If David Blunkett is forced out of the Home Office some "collateral good" may flow from the sad human drama responsible for his downfall. With many of the other big hitters in the cabinet either opposed or agnostic on the question of identity cards, there is a good chance that, without Blunkett to push it, this particular folly may be left to wither on the vine of good intentions sadly misplaced.
One of the most annoying things about identity cards is that those who are opposed to them are assumed to be concerned about civil liberties and personal privacy. The argument is trotted out that only wrong-doers should have anything to hide. That argument is nonsense, but it also beside the point because the real arguments against the I.D. card proposal are that it will be (i) hugely expensive, (ii) technically over-ambitious and prone to failure and (iii) irritating to the general public, who will have to carry the cards. It also won't make anyone any safer.
None of this matters to Messrs Blair and Blunkett, who have latched onto the policy for two reasons. First, it reinforces their message that there really is a threat we should be afraid of. As George Bush discovered last month, it helps to keep your electorate well and truly anxious. Second, the public is, according to the polls, overwhelmingly in favour of the introduction of I.D. cards. So it's a classic populist measure.
In reality, of course, the public is in love only with the idea of I.D. cards. They imagine that the cards will cause grief only to villains. When it begins to dawn on them that everybody will be put at both expense and inconvenience by the cards, the ardour can be expected to cool. The sort of rabble-rousing that gets people excited about threats - whether it be from terrorists, immigrants, asylum-seekers, drug addicts, drunken revellers, bored teenagers or a poisonous Tory press-style conflation of all of the above - only works so long as it doesn't put people to any trouble. If it does, the mood rapidly changes.
Witness the kerfuffle that has been caused by the case of Mrs Farhat Khan, a Pakistani who has put her four years in Britain to such good use that she has been invited to a reception at Buckingham Palace. The reception is to recognise those who have "made a significant contribution to national life", which Mrs Khan has, in ways that have been widely reported. Thousands of people have now joined a campaign to persuade the Home Office to lift the deportation orders on Mrs Khan and her daughters, whose asylum claim has now been rejected.
These numerous protesters, and those who have been touched by the news-reporting of the case, now find themselves unexpectedly thrust into the roles of people who have been put to trouble by the government's anti-threat rhetoric. Only the most heartless, hearing of Mrs Khan's case, could not allow the knowledge to affect them. But, according to the rhetoric, Mrs Khan and her family should be slung out of the country as failed asylum-seekers. People who could agree with that position so long as it didn't affect them are angered by it when they find that it does.
New Labour is engaged in a chase to the bottom with the Conservatives over this question of security and public alarm. It's a vicious spiral of descent, in which political pandering to public concern only causes the concern to increase. As the concern increases the measures politicians are obliged to dream up, and the language they use to justify them, become more extreme. And because the actual battles that the politicians define for themselves are impossible to win, no point of resolution can ever be reached.
Drug addicts are not going to respond to the criminal justice system. Terrorists are not going to be deflected by the need for an identity card. The desperate and dispossessed are not going to be discouraged from trying to come to live in Britain (although it is generally only the more enterprising and better off who make the attempt - the ones who are suffering the most don't even dream of it). The correct political response to these problems, therefore, is not to suggest that they can be somehow eradicated from consciousness, but to contextualise them, deconstruct them to identify the real issues and seek to dissipate public anxiety by replacing fear with a culture of understanding.
It may sound pious, but it is also the only approach that is going to work. There are even tiny signs of it in certain areas. Political leaders from both left and right are starting to promote policies of compulsory rehabilitation for drug-addicted criminals as an alternative to jail. The public has rumbled this one, and is no longer interested in locking up people under circumstances guaranteed to cause them to re-offend on release.
This may be a beginning, but it is going to take a lot more political courage than that to explain how the legalisation of certain drugs could hugely reduce the drugs-related crime problem, or how every asylum-seeker or illegal immigrant is a potential Mrs Khan, who, having sacrificed everything to come to this country is willing now to commit more than most to make the sacrifice worthwhile. Or even how, as the president of Pakistan said earlier this week, terrorism can only be defeated by addressing the concerns that motivate people to adopt such extreme measures.
The irony for Tony Blair is that -pace this week's negotiations - his single lasting political achievement stands to be the Northern Ireland peace process, an achievement that came about precisely because he was prepared to deal with the the situation as it really was. He abandoned facile principle, negotiating with terrorists because they were the people whom the political process would have to satisfy. It was a pragmatic policy that appears to have worked, but by deliberately blinding himself to reality in other areas he looks set to have aggravated more problems than the one he may have solved.
Comments