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Biometric ID Cards – 2008

Biometric ID Cards are now once again under consideration by Keir Starmer’s Labour government having being heavily promoted since 2023 by Tony Blair, William Hague and others including the misleadingly named ‘Labour Together‘ right-wing think tank – once directed by Morgan McSweeney who became Starmer’s campaign director – and who he appointed as Labour’s chief of staff when he became leader – and McSweeney became Downing Street Chief of Staff in October 2024.

Until 2008, Britain had only introduced identity cards at times of war. They were scrapped in 1919 but kept on rather longer after World War Two when they were only abolished in 1952.

While the British people were prepared to put up with them in wartime, identity cards were always viewed as fundamentally un-British, incompatible with our ideas of civil liberties and freedom. We contrasted our free society with others abroad where citizens could be stopped at any time on the streets and required to produce their papers – and chilling scenes of the Gestapo doing so were frequently invoked in popular culture. We were proud of not being a police state, but increasingly we are now moving more and more in that direction.

Now the idea is firmly back on the political agenda, there have been two major protests in London against the introduction of these ID cards. Unfortunately for different reasons I’ve not managed to cover either of them. A third protest is coming up in December and I hope to be there.

A petition to Parliament against their introduction has already received around 3 million signatures and will be debated on 8 December 2025. The initial government response is “We will introduce a digital ID within this Parliament to help tackle illegal migration, make accessing government services easier, and enable wider efficiencies. We will consult on details soon.” You can read more at Big Brother Watch.

Biometric ID Cards were introduced under the Identity Cards Act 2006, which came into force on 25th November 2008, when they became compulsory for all non-EU students and spouses applying for or renewing visas for study or marriage. They were to be required shortly for all foreign nationals in the UK and also to be rolled out to other groups including students who want a student loan by 2010. And from 2011 you were to be reqquired to have one – and have your details on that database – if you wanted to renew or get a passport.

London NoBorders and NO2ID (their website I linked to in 2008 is now a gaming site) marked the occasion with a picket outside the UK headquarters of the Border and Immigration Agency at Lunar House in Croydon.

It was, as I noted, a bitterly cold day and “on Wellesley Road a biting Siberian wind seared the demonstrators outside Lunar House. It seemed appropriate that such a freezing blast should surround the UK headquarters of the Border and Immigration Agency and indeed be generated by its twenty stories of the grim early 1970s office complex. After all its raison d’être is to give would-be immigrants and asylum seeks an extremely cold reception.“

It’s impossible to think about the introduction of ID cards without thinking of Orwell and ‘1984’ (though I also had another author in mind when I wrote of it as “a warning of things to come for all of us in a Brave New Britain of state surveillance and control whose infrastructure is increasingly with us through security cameras, the interception of mobile phone signals and electronic communications and the planned introduction of universal ID cards.“)

Although New Labour had few worries about the descent into totalitarianism, our other main political parties had clear reservations, though for the Conservatives they were intrusive but more importantly “ineffective and enormously expensive.” The Lib-Dems were also opposed to them and under the coalition the Identity Documents Act 2010 scrapped the National Identity register and the database and plans for future issues of cards, although they remained as residence permits for foreign nationals.

Also present at the protest was one man, David Mery, fortunate to be still alive – unlike Jean Charles de Menezes. Like that innocent Brazilian electrician six days earlier he had gone into Stockwell Underground Station in 2005 and been suspected of being a terrorist, but this time the police didn’t shoot first and ask questions later. Though having established he wasn’t carrying a bomb they still arrested him and put him through the mill rather than simply apologising on the spot and releasing him.

As I wrote, “his treatment in the months and years following the event can most favourably be described as Kafkaesque. He finally (or at least probably) succeeded in having both his fingerprints and DNA record removed from the police databases, but it took over two years of fighting. His blog and articles are essential reading for anyone who wonders why civil liberties are important.“

A few more pictures at Protest at ID cards start.

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Cops Off Campus National Student Protest – 2013

Cops Off Campus National Student Protest – Ten years ago today on Wednesday 11th December 2013 I was at the University of London for a large national student protest over the use of police against student protests on campus at several universities around the country.

At Sussex University the management had called the police onto the campus or gone to the courts to prevent or oppose student protests or harass students. A number of students had been arrested.

In London police had been called to protests over the closing down by management of the University of London Union and the 3 Cosas campaign supported by students for a living wage and decent conditions of employment – sick pay, holiday pay and pensions – for the low paid workers on campus. The cleaners union, the IWGB, had come to support the students at this protest.

