From a Delayed Train - Identity Cards, Bishops and Kenneth Clarke

I must apologize to readers for the absence of new postings here today. I ws caught in a typical post-privatization jam-up on the railways this morning (and no it's not rose-tinted glasses.There simply was not so much of this in the days of BR). And then I had a speaking engagement at a school in Watford, so all the hours I had meant to spend blogging were eaten up by waiting in the hope the jam would clear, followed by lengthy re-routing.

 

During a brief period of wi-fi, I managed to write a little on the fiddly keyboard of a porteble device:

 

A few responses. Passports and driving licences are not identIty cards, unless we allow them to be used as such. Each of these documents is issued for a specific purpose. it is quite possible to have neither and survive quite well.  nobody has any business asking to see them unless you are driving a car or travelling abroad. You are not required to carry them. Even a driving licence does not have to be produced on the spot, but can be taken - on police request - to a police station within a reasonable time.


Personally I have always refused requests from hotels or traders to produce a passport when registering or paying. They have no legal right to request this and if everyone simply says 'no' then it cannot be imposed. The trouble is, of course! that so many people are ready to be pushed around in this way.

It is this misguided meekness that has allowed many of the attacks on our liberty which we have endured during the last century . World War One was the point at which the state in England began to recover powers it had lost in the previous four centuries, simply because states naturally do this, as plants grow towards the light. The supposedly unanswerable pretext of national peril always seems to work, perhaps because the mass media are always so horribly willing to go along with it.

Patriotism, which once included a pride in our unique freedom, was perverted to support the extinction of freedom. The interesting process by which our right to bear arms was whittled away by bureaucratic action is described in my book 'A Brief History of Crime'. The chapter involved was deemed so shocking that I removed it. From the book's paperback incarnation, 'The Abolition of Liberty'. I learned during that experience that many modern men and women find actual human liberty too gamey and strong-flavoured for their sensitive taste-buds. I quite understand this. Freedom *is* frightening, and people often don't like it as much as they claim to do - the same is even more true of freedom of speech, hated in fact by millions.

The deepest difficulty for friends of liberty is in fact the attitude of people such. Mr 'Bunker', who can see nothing wrong in being required by the state to 'prove ' who they are.  Of course, the possession of state-issued documents proves nothing of the kind. States can be defrauded and often are. All such people are doing is conceding to the state a weird monopoly on identity, and allowing it to take a power which it ought not to have. If people such as Mr 'Bunker' subscribed to private organisations which offered to provide documents giving their names, addresses, personal details and pictures, it wouldn't  trouble me , as long as such things were entirely voluntary and conferred no advantage. The truth is that we have quite enough ways in commercial organisations can make reasonable checks on our ability to pay (some would say too many) and anything else really needs to be left to the criminal law. 

....

But it wasn't a day for lengthy reflections on assisted dying, cabinet reshuffles, women Bishops or other subjects I might have got round to.  They'll have to wait (though I would stress once again that the supporters of women Bishops could ahve had their way *years* ago, had thye been ready to be kinder to those who oppose the idea. the general impression given by media coverage, that the delay is caued by obdurate traditionaists, is misrepresentation. I should also record my regret at the departure of Ken Clarke form the government. I do not agree with Mr Clarke about anything much, but he represents a tstarnd of opinion which deserves a hearing, and he is a human being with a sense of proportion and an understanding of real life.

 

Can I ask readers not to moan about those posts which draw readers' attention to my new book? I have absolutely no shame about doing this - there is no point in a book if nobody reads it, it is in my view a very good book,  and my experience is that you have to keep on adrawing people's attention to something again and again before most people will even notice it. I am also quite enitled to point out that I have difficuties in getting such material published not least to deal with the incessant moans of the other lot, who say annoyingly that they won't buy it until it's in hard covers, which will be at about the same time we get Middle East Peace. Guys, I published it as an e-book only after I was sure it was the only way to do so. The only tiny chance of a three-dimensional book would come if it broke all records as an e-book, which won't happen if people hold off from buying it. A paradox, but there you are. So many true things are paradoxes.