The Abolition Of Liberty

Peter Hitchens

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781782397731
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'It's fair to say that Peter Hitchens remains one of the most misrepresented figures in the British media... Hitchens is in reality one of the most thought-provoking and intelligent commentators on life in contemporary Britain' Neil Clark, Spectator

From identification cards to how we protect our property, public debate rages over what our basic human rights are, and how they are to be protected. In this trenchant and provocative book Peter Hitchens sets out to show that popular views of these hotly contested issues - from crime and punishment to so-called 'soft drugs' - are based on mistaken beliefs, massaged figures and cheap slogans. His powerful and counter-intuitive conclusions make challenging reading for those on both the Left and the Right and are essential reading for all concerned with creating a lawful and peaceful society.The Abolition of Liberty argues that because of the misdemeanours of the few, the liberty of the many is seriously jeopardized.

Chapter 1

Your papers, please

The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robes and horsehair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941

Orwell might actually have been thinking of Lord Goddard when he wrote this beguiling description of one of the great English paradoxes. That paradox is that virtues much valued by liberal reformers are often enforced and defended by conservative fig­ures, whom they prefer to despise. Goddard was believed by his foes to relish donning the black cap and ordering death sen­tences. He was embarrassingly coarse and crude in his private conversation, at least according to one of his critics, Ludovic Kennedy, who was shocked at the sort of stories the judge told in the presence of ladies. He became a target of general hatred and contempt in his final years on the bench, for his stiff refusal to modify his belief in an older penal system and his general aura of personal, merciless nastiness. Yet the same Lord Goddard was an uncompromising and courageous champion of English liberty, whose actions forced an elected Conservative government to abolish identity cards, very much against its will.

Now, as a Labour government stealthily and dishonestly pre­pares to reintroduce these nasty badges of serfdom, it is worth remembering how and why Lord Goddard, of all people, put an end to them before.

This is in fact the third time that the British people have been faced with government demands that they carry identity docu­ments. The first occasion was towards the end of the First World War. Since the introduction of military conscription in 1916, adult males had been issued with National Certificates of Registration to prove that they had signed up for war service – useful for fend­ing off white feathers and taunts of cowardice. But in the very last months of the conflict, with rationing at its most severe and a genuine fear of defeat during the last great German offensives, Parliament made it compulsory to produce these documents on demand to any police officer. The requirement was abandoned as soon as the war was over, since there was no longer any excuse for it.

The second attempt to register the population was far more interesting, unexpected and controversial. Given that we are now told that identity cards are a response to national peril, unre­stricted immigration and crime, we tend to assume that the doc­uments issued during World War Two were justified by similar things. After all, there was a widespread fear of fifth columnists, the country lived for some years under a genuine threat of inva­sion by sea or by air, far more pressing and actual than the nebu­lous and generalized threat of terrorism, and the war is now acknowledged to have led to a great deal of crime, especially con­nected with the black market.

However, none of these arguments was ever used for the issue of identity cards in the period immediately before the Second World War. The first people to call for them were – and this is no surprise – Tory MPs, who believed they would be useful to ensure that citizens did not evade military duty when conscription was introduced in early 1939. However, the loyal and patriotic British people immediately proved them wrong, by registering promptly and in their millions for National Service, so that by the long-pre­dicted outbreak of war in September 1939 this country still had no system of registering identity, nor any need for one.

It also comes as some surprise to learn that when the govern­ment eventually did legislate for identity cards, the minister involved was not the Home Secretary, but the Minister of Health, the forgotten Walter Elliott. During a brief and heavily whipped debate immediately after the declaration of war, Mr Elliott argued prosaically that the cards would make it easier to organise food rationing and to direct key workers into war indus­tries. He did not mention security, black markets, German para­chutists dressed as nuns, or fifth columnists at all.

The scheme was much mocked by independent-minded MPs. Mr Elliott asserted that a national identity register would be use­ful because ‘In time of war, up-to-date statistics as to manpower and the general population both as to the producing and con­suming side of the nation’s activities are absolutely essential.’ To this, Sir Herbert Williams, a Tory from Croydon, retorted sarcas­tically: ‘On a great many occasions I have tried to discover what would be the purpose of such a register, but I have never yet dis­covered it.’

