Disenfranchisement and I.D. Cards

[Jean-F]

i caught a snatch of panel conversation on a TV show yesterday, the subject of Bojo’s alleged desire to introduce I.D. cards for voters was being discussed.
Someone said that if it went through, 2 million voters could be disenfranchised, as they had no photo I.D.
Now I can’t see how one can go through life these days without access to photo I.D., but I recognise that it’s the individual’s prerogative to have one or not, but the next statement blew my mind.
A guy on the panel said that 47% of black people old enough to drive do not possess a driving licence, as opposed to 26% of white people.
I can’t put my finger on why I find that remarkable, but I do.

 

[Jean-F]

I don't have photo I.D, i don't even have a photo DL, still got the old pink paper one, and im going through life fine.

Maybe you’d never be in this situation, in which case good luck to you, keep going through life, but if Royal Mail, Amazon, DPD, Hermes, or whoever leave a card through your mailbox informing you that they had a delivery for you, and you were out, please come to X depot and collect it, it’s just possible that you’ll be told that your pink paper licence doesn’t cut the mustard.

Big bad scary ID gonna get ya

I’m with you I think, what’s wrong with having photo I.D.?
What are people scared of?
I tried to count how many relatives I have in France, I thought of 28, but my wife reckons it’s 31, every one of them carries une Carte Nationale d’Identité, they’ve always had them and see it as perfectly normal.
The Carte isn’t compulsory, but all citizens must carry some form of government issued identity document.

Absolute rubbish, they have £20 of taxpayers money to spend on fags so there is no excuse.

Difficult to argue with that, although we’ll probably be accused of being minted aristocrats.

 

[Jean-F]

What's that got to do with the price of fish? There's no basis for insisting on a Photo ID. You just need to prove you reside at the delivery address. Other forms of ID are acceptable - bank statement, council tax bill etc.

I stepped on a banana skin there, I’d genuinely forgotten that they are acceptable, I was just thinking that the old pink driving licence wouldn’t be acceptable, as it bore no photo, a thousand apologies

 

[Jean-F]

I don't mind it to vote, I would object to it being compulsory to carry ID though

I called a young French relative about this hoo-haa today, I asked if Cartes d’Identité are free in France, (they are), I mentioned the fact that some Brits would object to them if they were compulsory, he answered, “Objet? Pourquoi?, de-quoi ont-ils peur?”, (Object?, Why?, what are they worried about?)

Seriously how can anyone say that ID to vote is a problem? It's standard in lots of countries, and that stupid excuse about mostly poor people not having ID is irrelevant crap. They will have plenty of time and warning to get one, and if they still can't be bothered that's their own fault.

You’ll get nowhere here with your damned logic.

They don't. It's using authoritarian tools of the state to oppress the poor.

That’s a good one, straight out of the John McDonnell playbook.
You’re wasted here, you could be a leader writer for Pravda.

or just give everyone free ID cards full stop! I wouldn’t say no to a free ID card.

Wouldn’t we all, but would you object to carrying it at all times? It wouldn’t bother me, but that’s me.

 

[Jean-F]

I get the feeling you're trying to label me as a leftie socialist. I'm not.

I just don't agree with this poorly thought out idea. It sucked in the 00s when the leftie Blair government tried to foist it on us, it sucks now.

Okay Magic, I’ll accept that you’re not a leftie Socialist, but with the best will in the world, sentences like “using authoritarian tools of the state to oppress the poor” do rather point to the supposition that you lean that way.

 

[Jean-F]

Internet voting doesnt happen because of claims it is too easy for fraud, yet we have people turning up to vote at booths without any photo ID.

Maybe I’ve missed something that’s glaringly obvious, but whenever I’ve voted, the polling clerk has sought my name in the electoral roll, whether I had my polling card or not, and presumably made an entry that Jean-François Genou has voted.
If someone else turned up and said, I’m here to vote, my name is Jean-François Genou, I always assumed that the clerk would note that Jean-François Genou had already voted.

If its not mandatory then many people wont get one, so many people will be unable to vote, for no good reason whatsoever.

The good reason would be that although I.D. cards were available, but not mandatory, X was unable to vote because he/she couldn’t ba to apply for one.

 

[Jean-F]

Have to admit when I first voted I was surprised that I didn't need proof of ID but then there is very little evidence of voter fraud so its not really a major issue that needs fixing.

