‘Britain has never been a ‘papers, please’ society,” said Jacob Rees-Mogg, speaking on his GB News radio show last week. “I’ve always loved the quotation from the historian AJP Taylor, who wrote that ‘until August 1914, a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman’. But the world has changed… is it time to sacrifice freedom for administrative efficiency, and bow down to po-faced officialdom?”
What prompted this rallying cry for freedom? A subject that has drifted in and out of public discourse for decades: whether or not every Brit should be required to carry an identity card. It drifted in again last week when former Labour home secretary David Blunkett challenged Keir Starmer to set up a national ID scheme to tackle the small boats crisis, which in turn prompted the usual lines of debate.
