Ron Paul, Racism, Conspiracy Theories and Utter Looniness

One of the pieces I’ve reblogged from Still Laughing At UKIP a short while ago is a piece noting that John Gill, the admin of UKIP’s Facebook page, is a fan of far-right Republican presidential candidate, Ron Paul. The article provides detailed information on just how far-right Paul is, with friends and political collaborators in a host of Nazi and racist organisations, including the Klan, the National Alliance – by far the largest American nationalist organisation – the National Socialist Workers Party and the racist website, Stormfront. It also has links to several websites giving even more information on Paul and his noxious connections to the racist right.

One of these is to an article in the liberal journal, Mother Jones, listing some of the extreme and offensive opinions expressed in Paul’s bulletins, which he issued from 1975 onwards. Paul tried to disown some of them, by saying that he’d never read them until after they were issued, but as he’s listed on them as ‘editor’, this seems unlikely. The views are what you’d expect from a pillar of the American far right: racist, homophobic and with a venomous hatred of any type of welfare and its recipients, whom he views as simply lazy. He also has a line in barking conspiracy theories. Two of his assertions stood out in particular to me. These were

1) AIDS was a secret experiment that escaped from Fort Dettrick, and

2) 95 per cent of Black American men in DC are criminals.

AIDS: The Germ Warfare Experiment

The idea that AIDS was secret germ warfare experiment emerged in the 1990s. Kevin McClure, a long time weird watcher, who has edited a series of small press magazines since the 1970s covering all aspect of the paranormal and alternative spirituality, tackled this one twenty years or so ago in an edition of his small press mag The Wild Places. From the evidence, it looks like this story was a piece of Soviet disinformation in retaliation for the American line that the KGB was behind the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, rather than a group of Turkish Fascists called the Grey Wolves.

A medical doctor writing in the American conspiracy magazine, Steamshovel Press, noted that the story was believed by large numbers of Black Americans. It was especially plausible to them, he pointed out, because of the Tuskeegee experiments in the 1930s. This was a programme in which a group of Black share croppers were given syphilis and refused treatment in order to examine the progress of the disease. Their funerals were, however, paid for by the state. The American government also conducted mind control experiments on American servicemen and unwitting civilian personnel. Again, those victimised were the poor, and particularly Blacks. Paul believed it because he’s a Nazi who’s paranoid about his government. Blacks, on the other hand, had every reason to believe it, because experiments like it had been inflicted on them.

Locking Up Black Americans, Just in Case They Commit Crime

As for Paul’s assertion that 95 per cent of Black males in Washington D.C. were crims, this largely stemmed from his own racism and bizarre belief in the absolute rectitude of his bonkers views. According to him, the only Black men, who weren’t criminals were those, who agreed with him in wishing to end the welfare state and affirmative action and anti-segregation programmes. It’s bizarre, but unfortunately, Paul’s not alone. There are plenty of others, who have similar opinions. An American friend of mine told me about one Republican politico, who decided that most crime was committed by young Black men between 18 and 30. He therefore had a simple solution to solving America’s crime rate: lock up every Black American male between those ages.

Another Republican politico had a similar, though less severe suggestion. He wanted everyone to be locked up in prison for three days on their 18th birthday, in order to deter them from a life of crime. With these, you really are dealing with the part of the Republican Party rationality forgot.

Ernst Zundl and the Nazi Flying Saucers

One of the links also takes you to a website, which details Paul’s links to Ernst Zundl. Zundl’s a notorious Canadian Nazi, who’s been publishing Holocaust Denial rubbish for decades. Back in the 1990s he was one of the talking heads on a Channel 4 documentary about the designer of gas chambers for the American prison system. Sponsored by various American Neo-Nazi organisations, this particular expert went off to examine the surviving gas chambers at Auschwitz. He concluded that there was no evidence to support the assertion that they were gas chambers. A Jewish researcher was also featured, who knocked down every piece of evidence this particular individual used in his argument.

Along with promoting Holocaust Denial, Zundl has also published stuff claiming that UFOs were really super-secret spacecraft created by Nazi scientists. One version of this claims that these ships were built under scientific instructions from an advanced technological civilisation on planets orbiting the star Aldebaran. See the video, UFO Secrets of the Third Reich, produced by Royal Atlantis Films. Kevin McClure and the anti-Ufologists over at Magonia debunked the Nazi saucer myth about a decade ago. It’s pernicious, bonkers stuff, as some of it is produced by Nazis keen to keep the myth of a technologically advanced Third Reich alive. Zundl, however, although he publishes it, doesn’t appear to believe it. He has apparently said that he only publishes it because it makes money.

