Blunkett's card trick

Bit of a mystery, this proposed new "entitlement" card that the Home Secretary backed so enthusiastically last week. Perhaps I am being obtuse, but why do we need a card to give us access to health, education and social security benefits when we can already get them without one? Last weekend, for instance, when one of those annoying accidents in the home led me to turn up at my local casualty department with blood dripping from my head, I was treated quickly and efficiently without having to provide much more than my name and postcode. Even if I had possessed an ID card, it would have been the last thing on my mind as I staggered out of the house in search of help.

But what if a system of "entitlement" cards had been in place? When asked whether treatment at A&E departments would be denied to people without cards, ministers said that the details had not been worked out – a disgraceful non-answer that exposes the "voluntary" nature of any such scheme as a potential fraud. If the penalty for not carrying a card is exclusion from the NHS, employment or state benefits, then the proposal is coercive in effect and might as well be compulsory. David Blunkett's assurance that we would not have to carry an "entitlement" card at all times, or show it to the police on request, means nothing if a refusal would expose innocent individuals to suspicion or worse.

Anyone who doubts that this would be the case should try not having a TV licence. I don't, for the simple reason that I don't own a TV set, but it is a sure-fire way of landing yourself with years of menacing correspondence and unannounced visits from the licensing authority. I am certain the same suspicion would attach to those of us who refused to carry "entitlement" cards, even though I am white, female and middle class, which is to say pretty well protected. The groups who really suffer from the introduction of ID cards are always the poor, the illiterate and foreigners, people least equipped to stand up to bullying officials of one sort or another.

At the same time, it is clear what this disingenuous proposal to introduce ID cards through the back door – sorry, I mean this exciting new crime-fighting initiative – would not achieve. Right-wing columnists are always claiming that carrying them is a small price to pay for combating terrorism, but even the Government concedes that the measure would have little effect on their activities. I have personal experience of this, for I was in Istanbul in 1994 when a bomb went off in the next street, planted by Kurdish separatists. It was one of a long series of atrocities carried out by terrorists in Turkey until the late Nineties, even though it has one of the most rigorously enforced systems of ID cards in the world.

Nor would the proposed scheme have much effect on crime, unless the Home Secretary has in mind some lunatic scenario in which burglars, rapists and other criminals suddenly become law-abiding citizens to the limited extent of carrying their "entitlement" cards at all times. (It also makes the dodgy assumption that identifying suspects is the main problem facing the police, rather than having enough officers to catch them in the first place.) The Home Office is on equally uncertain ground when it comes to illegal working and asylum-seekers, where introducing fancy cards looks very much like a smokescreen for the Government's failures: allowing a huge backlog of asylum applications to build up, creating a situation in which people abscond and end up working in the cash economy.

Of course, governments relish the prospect of having more information about their citizens, but that does not justify intrusion on such a grand scale. If the Government really has £3bn going spare, the likely cost of Blunkett's scheme in the first 10 years, it would be better spent on tackling crime directly. But if ministers are determined to press ahead, with all the political risks the proposal entails, why stop at "entitlement" cards? The technology now exists to microchip the entire population, as many of us (including perhaps the Home Secretary, as a responsible dog-owner) already do with our pets. Then the authorities could sneak up behind us with scanners and read every detail of our private lives. Hang on, that was a joke, for God's sake, not a policy recommendation.