The previous week in London there had been a large police presence harassing and arresting students at an emergency protest over police brutality in their eviction of students from the Senate House that Wednesday, with a total of over 40 arrests on that day and the following day.

When I had arrived for that protest, there were police vans parked in all the side streets around and later the police made several failed attempts to kettle the large group of students at the protest despite it being intended as an entirely peaceful and orderly march around some of the various sites of the university in the area.

The police actions on that occasion seemed totally unnecessary and it was hard not to see them as a deliberate attempt to provoke a violent response, but the students kept their heads, moved rapidly and outwitted them. My account of the protest at ‘Cops Off Campus’ Protest Police Brutality‘ ended with the sentence: “It did seem an incredible and pointless waste of public money, and it resulted in more inconvenience to the public than if the event had not been policed at all.”

I don’t for a moment imagine the police had been influenced by my account, though I do know from occasional comments made to me by officers at various protests that some of them at least followed me. I’m sure that they had come to the same obvious conclusion independently, and for the protest on 11th December there was not an officer in sight in the whole area.

There were speeched outside the University of London Union before the march moved off, at its front a ‘Book Bloc’ carrying large backed polystyrene foam shields with book titles, including George Orwell’s ‘1984’, particularly appropriate as the Senate House is said to have inspired Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Truth’, and alongside it were Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Mary Woolstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, E P Thompson’s ‘The Making of the English Working Class’ and other classics.

When the march came to the gates to Senate House from Russell Square they found that these gates, normally open, had been locked and chained to prevent them entering, despite most of those present being members of the university. They are stout metal gates but the chains could not for long resist the bodies pushing against them and they gave way and the crowd surged into the car park.

After a few minutes the marchers made their way back to Russell Square and continued to march around the area, eventually coming to a halt outside SOAS, where the samba band was playing and they sat down, stood around or danced.

Later some went on to protest outside the law courts where the inquest on Mark Duggan, shot by police in 2011, was ending and then to Whitehall, but I left as I was getting tired and needed to file my pictures.

More at Cops Off Campus National Student Protest.

Armistice Day – November 11th

*Poppies in Trafalgar Square. 11 Nov 2006*

When I was young everything still stopped for two minutes at 11am on Armistice Day although the main remembrance events had been moved to Remembrance Sunday in 1939 so as not to interfere with the war effort. But traffic still pulled into the side of the road here. In France the Armistice de la Première Guerre mondiale is still a national holiday.

I’m not a pacifist, but I am firmly opposed to most wars, both historic and current. The First World War was clearly a disaster that should not have happened, a family quarrel that should not have resulted in such incredible suffering and loss of life largely with people killing others who they had far more in common with than with those who sent them into battle.

Clearly US war in Vietnam (and earlier the French in Indochina) was wrong as was the invasion of Iraq. And equally clearly we as a nation should not be wasting money on pointless nuclear weapons and selling arms to promote wars around the world such as that in Yemen. And so on.

Remembering Animals Killed in War, Park Lane, 11 Nov 2006

But while it seems clear that America should not have been fighting in Vietnam, it seems clear that the Vietnamese had to fight against them, just as it seems clear that Cubans were justified in fighting against Batista and US imperialism – and the same applies to other struggles against colonialism and for national liberation.

*School Students Against the War, Oxford St, 11 Nov 2006*

I’ve recently re-read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and although Stalinists contest his view of events it remains powerful both as a personal account of the war in Spain and makes clear the main reasons why the democratically elected government was defeated by the fascists – and Stalinist Russia’s contribution along with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to that defeat, which made a wider war inevitable. If you’ve not read it, this is a book I highly recommend – and there is an excellent article ‘Orwell and the Spanish Revolution‘ by John Newsinger in International Socialism Journal which explains Orwell’s position and deals with some of his detractors.

I grew up in the years following the Second World War and had my share as a wolf cub and boy scout of standing in short trousers with the bitter November wind blowing up them at Remembrance Sunday parades at local war memorials. Of course we should remember those who died, but not in the kind of militaristic and often jingoistic fashion that most or all such events have in England. The best way to honour their sacrifice is surely to work for peace. In Germany they have a day as a peace celebration.

*Families of Servicemen Killed in Iraq, Cenotaph, Whitehall. 11 Nov, 2006*

After briefly photographing the event at the Mairie in the 11th arrondissement – I’d rushed out from a café when I saw the event happening – we strolled the short distance to the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise.