I have not been able to get too excited about the ID cards proposal. It seems to me to confuse the desire for means with the desire to use the means in a reprehensible manner. To point out that tyrannies love to know about the population in extreme detail, and that ID cards are therefore tyrannical by nature, is a false logic. Nuclear weapons – to make an extreme analogy – are, though physically similar, not the same thing if stored under a mountain in Nevada or under Isfahan. They have different meanings because the context is different. The animating will behind them is different. To say, in the manner of the Guardian, that making the Middle East a nuclear-free zone should begin with Israel disarming is to get the problem precisely the wrong way round. Israel has had the damned things for thirty or fourty years and hasn’t even threatened their use even during crises. I doubt if the Iranian theocracy would be so patient. Dimona has a different meaning to Natanz.
This is about the least original point ever: technical means do not imply intention – that is an independent variable. It seems to me wrong to evoke 1984 or North Korea when discussing ID cards. The abuse of technology depends upon the will, not on the existence of the technology, and if the desire to abuse the technology exists it would find some other way of attaining its means. Freedom is not lost because of technology: it is lost through the lack of will and desire to retain it. This is why the religious-hatred bill is abominable and ID cards are not. One is inherently illiberal, the other is not. The reaction of the government to the Sikh mob in Birmingham was illiberal because the government’s job is to secure free speech - even offensive speech - for all, a level playing field, not to dismiss concerns about mob violence with commonplaces about controversy being good publicity for the playwright. That is true but irrelevant, and it showed a plain lack of desire to secure freedom.
We should not waste our energy fretting about what some putative future government might do with our biometric data, because if a British government wanted to abuse such data it would get found out almost immediately. People would be fired and a healthy precedent set. Alternatively, if the abuse were not regarded as an outrage, it would be because we had ceased to have the will and desire to retain our freedom. We would, in short, have ceased to be British, and then one would have to say: mene mene tekel pharsin.