New Labour's plans for identity cards were swept aside in a storm of protest. They were deemed to be an assault on the liberties of the 'free-born' British. How dare could anybody think that we would ever give those up ? (As a matter of fact, a the same time as this controversy was raging, many people were quietly and somewhat nonchalantly handing over vast amounts of personal data to banks and to the egregiously mis-named 'social media' companies, but let that pass. If you think that Mr. Zuckerberg is that trustworthy, then trapping yourself in his algorithms is perfectly fine).
However, the more terrible irony is this. The liberties of thousands of our fellow citizens had already been taken away by immigration legislation, passed by the Heath and Thatcher governments, which tightened residency requirements for immigrants from the New Commonwealth. (For details, see the relevant section of David Reynolds' 'Island stories' (2019)). They had, in effect, been stripped of their citizenship without their being informed. They had committed the crime of spending time in the country of their birth. This is at the root of the Windrush scandal. It did take, however, the transformation of the Home Office into a mass surveillance operation with an avowedly racist intention under both New Labour and the Conservatives (with the cold-blooded malice of Theresa May as the icing on the cake) to make life a living hell for these people. (For details, see Daniel Trilling's long article in the 'Guardian' this week). In truth, the 'hostile environment' had existed for a long time: it just needed these extra ingredients for it to reach boiling point. It can be observed that, with the new stringent residency requirements for EU nationals adding a more purely xenophobic element to the inherent racism of immigration law. Although Britain still has an ostensibly 'civic' definition of citizenship, for a long time a racial element has been introduced through the back door by immigration legislation, in effect creating different classes of citizen. (The 'civic' and 'ethnic' definitions of nationality are perhaps not polar opposites as some political theorists, such as Michael Ignatieff, have supposed: see his 'Blood and belonging' (1993)).
The proposed legislation by the government to introduce photographic voter identification forms a part of this terrible history. When the Con/Lib Dem calition came to power in 2010, the shelving of New Labour's plans for identity cards was announced, after several years of public protests. Yet this government is introducing them, through this legislation, with barely a whimper of criticism emanating from any quarter. Perhaps the government is correct in its assumption that we are all so disoriented by the pandemic that the time is ripe to take advantage by imposing measures (such as restrictions on the right to protest) which we would not accept in other situations. Yet, as Naomi Klein points out in her seminal work, 'The Shock Doctrine' (2007), right-wing governments have, from the Pinochet coup in 1973 onwards, taken advantage of similarly disorientating situations to impose unpopular and 'neoliberal' policies, precisely because they could not secure consent for them in other circumstances, because they were so unpopular. The government knows in its bones that it is in a fragile position, which is why it is so desperate to keep ahead of the public by surprising it.