Sir Herbert pointed out that the government could find out how many people lived in an area by asking local councils, and obtain workers for industry by advertising vacancies. He predict­ed there would be ‘thousands of girls punching innumerable holes in small cards so that it will be possible to find out how many ladies have size eight feet and pink eyes’.

Another critic, the Gateshead MP Thomas Magnay, scoffed: ‘The next suggestion will be fingerprints. Logically, why not? You might as well tattoo people.’ The sceptics did manage to reduce the planned heavy penalties for failing to carry the card, and limit the number of people entitled to demand it. But the costly scheme went ahead. If it was any use at all to anybody, this has not been recorded. The cards were crude cardboard folders, without even a photograph of the holder, easily forged and stolen. They contained a mysterious page on which were printed the words: ‘Do nothing with this part until you are told.’ On 22 May 1940, as an invasion seemed imminent, everyone was ordered to fill in this page with his address and signature, and to carry the card at all times or face a fine of £50, a huge sum then. It also became an offence to fail to report a change of address.

I have studied the newspaper archives of the period, and have failed to find any cases of spies or saboteurs being caught because they failed to produce identity cards. They do, however, reveal that there was a large black-market trade in stolen blank cards. A man was tried at the Old Bailey for receiving stolen cards in November 1941. Half a million people, unsurprisingly, man­aged to lose theirs in the first two years of the war. But the doc­uments became a growing excuse for officiousness and interfer­ence in people’s lives.

In 1942 the authorities refused to issue new ration books to those who could not produce cards. In 1944, police threatened to prosecute those in ‘sensitive’ coastal areas who collected ration books for neighbours. This miserable inflexibility does not seem to have had any practical purpose. A spy trying to uncover details of D-Day preparations would hardly risk detection by asking a citi­zen to collect his ration book for him. It is in fact typical of the sort of thing that officials do, once they have the power to do it, for no other reason than that they can and it pleases them to do so. One chief constable even warned, grandly: ‘No one in the prohibited areas may be without his or her identity card for a moment.’ All this ostentatious vigilance might just have been excused by grave national peril, if there were any evidence that it had even once led to the detection of a fifth columnist, spy or infiltrator.

But on the other side, it is worth pointing out that if we had lost the war, German authorities would have found the national register extremely useful (as they found the meticulous registers of other occupied countries so useful) for their plan to deport British males of working age for slave labour on the Continent. They would have found the compulsory recording of addresses even more helpful in rounding up victims for political and racial purges. This danger certainly seems to have occurred to at least one British subject at the time. For in May 1950, a Jewish furri­er, Myer Rubinstein, was prosecuted because he had never reg­istered, presumably because he feared in 1939 that his name alone, discovered on national records by a Gestapo officer, might one day cause his death.

Who can blame Mr Rubinstein for his caution? But his case has another interesting lesson for us. Despite having never regis­tered, he had successfully managed to live and work without a card, undetected amidst the regimentation of wartime, for more than ten years. The idea that the oppressiveness of such meas­ures is justified by the increased efficiency they give to the organs of security just does not stand up to scrutiny.

When war ended in 1945 the authorities did not, as they had in 1918, give us back our former freedom. Though the official rea­son for their existence was over and done with, government found it convenient to hang on to its new powers on the grounds that they might come in handy at some time. This suggests that the real reason for the introduction of cards had always been the state’s natural instinct to increase its power over the people at every opportunity, and also to gather knowledge about them in case it might one day be useful. The post-war period was a peri­od of increasing crime and disorder, mainly brought about by the dislocation and demoralization which always follows war. Identity cards do not seem to have been of any great use – if any – in curbing this. Yet the uselessness of the cards to the innocent citizen was often demonstrated. The droning mantra ‘If you have nothing to hide and have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear’ was constantly disproved in practice. In 1945, the Seamen’s Union leader Charles Jarman was held by police for hours on the ludicrous suspicion of being a smash-and-grab raider, even though he produced his identity card which ought to have proved that this was, to put it mildly, highly unlikely. There were many similar cases involving less prominent people, who found that, while cards gave the police the power to poke their noses into their private affairs, they did not provide any protec­tion from the frequent mistakes of insolent and arrogant officials.