This really tells you all you really need to know about Ron Paul and the really, really lunatic fringe of the American political system he represents: vindictive, racist and with a strong desire to lock anybody and everybody up, even if they’re innocent of any crime, because, well, just in case.

And these are the people John Gill admires.

Book of Interest: Guy Standing’s A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens

I found Standing’s A Precariat Charter (London: Bloomsbury 2014) going through my local branch of Waterstone’s. It’s the sequel to his earlier The Precariat. The precariat is the term he uses for the class of people trapped in low-paid, insecure work, with frequent withdrawals from the job market due to unemployment or the need to look after or raise a family. They are the people trapped on short-term or sero-hours contracts, humiliated by the DWP and its regime of benefit sanctions and endless means tests. They are often overqualified for the menial and low-status jobs they are forced to perform. Thus they include the graduates flipping burgers in the local McDonalds or signing on with the employment agency to do some kind of clerical work. They have been created by the policy of successive governments of creating flexible labour markets. They include large numbers of women and also immigrants and asylum seekers, who find themselves excluded from more secure jobs.

Standing calls them ‘the precariat’ because of their precarious employment position, which also excludes them from enjoying full citizenship. As well as Neoliberalism, he also criticises the Social Democratic parties for their exclusive concentration on securing rights for the labour – meaning primarily male breadwinners in secure employment – while ignoring other kinds of work.

He describes the way the Neoliberal capitalism of the late 20th and early 21st century invaded and overturned the automatic link between residence in a country and citizenship. On pp. 2-3 he writes

It fell to T.H. Marshall (1950) writing after the Second World War, to define citizenship in its modern form as ‘a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community’. To be a citizen meant having ‘an absolute right to a certain standard of civilisation which is conditional only on the discharge of the general duties of citizenship.’ While Marshall’s later conception of the ‘duties of citizenship’ included a duty to labour, with which this book takes issue, he recognised the tension between rights and capitalism, noting that ‘in the twentieth century, citizenship and the capitalist class system have been at war.’ Citizenship imposed modifications on the capitalist class system, since social rights ‘imply an invasion of contract by status, the subordination of market price for social justice, the replacement of the free bargain by the declaration of rights’.

That was roughly correct in the ‘re-embedded’ phase of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation ((1944) 2001), the period of social-democrat supremacy between 1944 and 1970s. In the subsequent ‘disembedded’ phase, contract has invaded status, and social justice has been subordinated to the market price.

On pp. 8-9 he further describes the way residents in nations across the world have been stripped over their rights as citizens.

Until the 1980s, the conventional view was that over the long run, in a democratic society, residence and citizenship should coincide (Brubaker 1989. This would not be true today. Many residing in a country never obtain citizenship or the rights attached to it; others who have resided since birth, lose rights that supposedly go with citizenship.

Many denizens not only have limited rights but also lack the ‘the right to have rights’. Asylum seekers denied refugee status are an example; migrants who cannot practise the occupation for which they are qualified are another. Often, they do not have the means or the procedural avenues to contest their marginal status. Many lack the capacity to claim or enforce rights, or fear that the act of asserting a claim right would have a high probability of retributive consequences or disastrous costs. Others have no avenues at all for pursuing nominal rights.

… There a six ways by which people can become denizens. They can be blocked from attaining rights, by laws, regulations or non-accountable actions of state bureaucracies. The costs of maintaining rights can be raised. They can lose rights due to a change in status, as employee, resident or whatever. They can be deprived of rights by proper legal process,. They can lose rights de facto, without due process, even though they may not lose them in a de jure (legal) sense. And they can lose them by not conforming to moralistic norms, by having a lifestyle or set of values that puts them outside the range of protection.

He mentions the way people can be stripped of their rights through being convicted as criminals. This is an important point. While I have absolutely no objection whatsoever to crims in prison losing their right to vote as part of their punishment, in America the process has gone much further than that. In some states, if you have committed a crime, you automatically lose your right to vote in perpetuity, even after you have served your sentence and been released as a free man or woman. He summarises the situation thus

In sum, denizenship can arise not just from migration but also from an unbundling of rights that removes some or all of the rights nominally attached to formal citizenships. The neo-liberalism that crystallized in the globalization era has generated a ‘tiered membership’ model of society. Worst of all, the unbundling of rights has gone with a class-based restructuring of rights. This is the ground on which the precariat must make its stand. (p. 10.)

