No, the state mostly doesn't need me to prove who I am...
It is bizarre that so many conservatives are so untrustworthy they have transferred trust from a person to a bad photo on a plastic card
It’s that time of year again. You know the one where we test out the reliability, consistency and robustness of assorted parcel services. Local Facebook forums are filled with slightly strained comments about parcel delivery - “has anyone taken in a parcel for No. 6”, “where is this house - you have my parcel”. Mostly, I don’t know the statistics but suspect well over 95%, perhaps even 99%, of times the parcel arrives in the right place somewhere close to the time promised and in good condition. We can relax as the magic of Christmas and the wonder of Santa’s largess will happen yet again.
Sometimes, however, we have to head to a specified location in order to pick up a parcel. In the case of the private delivery companies this usually involves a trip to a pre-arranged location with a code or bar-code on a smartphone - for us it’s the local co-op or the nearby sweet shop depending on the company. This can, as my wife discovered, cause some degree of chaos for the simplest of reasons - the manager at the dedicated place knows you, knows where you live.
If the delivery company is Royal Mail it all gets more complicated. They haven’t left the parcel with a neighbour or in a special location that you told the delivery company about. Instead the parcel wends its way back to a remote Royal Mail depot with challenging opening hours. The postie will have popped a card telling you this plus useful information about the location of the depot and when your parcel will arrive back there. Oh, and you’ll have to provide a proof of identity to collect the parcel (the one, assuming there isn’t some parcel delivery watcher waiting to pounce, that only you and the postie know about). Other than a sort of petty bureaucracy I see little or no reason for the Royal Mail, uniquely among parcel companies, requiring you to prove ID.
This week our MPs decided that they don’t trust you in a polling booth. Apparently the two hundred or so allegations (and no convictions) for personation in voting is enough to require an 83 year old widow in a Wiltshire village provides proof of identity in order to vote. “What’s the fuss,” is the cry of the ID advocates, “this will make our democracy safer, will give more people confidence in the secret ballot.” So Mrs Burton who has lived in Manningford for all her life, dutifully toddling to the Memorial Hall on voting day, now has to remember to bring a form of photographic identity along. How exactly does that make the polling in Wiltshire better?
The idea that there is widespread election abuse is something of a fiction. Don’t get me wrong here, I was a councillor in Bradford for 24 years and have seen plenty of cheating at elections. The thing is, however, that this cheating mostly doesn’t involve personation but a set of different practices - family voting, postal vote fraud, intimidation, treating and candidate selection fixes. Requiring Mrs Burton in that little Wiltshire village to provide ID to vote doesn’t fix any of these problems. It may, you say, be a minor imposition but, for me, it screams a different message. It tells me that the state and its petty bureaucracies simply don’t trust you.
“At the heart of the need to produce identification is the idea that we cannot trust the person in front of us to behave honestly. Every transaction requires some sort of identification process because of the remote possibility that somebody is going to cheat us. Take, for example, a simple thing like collecting a parcel. For most of my adult life, all this has required is that you take the card popped through your door by the postman or delivery company to the place where the parcel has been taken and they hand you the parcel. Now - and this is used as the most common argument for demanding ID at the polling station - we have to produce some sort of photo ID and proof of address as well as the card the postie delivered. This is daft - the card was delivered to you and should be sufficient. Unless, that is, there are cunning thieves following delivery vans, breaking into houses, stealing those cards and going to collect them.
The government rather likes it that you don't - or aren't allowed to - trust your neighbour. The idea that, in a community, people know each other and trust each other doesn't fit with a state directed system. Take voting - the presiding officer for the past few years in Cullingworth lives in the village and has done for a long while. She knows a lot of people here and, along with local polling clerks, can be trusted to only question those folk who raise some sort of doubt. Most of the people lining up to vote arrive with a poll card (delivered to their house by the council) and ID fans seems to believe that there's another cunning set of miscreants going round nicking poll cards so they can impersonate voters. This might occasionally happen but I prepared to bet that it won't be happening in Cullingworth. We should be trusting our Presiding Officer, trusting the poll clerks and trusting the vast majority who are not about to cheat anyone.
In an environment of trust, especially trust established over a long period, there is less need for government protection. My exchanges and interactions with friends and neighbours don't require government oversight to make sure nobody is cheating. The sad thing is that this sphere of genuine community has shrunk and shrunk - we stopped trusting the local shopkeeper to know whether or not young James is over 18. Or, more to the point, trading standards officers shifted their focus away from product safety and towards the enforcement of arbitrary age limits on an ever growing range of products. And because of this enforcement, the shopkeeper stopped selling these products without a proof of identity (and age) - the days of sending the kid to the pub to get jug of ale for grandpa are well and truly over.
Government - and by this is mean the Kafka-esque structures of bureaucracy and control not the politicians we elect who pretend to direct these structures - likes the fact that mistrust makes its controls and enforcement necessary. It suits bureaucracy for us to be issued with numbers and for those numbers to be demanded in order to access simple services like collecting a prescription from the chemist or signing up to a GP. And the bureaucrats will point to examples of abuse (carefully gathered for this purpose) to show how absolutely essential it is that the sub-postmaster, pharmacist and GP don't trust us. There'll be mistakes, example of abuse and the old canard of illegal immigration all paraded before us to explain why you will need to produce a photo ID to enter a pub in Bingley.”
That all bar one Conservative MP decided that they didn’t trust you, the voters who put them there, should bother us as much as the relatively minor incidence of cheating at elections. We have become a low trust society in no small part because the state and its agents - from the Royal Mail through to the doorman at the Potting Shed in Bingley - no longer trust the person in front of them. We have transferred trust from the insight of the public servant to a bad photo on a piece of plastic card. This is not progress.
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