10.07.2002

Entitled to resist

Communists must oppose identity cards, says Ian Donovan

David Blunkett and the Blair government are once again whittling away at civil liberties and democratic rights. Only a couple of weeks after Blunkett was forced to back away from giving virtually any local council or ministerial bureaucrat the right to access people's internet or mobile phone records, New Labour is once again pushing proposals for identity cards. This of course is not the first time this kind of proposal has been made in recent years. It was floated by Tory home secretary Michael Howard in the mid-1990s - and was pretty quickly abandoned - the political conditions did not exist in that situation of rampant Tory unpopularity for Major's government to be able to push it through. The coming to power of Blair's regime, which on so many questions has simply continued the policies of Thatcher and Major, provided an opportunity for Labour's own thoroughly bourgeois and authoritarian political elite to use their 'honeymoon' period to implement a similar scheme. But still the conditions did not exist - popular suspicion of government snooping and the like made the idea virtually impossible to get through. September 11 thus provided the government with another opportunity - the wave of popular panic about the possibility of terrorist attacks, though nowhere near as marked as across the Atlantic, nevertheless gave them something of an excuse to begin to promote the idea again. They are trying to use the currently widespread popular prejudice against asylum-seekers as a means to try to circumvent and deflect popular suspicion of such authoritarian measures. Thus the Orwellian presentation of the cards proposed, not as identity cards, but as 'entitlement cards' - helpfully making it easier to obtain a whole range of public services: healthcare, social security benefits, education. In reality of course their purpose is to restrict access to those services. In particular they will also be used to prove 'entitlement' to work, particularly where immigrants are concerned. Thus they go hand in hand with other repulsive chauvinist measures, such as the segregation of asylum-seekers' children in separate schools, as well as the building of detention centres around the country as part of the latest government wheeze to discourage migrants from these hallowed shores. Behind the scenes the infrastructure to make it work will be put in place. There will be a massive, centralised government database containing the details of every card-holder. Potentially, such a database could contain such things as a record of every person's DNA signature, fingerprints or iris pattern - whose biometric reading provides even more accurate identification than fingerprinting. They could also store an individual's medical, tax and criminal details, and who knows what else. Potentially, all kinds of information, held by a range of disconnected public bodies, could be linked together to provide a complete 'portrait' of every card-holder - a secret policeman's dream. It would be a harbinger, given some further retrograde shift in political conditions, of repression against dissenters and potential opponents of capitalism using technologies that the totalitarian regimes of the mid-20th century could only have dreamed of. As communists, we oppose these proposals. We are as a matter of principle against all restrictions on the rights of immigrants, whether political refugees or economic migrants. We are for the abolition of all immigration controls, and for the defeat of all measures aimed at propping up such laws. Immigration controls are fundamentally an attack on the rights of workers as a class - they restrict the freedom of movement of labour in a world where capital increasingly has no limits on its mobility and ability to span the globe. It is no accident that the question of immigration, and the rights of non-citizens, is being used as the thin end of the wedge for a measure that is in fact an attack against the rights and civil liberties of all workers. It is a tried and tested method of the capitalists to exploit divisions in the working class, exploiting prejudice amongst those workers who mistakenly identify with their 'own' nation and its bosses by attacking some vulnerable marginal layer - in order to soften up the class as a whole. The Labour (and previously Tory) aspiration to introduce identity cards is yet another manifestation of the tendency of capitalism to require greater and greater regimentation of the workforce, greater levels of surveillance of social and political currents that pose a potential threat to the profit system, and the greater use of new technologies for such snooping. The rightwing taunt against opponents of such measures - 'If you are innocent, you have nothing to fear' - which is gaining some popular resonance in the post-September 11 social climate, expresses in the mouths of 'ordinary' people who echo it a touching naivety. It implies that the governments of our 'democratic' society are always blameless, are always 'fair', never have a political motive for attacking the rights of those below, etc. Complete nonsense, of course. Anyone who casts their mind back as far as the miners' strike of 1984-85 will remember how the government used the technology available to the state against the working class, with the political aim of decisively weakening the power of the organised labour and allowing precisely the massive privatisations and arrogant rule of the fat cats that we live with today. Phone-tapping, computerised records of car ownership (used for tracking and intercepting miners and their supporters around the country) - you name it: all were employed to ensure that the bosses and their government defeated the strikers in that historic class battle. Capital is a fundamentally anti-democratic force, that frequently in history used the false consciousness generated by its own parody of 'democracy', limited to a narrowly defined 'political' sphere, to push through swingeing attacks on democratic rights. Defence of the democratic rights of the whole of the working class, and the defence of those sections of the class who are to be the immediate target of these measures - asylum-seekers and immigrants - must be seen as one integral struggle. The various bourgeois factions have repeatedly shown an inability to agree among themselves exactly how and to what extent such attacks on democratic rights should be conducted. Indeed, there is always the possibility of new-fangled technical methods of keeping tabs on the mass of the population being subverted and rendered ineffective by hi-tech crooks, saboteurs and the like. Some worry that it could be potentially sabotaged by a popular movement of non-cooperation and non-registration, along the lines of the poll tax. In any case, it is likely that it will take several years for such a scheme to be implemented - the biometric technology envisaged, for instance, is still at a fairly undeveloped stage technologically. This kind of thing, more than any disagreement in principle with such reactionary measures aimed at circumscribing the democratic rights of the masses, is what may persuade sections of the ruling class to think twice about the wisdom of such a scheme - this government has more than once overreached itself and been sent back to the drawing board by opposition from within the establishment. This, however, does not change the fact that there is a ruling class drive towards circumscribing democratic rights and safeguards in Britain today. Such measures as the Regulation of Investigatory Powers act; the attenuation of the right to silence in criminal law; the new terrorism law involving indefinite detention of suspect non-citizens without trial; and even the taking of new powers of imprisonment of so-called 'psychopaths' (people who may have never committed even the smallest of criminal offences, but who are deemed in some way likely to commit some horror in the future on the say-so of government-appointed specialists): all these things are examples of a whittling away of important legal protection for the rights of ordinary people that have taken place in the past decade or so. Most of them, indeed, under the current Blairite government. Sooner or later, a ruling class consensus does tend to emerge about how precisely such attacks are to be carried out - it would be extremely foolish for the labour movement to leave it to a bunch of unruly life-peers in the inherently anti-democratic House of Lords to sink these proposals. On the contrary, the Socialist Alliance and those who follow its lead need to fight for trade unions and other working class organisations to be in the forefront of opposition - opposition from below to make sure that Blunkett's plans never see the light of day. Ian Donovan