The bigger issue in voting is how people are coerced to vote the same way as the head of the family / parents / husband etc. That happens a lot but I don't know how you could stop it, particularly with postal votes.

While I’m not naïve enough to disbelieve that some overbearing family heads might attempt to strong arm their family members to vote in the way that they demand, I can just imagine my wife’s reaction if I tried it.
Never mind the spare room, if I even condescendingly suggested that she think carefully before voting, I think that I’d be consigned to another planet!

 

[Jean-F]

how is this a good reason for voter id? The singular reason would be if there were widescale voter fraud, there isnt, its a waste of time and money.

I didn’t say that it was a good reason for voter I.D., I was replying to your post, which said “If its not mandatory then many people wont get one, so many people will be unable to vote, for no good reason whatsoever.”

 

[Jean-F]

Aren’t people conflating voter ID and ID cards here. Voter ID is proving who you are to vote and the proposed legislation requires councils to provide ID for free if required. ID cards are a National system where everyone has to have an ID card and no doubt with ratchetting legislation will be require to carry it. They’re not the same thing. Voter ID might be a sledgehammer to crack a nut but it’s not national ID cards.
Personally I see postal votes as a much bigger problem than voter ID and that’s where I’d make changes.

You could well be right there Placid, if indeed the proposal IS that councils provide a free I.D. for voting purposes, then that’s a good idea I think, how could anyone worry about that?
However, I would have no objections myself if National I.D. cards were introduced, and it was mandatory to carry them at all times, it would seem that the cognoscenti envisage a situation here that’s akin to old war films, where Gestapo agents constantly stopped ostensibly law abiding people and snarled, “Your papers, NOW!”

 

[Jean-F]

This happened in the UK post WW2. Police abuse of identity cards was one reason they were abolished.

I was unaware of this alleged “police abuse” vis-a-vis I.D. cards, and was prepared to file it under, ‘every day’s a school day’, but Googled it to shed a little more light.
I found no mention of police abuse, but found this example of public annoyance, taken from The Guardian in that era.

“There was debate within parliament, even with the Nazi threat towering over Britain’s very existence. In the Act’s second reading, John Tinker MP said: “We do not want to be stopped in the street by any person anywhere and to be forced to produce a card.

“If that kind of thing begins, we shall be afraid of people meeting us and asking for our cards. One thing that we do respect in this country is our freedom from being challenged on every occasion to produce something to prove that we are certain persons.”

The cards lasted well beyond the end of the war in 1945. Clement Atlee’s pivotal Labour administration came and went. And then, in 1951, as is so often the case with these things, one man decided he had had enough.

A driver was stopped in connection with a motoring offence and when asked to produce his card, promptly refused. He was subsequently asked again, to which he subsequently refused again. The case of Willcock v Muckle went to court.

Dr Edward Higgs, a lecturer in the University of Essex, says this act of rebellion neatly summarised the disgruntlement of a country still living under wartime restrictions six years after the war had ended.”

The M.P. mentioned, John Tinker, sounds to me like a man not unwilling to introduce a little ‘alarm and despondency’, rather like a believer of Reds under the bed, he seemed to be saying that the public could be challenged to produce I.D. on a daily basis, at every corner.

 

[Jean-F]

ID cards became very unpopular after the war. The police were demanding ID cards for utterly trivial matters. You should try asking your grandparents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006#Historical_and_international_comparisons

From https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2009/02/21/id-cards-abolished/
Etc.

While I sincerely appreciate that you weren’t being flippant with the grandparents remark, I.D. cards were abolished in February 1952, when I was 12 yrs 3 months old, so I have no parents nor grandparents around to ask.
While I’ll agree that anyone who’d been asked constantly to produce I.D. would have viewed the cards as unpopular, I’d suggest that the silent majority who were never asked, weren’t bothered about carrying them.
However, almost 70 years later, I’d suggest that it’s a moot point.

 

[Jean-F]

All reports indicate that the vast majority of people were bothered. They put up with them during the war (note that the UK had ID cards during WW1) but they were not appreciated thereafter.

