THE NEW WORKER

The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 11th May 20188

Are you documented yet?

OVER the last two decades there have been a couple of attempts by Tory and Blairite Labour governments to introduce compulsory ID cards, but both were opposed by civil liberties campaigners and were dropped as unworkable. But that does not mean the ideas have gone away.

As the class struggle sharpens and wealth of the world is accumulated by a smaller and smaller group of super rich parasites, from their lofty perches they can see the vast gulf between their lives and ours yawning and they grow insecure, knowing that sooner or later we will rise up and they will fall. And so their desire to control us and divide us becomes a desperate obsession and they devise all sorts of ways of introducing controls by the back door. And they want to introduce systems whereby they can micromanage our lives and behaviour with punishments and rewards.

They want us to accept the concept of ID cards in the way that a horse is taught to accept a bridle or a dog is taught to accept a collar and lead. And lately they have been demonstrating to us just how awful life can suddenly become for those who do not have the right identity documents.

They have just demonstrated to us how bad life can get without proper ID by singling out a minority ethnic community to isolate and punish — the Windrush generation. For them, now no proper ID means no job, no home, no NHS care, no bank account, and the possibility of being rounded up in the middle of the night and taken to a detention centre and then deported to a place they cannot remember ever having lived. Theresa May and Amber Rudd — since resigned — have apologised but done nothing to remove or suspend the offending 2014 Immigration and Asylum Act. Their help to the victims will consist of guidance through the bureaucracy to get the right ID documents, for which they will have to pay a lot.

If they can get away with treating the Windrush generation this way they will end up doing it to all of us. But they’ll do it to one section of the community at a time, hoping that those not affected immediately will close their eyes to what is happening. And it is no good thinking that Theresa May did not intend the racist nature of her Act. She has been actually carrying out the policies that the National Front wanted to do in the 1960s and 1970s — when they were regarded as racist pariahs by most of the Tories of that time. In addition, the Tories chose five local authority areas in the local elections to show that, in future and for all of us, our right to vote will depend on us having the right ID documents.

Already it is now hard to access so many services without the right ID, and that usually means a passport or driving licence because these include photographs. Birth and marriage certificates are no longer accepted. But there are thousands of people who do not possess either a passport or driving licence, and these people are mostly on very low incomes, from ethnic minorities, or mentally or physically disabled. The state is starting to categorise us into more and less acceptable groups for legal purposes. And of course there is no more legal aid for us to challenge any of this.

Those who do not have photo ID documents will be offered — at a price — special biometric identity cards. If we allow this to continue, in a while we could end up with large sections of the lower-paid working class effectively being excluded from society — forced to join the growing army of the homeless living by their wits on the margins of society as outlaws — as in early Victorian times.

The new, sudden rise of right-wing ‘identity politics’ is part of this. The 4,000-strong rally of ultra-right Islamophobic and racist thugs in Whitehall last Sunday was described as well financed and funded, and attended not only by veteran football thugs and old National Fronters but also younger, well-dressed ‘intellectuals’ from the far right espousing the new version of eugenics. But now we have to grasp the horrifying reality that these fascist and racist morons are, in terms of their policies, less right wing than our current Prime Minister — and she has a lot more power than they have..