In discussing the varieties of the precariat, he describes deprived members of the working classes, who may because of their lack of opportunities or education become attracted to Fascistic ideologies that blame others for their misfortune, and demand that other groups have their benefits cut, even when they themselves need them. IN my opinion, this describes a certain type of Tory voter – the working class Conservatives on whom Johnny Speight based in the famous Fascist git, Alf Garnett. He goes on to explain why the precariat is a dangerous class:

The precariat is dangerous for another related reason, because it is still at war with itself. If populist demagoguery had its way, the first variety [the dispossessed working class] would turn vicious towards the second [migrants and asylum seekers], as has been happening in Greece, Hungary and Italy. It is also dangerous because as predicted in The Precariat, the combination of anxiety, alienation, anomie and anger can be expected to lead to more days of riot and protest. And it is dangerous because stress, economic insecurity and frustration can lead and are leading to social illnesses, including drug-taking, petty crime, domestic violence and suicide.

Finally, the precariat is dangerous because it is confronted by a strident divisive state. Many in it feel commodified, treated as objects to be coerced to labour, penalized for not labouring, exhorted by politicians to do more. Nobody should be surprised if they react anomically. But since the precariat is emotionally detached from the labour it is expected to do, it is less inclined to imagine that jobs are the road to happiness or that job creation is a sign of social progress. The precariat pins its hopes and aspirations elsewhere. Quite soon, it will echo a slogan of 1968: ‘Ca Suffit!’ p. 32).

As well as the chapter describing the emergence of the precariat, and the social and economic forces that have created and exploit it, he presents a charter for improving their conditions in Chapter 5. This includes the following articles

Article 1: Redefine work as productive and reproductive activity (basically, it isn’t just work outside, but also inside the home).

Article 2: Reform labour statistics.

Article 3: Make recruitment practices brief encounters.

Article 4: Regulate flexible labour.

Article 5: Promote associational freedom. (This means developing new forms of unions and work associations that are able to act for the precariat).

Articles 6-10: Reconstruct occupational communities.

Articles 11-15: Stop class-based migration policy. (This, presumably, means ending the double standards that allow the massively wealth to go wherever they want, while excluding the poor, who may desperately need sanctuary or the job opportunities available in the countries to which they wish to migrate).

Article 16: Ensure due process for all.

Article 17: Remove poverty traps and precarity traps.

Article 18: Make a bonfire of benefit assessment tests. (Yaay!)

Article 19: Stop demonizing the disabled. (Also Yaay!)

Article 20: Stop workfare now! (Definitely yaaay!)

Article 21: Regulate payday loans and student loans.

Article 22: Institute a right to financial knowledge and advice.

Article 23: Decommodify education.

Article 24: Make a bonfire of subsidies (in other words, stop state support for over-paid exploiters and slave masters like IDS).

Article 25: Move towards a universal basic income.

Article 26: Share capital via sovereign wealth funds.

Article 27: Revive the Commons.

Article 28: Revive deliberative democracy.

Article 29: Re-marginalize charities.

This effectively means stemming the various Neoliberal polices that have led to the emergence of this new class of the dispossessed, as well as democratic deficit in which parliament has been side-lined in favour of a presidential style of politics, and social and economic policies formulated by think tanks and corporations.

I haven’t read the book yet, and intend to write a fuller review when I do so. I have, however, glanced at some of it, particular the attack on workfare, and have been impressed by Standing’s analysis and arguments.

Lord Lucan, Public School Thuggery and Establishment ‘Omerta’

Lord Lucan: The detective investigating his case said that he encountered a wall of silence greater than at amongst professional criminals.

Yesterday evening I reblogged Mr Pride’s post ‘Violent thugs with public school accents and connections to the very top of the Tory Party’. This was about the derisory sentence – a fine of £350 – handed out to two thugs, who had attacked and robbed two women in car in 2007. The men were both friends of David Cameron and were leading members of the Heythrop Hunt. One of them was Charles Otis Ferry, the Marlborough-educated son of pop star Bryan Ferry. Otis Ferry was a strong supporter of the pro-fox hunting group, the Countryside Alliance, who took part in their invasion of the floor of the House of Commons when it was banned by Blair’s government. There’s more than a suspicion here that upper class solidarity played a very strong part in the exceptionally low penalty given to the two men, despite the violence of the attack. The two men had blocked the road in front of the two women with their car, and then smashed the women’s windows in order to get the money. It was a violent crime, and there is absolutely no way that someone from the working or lower middle classes would have been treated with such contemptible leniency if they had been responsible for a similar assault.

