A costly identity crisis

Will the proposals for compulsory ID cards prove to be Tony Blair's poll tax?

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, thinks so. She argues that because of the cost, ID cards will prove to be extremely unpopular. 'Businesses and the unions hate them,' she said. 'Minority communities fear them. Nine out of 10 of us don't want to pay for them.' Recent reports suggest that buying your ID card is likely to be a very expensive business. The unit cost is estimated by the government to be £93, but figures from the London School of Economics put the unit cost nearer £300.

This emphasis on the cost of the cards is missing the point: the real problem with ID cards is they provide the state with the means and the authority to keep tabs on what we do in a way that undermines our privacy and freedom. There are parallels here with the rather feeble discussion about the monarchy. Rather than point out the anti-democratic nature of having someone rule us by accident of birth, critics are much happier to complain about Prince Andrew flying from one golf tournament to another at public expense.

While both the cards and the Crown seem to be expensive symbols that don't work, they do have one other common feature: they're both designed to remind us that we're British. Now the once-powerful monarchy can no longer cut it, spending a few billion pounds to give us a daily reminder of where we belong seems a small price to pay for an establishment desperate to create some common purpose. For the rest of us, it seems more like a costly experiment to find out what we know already: that the solution to Britain's national identity crisis won't fit on the back of a piece of plastic.

Badging the British, by Dolan Cummings