By 1951, the public were sick of being pestered for documents which were of no benefit to them at all. That year Joyce Mew, of Tunbridge Wells, won a court case after she refused to show her card to a pettifogging rationing officer who knew perfectly well who she was. Even the Home Secretary, Chuter Ede, was ready to admit that that the cards were ‘alien to the British mode of life’ but his view was then overruled by the Cabinet when he sought to abolish them.

Finally, Lord Justice Goddard destroyed the system, while rul­ing on the case of a motorist who was stopped and asked for his identity card even though he had committed no offence. Goddard decided that the letter of the law entitled the police to behave like this, but added – devastatingly – that it should not be so. The duty to produce a card, he said, ‘tends to make people resentful of the acts of the police and inclines them to obstruct the police instead of to assist them.’ Those who now claim that such cards would aid the fight against crime should bear this in mind, but never do.

The newly-elected Tory government, which had somehow not got round to dispensing with the cards despite having given the impression that they would do so, were now forced to act by Goddard’s trenchant judgement. The cards were abolished within days of the case, on 22 February 1952, and the Daily Mail recorded that day: ‘Many people did what they have been long­ing to do ever since the cards were issued – they tore them up.’

Once again the English tradition of common law being superi­or to political power, and the English love of privacy which this reflects, separated us from most of our Continental neighbours. We had been prepared to submit to this foreign idea during the war, but the war had only served to prove that it was useless in any case, and that unless ordered to abolish it by a powerful sen­ior judge, the authorities would have clung to it for ever. Most European countries have had identity documents for so long that nobody can say exactly when or why they were introduced. Those that do not have compulsory cards instead issue ‘volun­tary’ ones, which are demanded on so many occasions that they are effectively essential to daily life. Many have compulsory reg­istration of home addresses, some demand thumbprints, some have penalties for those who do not carry cards, most expect a new Europe-wide ID card to be introduced before long, which is no doubt part of the impulse behind moves to introduce a British version. They are all used to it, just as they are used to living without juries or habeas corpus. In the old Soviet Union, the thing was known by a name which gives a much better idea of its real purpose. It was called an internal passport, and resembled a passport in every way but one: while the holder was required to show it to register his residency, send his child to school or buy a railway ticket to the next city down the line, he could not use it to leave the country.

When I asked them, spokesmen at most Continental embassies in London could not recall any time when they had not carried such cards, although none could explain how they came into being. The truth is probably that most Continental countries have had systems of registration at least since the days of Bonaparte, have found it convenient to retain them and have no common law through which they could be challenged.

Ireland, Sweden and Norway, all for various reasons outside the European legal and political mainstream, do not have identity cards. Denmark, that ambiguous country whose closeness to Germany has often forced her to act against her own wishes, does not issue cards, but has a system of identity numbers which has the same effect in practice.

There is no evidence that any of these countries has less crime and disorder because of these cards. If there are differences in crime rates, they are easily explained by other reasons. And the claim that the cards are a safeguard against illegal immigrants is also rather feeble. Illegal immigrants gain access to Britain because the United Kingdom’s external borders are so slackly patrolled and because the claim of asylum is too readily accepted as giving a right of entry that then cannot be revoked – often because those involved have destroyed their original passports and their home countries will not accept them back. Illegal immi­grants are able to work in Britain despite the fact that – officially – documents are required for them to do so. Some obtain forged British National Insurance cards. Others get documents from the ever-growing number of countries in the European Union. Others work without any documents at all, in poorly-regulated industries. It is not the absence of identity documents that allows this to take place, but the inability of the authorities to keep track of so many lawbreakers, and the complicity of many employers who know that illicit labour is cheap and pliable, and who have no interest in checking backgrounds too thoroughly. And it is worth pointing out here that, were British identity cards to become compulsory, the only people in this...