Government plans for Student ID Cards
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Benjamin Franklin (1759)
Imagine a country where it is compulsory to carry identity cards, a country where the police can stop and search at will and can hold suspects for ninety days without conviction. Imagine a country where the right to protest is abolished, where every aspect of one’s life is held on vast government databases, where the right to fair trial by jury is suspended and where suspects can legally “disappear”. In this country being presumed innocent is a lost luxury. This is not a description of Belarus, North Korea, Saudi Arabia or any other dark corner of a foreign field. It is not a nation on the infamous “axis of evil” or denounced by our politicians, for it is a vision of Britain. This Orwellian vision of the future is no longer confined to fiction, and it is not a wild prediction of the distant future it is the state of things to come in 2009.
An official Home Office document, leaked to both the Conservative party and selected media, has revealed that the government are planning to use the student loan system to introduce the controversial identity card scheme as early as 2009, a scheme viewed by many as the greatest assault on our civil freedoms since the Second World War. The document states "We should issue ID cards to young people to assist them as they open their first bank account, take out a student loan, etc." This will mean that students applying for loans will be forced to hold identity cards, containing their biometric details and costing £100, if they wish to get basic levels of funding or even open a bank account. Whilst our welfare state has never been perfect it is abhorrent for individuals to have to sacrifice their liberty in order to participate in society.
The opposition have responded by denouncing these plans as a form of “blackmail.” Shadow immigration minister Damian Green called the plans "straightforward blackmail to bolster a failing policy". Green stated, "this is an outrageous plan. The government has seen its ID cards proposals stagger from shambles to shambles. They are clearly trying to introduce them by stealth." The National Union of Students have also been swift to speak out against these proposals, Vice President Ama Uzowuru stated that it is “extremely disappointing that the Government is planning to use students as guinea pigs for this scheme by forcing them to take on ID cards in order to apply for a loan.”
If the report, partly reproduced in the Guardian, is accurate then we are about to witness a creeping barrage upon our civil liberties, with students on the front line of this assault. The proposed timetable stands thus, later this year foreign nationals will be expected to carry identity cards whilst by 2009 it is expected that those “in positions of trust” shall be forced to carry them. By 2010 the government, using the student loans system, will be in a position to collect the biometric information of over two million young people. The wider population will then also be expected to apply for identity cards as they will be compulsory for Passport or driving license applications. As we toast to the end of 2010 and the rise of 2011 we shall also be toasting to the end of our freedom and the beginning or a new era, and if this timetable succeeds, we may not even notice.
We must not allow ourselves to sleep walk into a police state. We cherish living in the age of information, an age with technology that can provide levels of communication never before dreamt of. However, it is with these measures that we will wake up in an epoch of surveillance. No doubt we will hear the familiar cliché that “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to hear”; this argument of course magnificently misses a very dangerous point. For all of the faults of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s premierships they are not dictators. We do not yet live in a police state, but that is not to say we will not. Measures such as these, rushed in by opportunistic politicians and granted by a fearful public, lay the foundations for future governments to display unparalleled levels of tyranny. Imagine a Britain where a BNP government had these powers. Today they come for those you fear; tomorrow they may come for you.
We are the generation who allowed top-up fees, we are the generation who watched as our country entered an illegal war and now we are the generation who chooses to look the other way as we are striped of the liberties and our freedom. We are students, we are education, we are the future and we are on the frontlines of this assault and so it falls upon us to make a stand. Let us not throw away our freedom or forsake our liberty, let us be the generation who reclaims what is rightfully ours.
Do you have a view on ID cards? Necessary evil or the first steps to a police state? Make your views heard at ww.upsu.net