In this respect, it reminds me of what I’ve heard about the wall of silence and establishment class solidarity the police detective charged with investigating the affair of Lord Lucan encountered. Lucan was the lord, who disappeared after the murder of his children’s nanny. A friend of mine with a far greater interest in the case than me told me that the detective investigating the case was appalled by the complete lack of co-operation he received from the other members of the aristocracy. The attitude was very much that Lucan may have been a nasty piece of work, but he went to the same public school, and so they stood by him against the detective trying to get to the truth and obtain justice for the murdered nanny. The detective remarked that not even amongst the hardened criminals of the East End had he encountered such an attitude of solidarity and deliberate silence to cover up a crime. The aristocratic establishment thus have a stronger sense of protecting their own, criminal members than the mafia’s ‘omerta’ – their notorious code of silence.

And clearly this class solidarity is still very strong, and shared by the judge, who awarded such a paltry penalty to Otis Ferry and his accomplice. This shows you just how low David Cameron and his friends consider the safety of the working and lower middle classes and their property, compared to protecting their fellow aristos. They have no concern or interest in them at all. All they’re really interested in is preserving and maintaining their own, highly privileged place in society.

And so the violent thugs, who robbed two women on an isolated country road got a fine of £350. And Lord Lucan got away with murder.

Cameron and Ceaucescu: United in Opposition to Journalistic Freedom

I’ve reblogged Mike’s and David Hencke’s pieces about the threat to journalistic freedom posed by recent government legislation that would force journalists to reveal their sources to the police. If they do not, then the police may seize their records, including their computers.

Make no mistake, once this passes into law, these powers will be used. There have been a number of cases already where British journalists have had their computers, notes and records seized by the police after they have released information that the authorities would rather have kept under wraps. The EU can be just as bad. One German journalist working in Belgium had his computer and documents seized by the police after he started revealing just how corrupt the European Union was. He was lucky. One of the female officials inside the EU itself, who started raising awkward questions about the amount of corruption, ended up falling from the top floor of a Brussels multi-storey car park in highly suspicious circumstances. The EU is, of course, one of the bête noirs of the Tory Right, but this hasn’t stopped the Tories from emulating them in this attempt to suppress free speech.

David Hencke’s piece about it reports that some journalists’ organisations are protesting about the legislation. The Angry Yorkshireman over at Another Angry Voice wondered how the Right-wing press will react when they’re at the sharp end of this piece of legislation. I have to say I doubt they will make much fuss at all, except if this is done by a Labour government. Then it will be seen as another example of their Marxist perfidy. The parapolitical magazine Lobster has several times stated that a number of right-wing newspapers, like the Sunday Times under Andrew Neil, were used as conduits for disinformation by the British secret state. And there are certainly a number of journalists all too ready to collaborate with the harassment and intimidation of their fellow journalists, who are not prepared to betray their sources to the authorities.

About a decade ago Private Eye ran a story about a female journalist on one of the broadsheets, who had been working on a story about the activities of the terrorist organisations in Ulster. This attracted the attention of one of her male colleagues, who made much about his supposed links to British intelligence. He approached her several times saying that his masters ‘wanted a word’, and demanded to know, who her sources were. When she made it very plain that she was not going to end her career as a journalist by betraying them, he threatened her with the words, ‘Well, we can do this the nice way, or the nasty’.

Now I’ve made my disgust at terrorism of any variety very plain on this blog. However, it goes without saying that to get a story, and give the public a clearer picture of what’s really going on, good journalists sometimes have to talk to some ‘bloody nasty people’, to use a phrase describing certain members of the British Far Right. A lot of intelligence work, supposedly, simply involves going through the papers every morning. It’s hard to see how a piece of legislation that allows the police ample powers to force journalists to reveal their sources can serve the interests of national security, as it would have a chilling effect on journalists investigating anything that remotely touches on terrorism, or organised crime or anything else that would remotely excite the interest of Inspector Knacker. The press would be simply reduced to reporting safe subject, and repeating the statements passed on by their governmental superiors.

Pretty much like Tass did during the days of the former Soviet Union.
Hmmm… now I know what the business model for the new, Coalition-friendly BBC is. Possibly German radio under the Nazis would be a closer analogy. I wonder if Oliver Letwin is going to change his job title to ‘Minister for Public Enlightenment?

