THE great aim of the technocratic left-wing elites in the West is to bring an end to the independence of nation states and effectively rule the world through supranational bodies with the assistance of large-scale lobbying groups and authoritarian Big Tech corporations. In The Communist Manifesto of 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were open about wanting to abolish countries and nationalities and, whether today’s globalist politicians know it or not, they are still working from that playbook – and have managed to drag much of the so-called centre ground with them. Crucial to this idea is the modern bien pensant obsession with open borders and maintaining high levels of unsustainable immigration.
It therefore came as no surprise to hear Stephen Kinnock, Labour’s shadow minister for immigration, resurrecting the Labour dream of ID cards from Tony Blair’s governments of 20 years ago. Kinnock, a former European director of the uber internationalist, anti-borders, day-glo Marxist World Economic Forum, old Times Radio that Labour was considering reviving their plans for an ID card scheme ‘very, very carefully indeed’. This admission was quickly overruled by his boss Yvette Cooper, the shadow Home Secretary, but you can be sure that this was a ‘not in front of the children’ reprimand. An ID card system – forced digital registration, as it should properly be known – is the very essence of the supposedly moderate Blairite Left who have just regained control of His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition. With the permanent shambles of the Tory government giving Labour an open goal at the next election, they clearly do not want to do anything to spook the embattled public.
Kinnock, son of former Labour leader Lord (Neil) Kinnock, is a man to watch. He has a similar talent for chutzpah to Blair. On Sky News last week his given solution to the tens of thousands of migrants crossing the Channel was to hire more civil servants to process them. That’s right: the tsunami – invasion, as Home Secretary Suella Braverman called it – of illegal immigration from France was to Kinnock a welcome opportunity to expand the state. (Never mind that a huge proportion of Britain’s woke civil administration are not at their desks as it is.)
Kinnock said that ID cards would be, my italics, ‘helpful in terms of giving people the reassurance that they’re looking for, that we have control of our borders’. This is breathtaking double-speak from an open borders enthusiast: the Channel crisis appropriated to put the entire country under barcoded surveillance and create a system of identity to rival – and no doubt in time to supersede – the British passport. Tie all that up with the elites’ preoccupation with Covid vaccination passports – another obsession of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change – and one sees a definite pattern emerging: a system of authoritarian surveillance and control that heavily restricts the liberty of anyone outside it. ID cards would be a huge step in the creation of the decaf North Korea the globalists want to make of the West, and would also achieve something else the political class and its media outriders greatly desire: the decriminalisation and thus normalisation of illegal immigration. Off the boat you get, you are barcoded and iris-scanned and sent off to the chaotic la-la land of London, there to deliver pizzas for migrant-exploiting firms or perhaps enter the skunk industry; incidentally an industry that the London mayor Sadiq Khan has been studying how to legalise. Whatever ID cards do, they most certainly will not control borders.
It was in the early Noughties that Blair pushed for ID cards. The post- 9/11 wars that he colluded in bringing about and their consequent explosions in Islamic terrorism posed an obvious and logical threat to New Labour’s aim of changing Britain for ever through massive immigration. Who would be coming in? ID cards would kill two birds with one stone: the public could, however wrongly, be told that the new massive levels of immigration were being policed properly, and the whole country could be numbered and tracked in the most dictatorial way since the Second World War, a socialist fantasy project. Under the plan every person in the country would have had to supply fingerprints and an iris scan and produce them in daily life. This would be a vast alteration in the relation of the state to the individual. Instead of the state being servant of the individual, who after all pays for the state’s existence through mandatory confiscations of income, things would be turned on their head: the individual being required to present a barcode to the authorities to go about his or her business on pain of official reprimand or detention. Of course, behind this was the evil dream of absolute control of liberty. I have little doubt that enthusiasts for the idea then and now look forward to when it could be applied to lifestyle bullying: restrictions on things the state’s advisers don’t like including tobacco, alcohol, high fat comestibles, sweets, red meat, people not wanting to be vaccinated with a shoddily tested gene therapy . . . Then there is the endless future of carbon bullying and sin taxes that awaits us all regardless of which main party is in Downing Street. ID cards would be a dream for those who want to control all that.
As it turned out, no sooner was the Identity Cards Act 2006 passed than it was abandoned in slow motion as technical difficulties, criticism over civil liberties and costs mounted. The legislation was eventually scrapped under the Tory/Lib Dem coalition. But as we see with Blair and Kinnock Jnr, the idea does not go away on the Left, and it will no doubt be repackaged and sold to the public again further on: a trick that kills their liberty, legitimises illegal immigrants and will no doubt provide juicy contracts to Big Tech.
The answer to the migrant crisis is not the dangerous totalitarian vision of mandatory ID cards. That answer is quite obvious: rigorous physical policing of entry points, by the armed services if necessary (and it is necessary because the Border Force have refused to do it), the scrapping or rationalising of legislation exploited by migrants such as the Modern Slavery Act; binning woke Whitehall’s adverts telling illegal immigrants ‘what they will get’; effective policing of the black economy and immigrant criminal networks – in short an unmissable message that paying several thousand pounds to people smugglers and middlemen will not get you into Britain. This is what Ms Braverman needs to do.
I’m not optimistic.
