By Graham Stewart (THE TIMES, 01/04/06):
CHEERS RANG OUT in the House of Commons when on February 21, 1952 Harry Crookshank, the Minister for Health, announced that national identity cards were to be scrapped. It was difficult to detect the same level of euphoric abandon last Thursday after Charles Clarke, the burly Home Secretary, revealed that ID cards were coming back and, if Labour wins the next election, will become compulsory.
In his previous guise as Education Secretary, Mr Clarke famously questioned the value of teaching medieval history, but he might at least find instructive a lesson in his own party’s more recent past. The 1945 Labour Government decided that a scheme introduced as a temporary emergency measure on the outbreak of war in 1939 should continue in peacetime. After all, ID cards assisted the great task of national bookkeeping. Long after the threat diminished from strangers with Mitteleuropean accents asking the way to the nearest deep water port, ID cards still facilitated the efficient administration of food rationing. They were also required when applying for new passports.
However, Clement Attlee’s bureaucratic citadel found itself besieged by a small band of individuals defending their right to be awkward. At the forefront was the British Housewives’ League. A delegation assembled outside Parliament in April 1951 to burn their ID cards. A downpour risked turning their protest into a damp squib, although Mrs Palmer of Sidcup managed to destroy her card by setting fire to it in a coffee tin, while Mrs Irene Lovelock of Canterbury was — as The Times reported — “partly successful with a frying-pan”.
These redoubtable women were not the sort to welcome comparison with Gandhi, but their passive disobedience campaign was gathering momentum. The previous year, Clarence Harry Willcock refused a police officer’s demands to stop his car and show his ID card with the explanation: “I am a Liberal.”
He was duly arrested. But his case reached the High Court in June, 1951. Although the conviction was upheld, the Lord Chief Justice cautioned that the extension of legislation beyond its original limited intention “tended to turn law-abiding subjects into law breakers, which was most undesirable, and the good relations between the police and the public would be likely to suffer”.
Willcock became, briefly, a national figure — the little man standing up against an overweening and officious bureaucracy. On a mandate to “set the people free”, the Tories won the ensuing general election and promptly scrapped the accursed identity card.
Last Thursday, Charles Clarke boasted that his ID scheme is gathering such momentum that a future Tory government would find it “very difficult” to reverse it. Yet the Willcock spirit may rise again, if only to prove we are all liberals now.