is that the Windrush scandal has barely passed from memory: an occasion on which the discriminatory interpretation of citizenship led to a cavalier abuse of power and the unnecessary suffering of many people. Bizarrely, some supporters are even claiming that the scandal would have been avoided if everyone had had an ID card; an unprovable counterfactual that completely ignores the actual history of events and the political pressures that led to the performative cruelty of the "hostile environment".

The prominence of immigration has caused some rearrangement of the political forces around the debate. Where once Tory newspapers would have rehearsed both sides of the argument - authoritarian versus libertarian - their opposition to the idea is now muted because of the salience of immigration and their own insistence on the existential threat that it poses to the nation. The Observer, which was previously firmly in the libertarian camp (it ran a "Liberty watch" campaign during the New Labour years), looks like it will provide the forum for the latest debate, though its editorial view, as it shifts further right, is now predictably blithe about the risks. Kenan Malik, for the libertarians, recently outlined the danger of dividing sheep from goats: "Mistreating and abusing citizens is not morally more reprehensible than mistreating and abusing those deemed “illegal”. What it reveals, though, is that if we turn a blind eye to such treatment on the grounds that “it’s only illegals being treated this way”, it will not remain “only illegals”. And once such forms of policing become acceptable, they can easily be transposed to dealing with other groups deemed a social menace, such as strikers or protesters." 

In contrast, Will Hutton has nailed his flag firmly to the authoritarian mast: "Immigration above any other issue fuels populism. Part of the fightback is to douse these flames – say, by introducing universal ID cards so we know who is here, building special purpose centres to house illegal migrants, and processing claims and necessary deportations fast and visibly. This should never be presented as a concession to implicit racism. Rather, it is to keep rules and be fair." While Malik is fairly indirect in his approach, leaving it to the reader to note the implicit mission creep of any ID scheme, Hutton is bracingly direct in his solutionism, which tells something about the respective confidence of the two camps but also about the uncertainty that besets liberals who have hitherto warned us of the danger of identity politics. A national ID scheme appears to flatten the population into a single mass, but it is also identity politics writ large: an extreme form of imagined community. The problem is that while the geographical borders of the country are clear, its demographic limits are not.

We know from the Windrush case that there isn't a clear, dividing line between citizen and non-citizen - between "them" and "us" - so all the talk of rules fairly applied is just hot air. What matters is the political direction and the operational practices of the Home Office. But what Hutton's contribution does make clear is that the introduction of ID cards is the necessary precursor for the mass deportation of people who have been in the country for years. His blunt advocacy is wrapped up in the usual panegyric to Enlightenment values, but it's one that does serious injury to history. Consider this: "The BBC, for example, was established as a public body to use the new broadcast media to disseminate impartial information better to inform and educate British citizens." The corporation was established as a commercial company in 1922, under licence by the GPO, by a cartel of radio manufacturers to provide "orderly management" of the radio spectrum and boost the sale of radio sets. It quickly acquired a political colouring when the establishment realised the benefit in terms of controlling public opinion, notably during the General Strike of 1926. In 1927 it was reconsituted as a public corporation and informal government censor. These facts are well known.

You might wonder why Hutton has dragged the BBC into the debate. The intention is to convince us that a British ID card scheme would be as reassuring as "Auntie". It appears he hasn't been watching BBC TV or listening to the radio of late. If the Tory press sets the agenda for the national broadcaster, don't be surprised if it sets the policy of the Home Office. According to Hutton, "The Overton window of what is acceptable has been moved so far to the right by the populist upsurge." But this confuses cause and effect. It is the political centre - supposedly the repository of Enlightenment values - that has pushed politics to the right since 1980, long before any "populist upsurge". Inevitably, he must drag in the newspaper's obligatory criticism of social media: "But just as the Enlightenment was propelled by a quest for truth and fact, today’s anti-Enlightenment populists are fuelled by social media and disinformation. ... Reform could never have climbed so high, so fast, without a credulous public deluded into thinking social media carries truths that mainstream politicians and media conspire to disguise."

The Enlightenment exploited the novel media of the day to advance its ideas: The Marriage of Figaro being a famous example. Even more pertinent to Hutton's claim was the rise of the scabrous anti-establishment pamphlets that did so much to stoke the French Revolution. Though there is a long tradition of liberals decrying 1789 as the wrong turn that would lead to the gulags, there is no doubt about the central role that Enlightenment ideas had in its gestation and development. The area where Hutton finds common cause with Malik is in the criticism of identity politics: "Have liberals made mistakes? Undoubtedly. Tolerance has mutated into advocacy of minority rights so fierce that the majority feel actively menaced. The charge of being “woke” has some legitimacy." At this point Hutton could be writing for the Sunday Times or Sunday Telegraph. What he cannot apparently see, while Malik shifts uneasily in his seat, is that there is no "majority" defined by their exclusion from minority rights. To suggest otherwise is to drift perilously close to the kind of politics that sees road signs in Welsh or Gaelic, or the mere existence of trans men and women, as an affront.

In the liberal lexicon, populism has always been a synonym for democracy, but in offering ID cards as a counter to it Hutton is reducing it to mere bigotry: that "implicit racism". But even the academics who have made a career out of analysing the subject agree that the primary fuel is economic stress, hence the current wave of populism can be traced to 2008 and its reverberations, notably austerity. It is a common observation that anxiety over immigration is simple displacement, hence it fluctuates in response to media prominence and is often highest in areas with the fewest immigrants. Other factors that have stoked populism include the cartelisation of politics and its related ideological convergence and corruption. Immigration may be seized upon as an issue, but it is not a significant explanatory factor. After all, the great wave of postwar immigration did not lead to more than a few isolated and evanescent cases of populist political advance, and many of those, e.g. Poujadism, had very clear economic roots.

Hutton believes that we, that nebulous "majority", should "go on the front foot to argue for Enlightenment principles, from vaccination to the environment. The entire anti-Enlightenment, anti-truth, disinformation biases of social media must be contested. The success of the Online Safety Act in dramatically lowering harmful content should be built on. Take on the tech giants. Insist information on their platforms is mediated, that anonymity is impossible and that standards of fact in the analogue world are reproduced in the digital world. Even consider launching public social media platforms, reproducing the same thinking 100 years later that justified the BBC." As with his potted history of the Corporation, this is misleading. The Online Safety Act has not dramatically lowered harmful content. It has simply led to the increased use of VPNs. Hutton's suggestion that all online content be mediated and that there be no anonymity is obviously absurd, but making such unrealistic demands is simply seasoning for the less palatable dish that he offers, namely a national ID card that would undermine the traditional liberties that were central to the British conception of the Enlightenment.