A third ‘will refuse ID checks’
The BBC reports:
One in three people are expected not to cooperate with identity card checks, Home Office papers from 2004 suggest.
Papers revealed under information laws show officials have worked on the basis 60% of people would carry a card if and when it becomes compulsory to own one.
They assume 10% will happily confirm their ID via fingerprint or eye scans, but 30% “will refuse” to voluntarily show their card or biometric data.
The Home Office said the documents were “incredibly out of date”.
A spokesman said the identity card scheme had evolved a great deal since these “historic documents” were produced.
But he declined to say whether the assumptions – which only covers people who have got an ID card – themselves had changed.
The FOI’d documents concerned are here. These are the sections in question:
B.3.1 Voluntary production of card
It is assumed that 60% of the card holding population will have their identity card with them and voluntarily produce the card when requested.
B.3.2 Voluntary Production of Biometric or Data
It is assumed that 10% of the card holding population will not have their card with them but will voluntarily offer their biometric or relevant identification information to confirm their identity.
B.3.3 Refusal to Supply Card or Biometric
It is assumed that 30% of the card holding population will refuse to provide their card or voluntarily supply identity data or biometric.
April 4th, 2007 at 20:09
Whether these figures are valid today isn’t the issue.
The issue is that the Government went ahead with this scheme despite internal warnings that it would meet with determined resistance from 30% of the population. The people who did this are (in theory) public servants. If they’re allowed to ignore their own estimates of determined opposition to this policy, and get away with it, what will they do next?
April 5th, 2007 at 20:37
On another blog, someone (sorry can’t remember who/where) said that the acid test for much of this government “modernisation” is “Would Stalin have approved?”
Perhaps in this case the question should be “What would Stalin do next?” The sad fact is that we know the answer. When he met such civil disobedience he filled his prison camps, and murdered vast swathes of his population. How else could the next British government cope with such determined resistance. After all 30% of 65 million is 19.5 million. I don’t think that the total prison estate has places for 100,000 at present! From the government’s point of view it could be a good tactic. The Russian population became fairly docile after Stalin’s purges. I imagine that the British population would also become docile after a similar purge by the (ex? communist) home secretary.
April 6th, 2007 at 08:14
While I have readily likened the government’s behaviour to that of Stalin’s USSR, I think prison camps and purges is stretching it a tad. They are likely to be rather more subtle than that. They will use the power of the media to make us out to be anti-social, criminals, friends of criminals and so on – along with ever more restrictive legislation requiring identity checks for just about anything and everything, thereby making refusniks’ daily lives all but impossible.
April 7th, 2007 at 12:59
TWO PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS
The DWP FoI Team’s letter to Mark Oaten is at pains to say that “… the original DWP estimates set out in the attached information, while they were the best available at the time, are no longer valid”.
In the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee’s enquiry into the ID cards scheme, the Home Office were at pains to say that “… it is important to reiterate that the enrolment trial was a trial of process and customer experience. It was not designed as a trial to look at performance of the technology per se”. This, despite the fact that the Key Findings section of the report on the UKPS Biometrics Enrolment Trial concern the performance of the biometrics being trialled.
There is some sort of denial going on here. Denial of the facts. An inability to face the evidence. An irrational faith which becomes more obstinate the more it fails to correspond with reality.
There are other examples. Biometrics, for example. The Home Office cling to the notion that the biometrics they have chosen to identify us are nearly 100% reliable when, in fact, they seem to be more like 80% reliable in practice. And the use of smart cards. Why are they ignoring the ID we already have, in the form of our mobile phones?
Anyway, psychological problem no. 1, denial.
If you write to the Home Secretary, or the Permanent Secretary, about the ID cards scheme, you get a letter back from the Identity and Passport Service (IPS). Mere mortals cannot get an answer from the people they are writing to. These people are sealed off from the outside world, insulated, perhaps jealously guarded by IPS, in the hope that they won’t be found out and will keep their jobs.
Another symptom of denial, I suppose, but there is something else. The response from IPS is always signed “Yours faithfully, On behalf of the Identity and Passport Service”. There is no name. Once you have got over the irony of an identity service whose officers cannot be identified, you start to wonder whether this practice isn’t perhaps illegal. Isn’t there a law saying that civil servants should give their name in their dealings with the public? Or, if not a law, at least a convention? It may not be illegal, it may not be unconventional but, at the very least, it is rude. Or is it sinister?
One thing is for sure. It is a sign of guilt. Juvenile, obtuse, sulky guilt.
Psychological problem no. 2, guilt.
IPS have good reason to be in denial. The facts are against them. They have good reason to feel guilty. They are wasting their time and our money. They are, quite pointlessly, making themselves the object of public ridicule and loathing.
People can only take so much guilt. There is a limit to how much of reality you can deny before you go mad. It is difficult at dinner, when you meet someone new, if you can’t tell them what your job is without fear of derision or vituperation.
Is there a psychiatrist in the house? How do we help these sick people to get out of their awful situation? And what awful things should we expect them to do next, to themselves and/or to us, if they can’t get out of it?
April 8th, 2007 at 21:15
“here a law saying that civil servants should give their name”
No, just the opposite in fact. DWP officials have ‘approved’ aliases that they use when writing letters or answering calls.
And to get around the IPS, write via your MP and he is then obliged to pass your letter to the Home Secretary
April 8th, 2007 at 21:32
Mr Jarman, thanks for the tip.
April 9th, 2007 at 12:24
Do I not remember a time when letters from Government staff came in buff envelopes marked “On Her Majesty’s Service”? At that same time, were they not all signed “Your obedient servant,” and then their name? We all knew it was a fiction, but at least it pretended to the proper relationship between Government and population.