Gavin’s Gaily Gigest

The breathtaking racism / nationalism (your choice) of the Labour government continues, with the revelation that Johnny Foreigner may be the only one to be compulsorily issued with an ID card. This comes of course after their smash-hit racism last year: “British Jobs for British Workers“.

Am I the only one worried about how an ID card scheme for only a portion of the population will work. Aside from the expense and logistical challenge (as well as the principled argument against ID cards), there’s the very obvious problem: how are the authorities going to know if someone is genuinely British or not? Will there be an accent test perhaps? If you sound “a bit foreign”, you get an ID card. Even this is problematic, not just because there are plenty of people with British accents who aren’t British, but also what about those people who are British, but have a foreign accent, maybe because they lived abroad when they were younger, or suffer from Foreign Accent Syndrome. I can’t help thinking of that scene in Blackadder, where the German sounding hospital patient turns out to have been a British spy who’s spent so long in Germany he has picked up a “teensy-veensy bit of ein accent”.

Writing of Germany, maybe the Home Office will fall back on a racial purity test, in which case we’re pretty much all screwed, unless you’re lucky enough to be able to trace your ancestry back to the Doomsday Book. This highlights that an ID card programme can only work if it applies to everyone, or, my personal preference, no-one.