Either way, the Coalition has taken another step towards totalitarianism with this latest assault on free speech and free journalism. Ceaucescu, the Communist president of Romania, was so paranoid that his secret police, the Securitate, held copies of the typescript from all the typewriters in the country, just in case someone, somewhere, was writing all that nasty samizdat stuff that got authors like Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak published in the USSR. It’s only a short step to that from the government’s desire to allow the police to force journalists to reveal their sources without the current judicial checks and balances. Ceaucescu also caused massive starvation within his own country by exporting most of their agricultural products to get hard currency, leaving his own people poor with little food on sale in the state shops. Obviously this is not at all like the glorious, Thatcherite administration of David Cameron, where there is plenty of food in the shops, affordable to all, except the unemployed, who have to rely on foodbanks and skips, in hardship and famine created by his welfare policies. But then, which apparatchik in any of the totalitarian parties had much time for the ‘narod’, the people, the lower orders?

It took centuries for Britain to develop a genuinely free press. It’s now under sustained attack. If this succeeds, then we will be back in the 18th and 19th century, when journalists were regularly sued and put out of business for publishing ‘subversive libel’ when they attacked government policy or its ministers. And this would suit David Cameron, Osborne, and the rest of the pukka-Etonian establishment now in power just fine. After all, you can’t have the proles rocking the boat, can you?

Immigration, ID Cards and the Erosion of British Freedom: Part 2

In the first part of this post I discussed the way successive administrations since Mrs Thatcher – those of john Major, Tony Blair, and now, possibly, the coalition, had planned to introduce ID cards. Privacy campaigners such as Simon Davies have opposed them, because of the immense potential they represent for human rights abuses, the mass surveillance of the population, and discrimination against immigrants and minorities. I posted it as a response to Mike’s piece on Vox Political, which I reblogged, on Theresa May’s latest campaign against illegal immigration, and the fears landlords and immigrants’ rights groups have about the terrible effect this will have on them. The landlords in particular were concerned that this would lead to the introduction of 404 European document-style ID cards. In this part of the post I will discuss the dangers ID cards present, and their failure to do what is often claimed for them, such as to prevent crime and illegal immigration.

It looks like illegal immigration will be the platform by which ID cards will be introduced in this country. Mike and a number of other bloggers have commented on the way recent statements and policies by coalition ministers to combat illegal immigration suggest that they plan to introduce ID cards as part of their campaign. Illegal immigration has been the main issue driving their introduction in Europe, America and some developing nations. Davies book on the growth of the surveillance society in Britain notes that as the European Union dissolves borders in Europe, so the police were given greater power to check people’s ID. As for fears that ID cards will somehow stop illegal immigrants from claiming benefits, this has been disproved in Australia. The Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Australia Card found that of 57,000 people, who overstayed their visa in New South Wales, on 22 were illegally claiming Unemployment Benefit.

Anti-racism campaigners are right to worry that ID will increase discrimination. ID cards carrying information on the bearer’s ethnic groups or religious beliefs have been used to discriminate against minority groups in many countries. The Japanese were accused of racism when they passed legislation forcing all foreigners to carry ID cards. The French police were similarly accused of racism in demanding Blacks and Algerians carry and produce ID cards. This was one of the reasons behind the race riots in France in the 1990s. In Greece, the authorities were also accused of using the religious information on the card to discriminate against those, who were not Greek Orthodox. Down Under, Aboriginal and Jewish Australians joined the campaign against the Australia Card from fear that they would also suffer discrimination. A few thousand miles across the Pacific in New Zealand, Kiwi trade unions and civil liberties groups also feared ID cards would lead to discrimination against minorities and the poor.

Contrary to the frequent claims made by various Right-wing governments like Thatcher’s, Major’s and Blair’s, ID cards don’t actually stop welfare fraud. Says Davies ‘the key area of interest lies in creating a single numbering system which would be used as a basis for employment eligibility, and which would reduce the size of the black market economy’. In Oz, the Department of Social Security stated that much less than 1 per cent of overpaid benefits came from identity fraud. The true figure for such crime is probably 0.6 per cent. Most fraudulent or overpaid benefit claims – 61 per cent – came from the non-reporting of variations in the claimant’s income.

ID cards also don’t stop crime. This is again contrary to the statements made by governments wishing to introducing them. The problem is not the identification of criminals, but in collecting sufficient evidence and successfully prosecuting them. The Association of Chief Police Officers in Britain concluded in 1993 report that burglaries, street crime and crimes committed by people impersonating officials could be reduced through ID cards. They did not, however, present any evidence for this. The Association did fear that the introduction of ID cards would make relations between the police and the general public worse. Davies considered that only a DNA or biometric database could possibly link perpetrators with their crimes.