I hate to disagree with anyone, so if you say that most people WERE bothered, I’ll assume that you researched that, and I’ll believe you, I probably imagined that the majority of people didn’t care about carrying I.D. because it wouldn’t bother me if it was mandatory to carry one.
I’ve already said that all my French relatives carry one, and to them it’s as natural to do as it is to put their shoes on every day.
I WhatsApped my son, resident in Germany for over thirty years, to ask the position there, he said that it’s mandatory for everyone over 16 to carry the I.D. card or a passport.
He said that he, his German wife, and their two sons thought nothing of it, it’s just a law, like having to stop at a red light, they don’t give it a thought.

 

[Jean-F]

The problem wasn't the ID cards themselves; it was the abuse of the ID cards, particularly by the police.

I’ve already accepted that you’ve researched it and established that British people resented being asked by the police to produce their I.D., as if they were suspects.
Maybe then the fault lay with the police in this country, my kid in Germany has never complained of being constantly asked for his ‘Personalausweis’, (I.D. Card), and to my absolute recall nor have any of my French relatives.

 

[Jean-F]

I would have thought the Germans especially would have been against police essentially saying papers, please

I guess that they would, but as I said, my elder son has lived there for thirty plus years, and has been a German citizen for circa ten, he has a German wife and they have two adult sons, none of them have been plagued by the polizei constantly asking for “ihre Papiere, bitte.”

 

[Jean-F]

Govt tried to tax fund or partially tax fund an ID card scheme previously, and somehow the individual price somehow came out higher than the bloody passport system.
I'm of the French mindset where I see nothing wrong with people having to carry ID at pretty much all times.
We spent enough on nottrace and nottrack to fund ID cards for everyone for about a century, so they should just on with it.

You appear to be a person of some discernment, in agreeing with me that the French attitude to I.D. carrying is “Ce n’est pas grand-chose”, but to some Brits it’s the penultimate step before giving up their first born.
It reminds me of the old adage, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

 

[Jean-F]

Do they still have that bit where if you move, you have to notify the police? And get your car re-registered at the new home, complete with new plates? I should point out, this used to be far everyone, not just immigrants.

I emailed my kid in Bielefeld, he said that some of that was partially true a few years ago.
You have to register your new address at the new council where you’ve moved to, as they’ll issue you a new ID card, and make sure that you go on the electoral roll.
A car no longer has to be re-registered, e.g. one of my grandsons has a car with Bielefeld plates, which has the prefix BI, but he has an apartment in Kleve, where the vehicle registration prefix is KLE, he switches back and forth between Kleve and Bielefeld, probably coming back to mum when he wants his laundry done.
His Personalausweis, (I.D. card), and driving licence bear his Bielefeld address and he’s on the electoral roll there.

 

[Jean-F]

So still no compelling argument for ID cards then.

I’ve never argued for them, it just wouldn’t bother me to have one, and I can’t understand the fear, bordering on unfounded terror of having to carry an I.D. card.
You’d think that it was the first step toward the gulag.

 

[Jean-F]

I dont object to having an id card, though personally I have never carried or needed ID. The objection stems from the poor reasoning behind it, voter fraud, its just a lie. Unless the cards are free, mandatory or dirt cheap it will stop some people voting.

So for me its a colossal waste of time and money.

I went to a polling station in Méricourt-sous-Lens in France with one of my cousin’s sons some years ago.
After he voted I asked him if he’d had to show his Carte d’Identité in order to vote, he said no, just his polling card, with his name and address on, so I asked how he’d got the polling card.
He said that French citizens have to produce their I.D. to get on the electoral roll, and then the polling card is sent to their address, this seemed vaguely lax to me, so I asked his father what were the purposes of his I.D. card.
He initially said that it was proof that you were who you said you were, but then enlarged that to say that they’re used by people wishing to open a bank account, buy insurance etc., or if you made a purchase using a cheque, the I.D. card proved that you were the person named on the cheque.
I said that it seemed strange that you didn’t have to show it to vote, he just shrugged, and said, “Don’t ask me, ask the government.”
I asked my kid who lives in Germany whether he had to keep showing his I.D. to cops every other day, he said that the only time a cop had asked to see it, was when he’d crossed the road at a junction where the lights were green, they take a dim view of jaywalking in Germany.
He’d produced his driving licence, but the cop wanted to check it against his I.D., which was weird, as it carries an identical photo.
The cop then said that his name would go on a computer, and if he was caught jaywalking again he could possibly be given penalty points on his driving licence!
When I scoffed at that, he said that he reckoned that the cop was winding him up, because the cop had noticed that he had an English Christian name, and an obvious French surname.