ID cards still aren’t a solution to the scourge of illegal immigration

I remember the press conference because it was the first time I had seen Nicolas Sarkozy up close and I was struck by his bluntness and supercilious hauteur, befitting a future French president. This was December 2002 and the then interior minister was in London for talks with David Blunkett, the home secretary, to try to settle the crisis between the two countries over the Sangatte refugee camp.

Thousands of would-be refugees had gathered in the Pas-de-Calais, where the Red Cross had taken over a Eurotunnel facility to offer shelter to those seeking to cross over to Britain.

Its very presence acted as a magnet which drew more and more migrants. Sarkozy agreed to shut down the camp, although Britain had to accept 1,200 of its residents as part of the deal. France agreed to deploy 1,000 gendarmes and “substantially enhance” security measures. Sound familiar?

Blunkett hailed a breakthrough: “This deal not only closes Sangatte, it will also shut off routes used by illegal immigrants to get to the UK.” But here we are, 20 years and umpteen similar agreements later, with 40,000 people crossing the Channel this year – far more than when the Sangatte camp was up and running. Around 1,500 arrived on Dover beach at the weekend alone, taking advantage of the good weather and benign conditions. As winter gets a grip, these numbers should fall away for a few months.

Suella Braverman, the current possessor of the poisoned chalice, has learnt from her predecessors to be less triumphalist, conceding the latest deal is not a “silver bullet” that will solve the problem. So what will? The question asked back in 2002, and which remains unanswered to this day, is whether there is something specific about Britain that encourages people to make such a perilous journey when they could stay in France or any other European country.

Is it proficiency in the English language, the deregulated labour market, the presence of large foreign diasporas, especially in London? Or is the solution more straightforward? In recent weeks, a ghost from the past has been stalking the corridors of Westminster, one that we thought had been despatched to a nether world of failed political ideas. Yes, once again we are talking about ID cards.

Last week, Stephen Kinnock, Labour’s immigration spokesman, said the party was looking “very, very carefully indeed” at an identity card scheme to reassure the public that “we have control of our borders”.

He was slapped down by Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, who said they were not going to be revived. Rishi Sunak sounded less than enthusiastic when asked about ID cards in Bali, where he is attending the G20 summit.

But I sense this is not going away as the Government flaps around for something – anything – that gives the impression that it is acting, since nothing else seems to work and the new deal with France almost certainly won’t either.

ID cards were proposed by Blunkett 20 years ago partly to reassure France that Britain was serious about getting to grips with immigration. His scheme was killed off by the Coalition in 2010 but some who opposed them then now think they might be all right after all. Since we have to show ID for virtually everything nowadays, they say, what’s the objection to one more? The pass has already been sold. Get over it.

But there is a fundamental difference that cannot blithely be brushed aside. We don’t have to have a Tesco Clubcard or a driving licence or even a passport. Life might be difficult without them but they are not a legal requirement. An ID card would be.

The individual’s relationship to the state is qualitatively different from his or her relationship to M&S or NatWest – and just because they have ID cards and Ausweis passes in Europe does not mean we should have them here. They have not stopped illegal immigration and a thriving black economy in most major EU countries.

Moreover, arguments for ID cards are always shifting. In the mid-1990s, they were hailed as the way to counter benefit fraud and underage drinking. Then, national security provided fresh impetus after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001. After that, mass immigration was used to revive the idea.

As the former Cabinet minister Peter Lilley once put it: “There is no policy that has been hawked, unsold, around Whitehall for longer than identity cards. It was always brought to us as a solution looking for problems.”

What was odd about Labour’s plan was that it would not actually have been a legal requirement to carry the card, only to produce it at some future date if required to by the police. That seemed to defeat the object of the exercise. Moreover, are we sure that if ID had to be shown to get a job it would stop illegal immigration? Employers are already legally bound to check the status of workers. If easy access to generous benefits and the NHS are pull factors, these entitlements could be addressed specifically.

We should remember that an ID card is pointless without a national population database to underpin the system. Labour’s ID scheme envisaged the input of 50 pieces of personal information, with biometrics including the scans of both irises, fingerprints and a photograph. Had it gone ahead, we would have been issued with a personal identity number and it would have been an offence not to have informed the authorities that we had moved home.

Can you imagine the bureaucracy and confusion such a regime would engender, especially among people who would struggle to obtain a card, rendering them a non-person as a consequence? Moreover, however sophisticated the system, there will always be false matches and false non-matches, which increase in number the larger the database. The innocent will be most inconvenienced – or even criminalised – by these inevitable glitches while the crooks will always find a way through.

Supporters of ID cards need to make a watertight case about their effectiveness in countering fraud, underage drinking, terrorism, illegal migration and the other modern scourges for which they are considered a panacea before insisting that our personal details are entered into a central database. It may be 20 years since they were last proposed but the civil liberties objections remain.