The introduction of ID cards do, however, increase police powers. Police routinely ask for ID cards in all the countries that have them, and detain those, who don’t possess them. In Britain the wartime ID cards were removed in 1953 after a High Court judge ruled that their routine demand by the police was contrary to the spirit of the National Registration Act, and adversely affected the good relations between police and the public.

In fact, instead of helping to combat crime, ID cards actually help it. ID cards provide a ‘one-stop’ proof of identity, and this can and is used by criminal gangs in their crimes. The technology used to manufacture the cards is now available and used by such organisations. As ordinary organisations, such as companies and the state civil service increasingly rely on ID cards as the unquestioned proof of an individual’s identity, so they abandon the other systems used to check it that they have been using for decades. As a result, crimes using fake identities are actually easier with ID cards.

ID cards are a real danger to the privacy of personal information. About one per cent of the staff of companies involved in collecting the personal information used to construct the relational databases used in such cards are corrupt and prepared to trade confidential information. Each year, one per cent of all bank staff in Europe are dismissed for corruption. This is a minuscule percentage, it is true, but nevertheless it still presents a danger to the privacy and safety of the public. In Britain, computer crime amongst the civil services own ID staff massively increased in the 1980s and 1990s. The National Accounting Office estimated in March 1995 that hacking, theft and infection by viruses were all increasing on the IT network in Whitehall. In one year, for example, hacking rose by 140 per cent and viruses by a massive 300 per cent. Of the 655 cases of hacking in the Whitehall network identified by the NAO, most involved staff exceeding their authority to obtain the personal information of members of the public, which was they then passed on to outside individuals.

ID card schemes also tend to be much more expensive than governments’ estimate and allow for. Once again, Australia provides a good example of this. When introducing the Australia Card scheme, the Ozzie government failed to take into account training costs, and the expenses coming from administrative supervision, staff turnover, holiday and sick leave, as well as compliance, the issue of the cards overseas and fraud. They also underestimated the costs of issuing and maintaining the cards and how expensive they would be to private industry. In the first part of this post I mentioned how leading Australian bankers and financiers, such as Sir Noel Foley, were openly hostile to the scheme. This is not surprising, as the Australian Bankers’ Association estimated that the ID card their would cost Ozzie banks A$100 million over ten years. The total cost of the cards to the private sector was estimated at A$1 billion per year. At the time Davies was writing, the cost of the card system in the UK had not taken into account of administration and compliance costs. These could be as high as £2 – £3 billion. When Tony Blair launched his scheme to develop biometric ID cards, there was further embarrassment to the government when it was revealed by the papers that the scheme had also gone massively over its budget due to problems in developing the technology.

Another factor against the cards is the distress and inconvenience caused to the individual by their accidental loss or destruction. About five per cent of ID cards are either lost, damaged or stolen every year, and it can be several weeks before a replacement is received.

Governments have frequently insisted that ID cards will be voluntary. This was the stance taken by Tony Blair’s government on them. It is misleading. There is a tendency for them to become compulsory. Even in nations where they are voluntary, there is considerable inconvenience if they are not carried, so that they are actually compulsory in practice if not in law.

ID cards also have a tendency to become internal passports as they acquire other uses through function creep. These will include all government and a significant number of important, private functions.

Finally, opponents of ID cards object to them because they feel that they damage national identity and personal integrity. The movements against ID cards in America, Australia, Canada and New Zealand called attention to the fears of ordinary people that the introduction of such cards would reduce them to mere numbers. They were a symbol of oppressive authority, and represented popular anxieties that their countries were ruled, not by elected officials, but by bureaucracies driven by technology.

Actually, reading through all the considerable negative aspects of ID cards and the list of the dangers and damage they represent to society and the safety and privacy of its members, I can see why the Coalition government would see no problem in introducing them. After all, such schemes are inefficient, corrupt and massively expensive. They expand the power of the state and the police at the expense of the individual, and are used to persecute and victimise minorities and the poor. Pretty much like all the Coalition’s policies, then. And ID cards are exactly like IDS welfare schemes and workfare in that, undercover of eliminating welfare fraud, which they actually don’t do anything about, they’re really about controlling the movement of labour.

So, corrupt, authoritarian and discriminatory: just right for Theresa May and the rest of the Coalition then!