oh come on, that's a government sanctioned report. do you really believe it doesn't happen in certain communities?
Disenfranchisement and I.D. Cards
- Thread starter Jean-F
- Start date
oh come on, that's a government sanctioned report. do you really believe it doesn't happen in certain communities?
it doesn't but it shows there is a problem
This happened in the UK post WW2. Police abuse of identity cards was one reason they were abolished.
Soldato
So we come back around to the government mandating ID for voting for no reason as even if there is voting fraud it isn’t impersonation so once again what is the point in the expense if it doesn’t address the problem?
I was unaware of this alleged “police abuse” vis-a-vis I.D. cards, and was prepared to file it under, ‘every day’s a school day’, but Googled it to shed a little more light.
I found no mention of police abuse, but found this example of public annoyance, taken from The Guardian in that era.
“There was debate within parliament, even with the Nazi threat towering over Britain’s very existence. In the Act’s second reading, John Tinker MP said: “We do not want to be stopped in the street by any person anywhere and to be forced to produce a card.
“If that kind of thing begins, we shall be afraid of people meeting us and asking for our cards. One thing that we do respect in this country is our freedom from being challenged on every occasion to produce something to prove that we are certain persons.”
The cards lasted well beyond the end of the war in 1945. Clement Atlee’s pivotal Labour administration came and went. And then, in 1951, as is so often the case with these things, one man decided he had had enough.
A driver was stopped in connection with a motoring offence and when asked to produce his card, promptly refused. He was subsequently asked again, to which he subsequently refused again. The case of Willcock v Muckle went to court.
Dr Edward Higgs, a lecturer in the University of Essex, says this act of rebellion neatly summarised the disgruntlement of a country still living under wartime restrictions six years after the war had ended.”
The M.P. mentioned, John Tinker, sounds to me like a man not unwilling to introduce a little ‘alarm and despondency’, rather like a believer of Reds under the bed, he seemed to be saying that the public could be challenged to produce I.D. on a daily basis, at every corner.
ID cards became very unpopular after the war. The police were demanding ID cards for utterly trivial matters. You should try asking your grandparents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006#Historical_and_international_comparisons
From https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2009/02/21/id-cards-abolished/
Etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006#Historical_and_international_comparisons
From https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2009/02/21/id-cards-abolished/
Etc.
While I sincerely appreciate that you weren’t being flippant with the grandparents remark, I.D. cards were abolished in February 1952, when I was 12 yrs 3 months old, so I have no parents nor grandparents around to ask.
While I’ll agree that anyone who’d been asked constantly to produce I.D. would have viewed the cards as unpopular, I’d suggest that the silent majority who were never asked, weren’t bothered about carrying them.
However, almost 70 years later, I’d suggest that it’s a moot point.
All reports indicate that the vast majority of people were bothered. They put up with them during the war (note that the UK had ID cards during WW1) but they were not appreciated thereafter.
Soldato
I'm the same, no driving license, and no need for a passport, but vote.
Why not biometric ID cards, or an app that uses biometric security on our phones? The only thing I should really need to prove who I am is my fingerprint or retina, we should be past paper documents being carried around with us by now.
There's a lot of right wing nut jobs that are vehemently against this form of identification. And besides, biometric is only authentication, not authorisation.
I hate to disagree with anyone, so if you say that most people WERE bothered, I’ll assume that you researched that, and I’ll believe you, I probably imagined that the majority of people didn’t care about carrying I.D. because it wouldn’t bother me if it was mandatory to carry one.
I’ve already said that all my French relatives carry one, and to them it’s as natural to do as it is to put their shoes on every day.
I WhatsApped my son, resident in Germany for over thirty years, to ask the position there, he said that it’s mandatory for everyone over 16 to carry the I.D. card or a passport.
He said that he, his German wife, and their two sons thought nothing of it, it’s just a law, like having to stop at a red light, they don’t give it a thought.
The problem wasn't the ID cards themselves; it was the abuse of the ID cards, particularly by the police.
I would turn the argument on its head, why is that the same people who have been in favour of COVID passports to pervade all areas of every day life and create a total digital checkpoint/surveillance society akin to China seem to be the most hostile towards voter ID for elections once in a blue moon?
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Police have already started using facial recognition technology, they won't need to ask you for an ID to know who you are.
Do you not think it opens up the risk for incumbent governments to rescind peoples right to vote to influence the outcome? For example, we could agree that anyone who had visited X websites or had X political stance would have their vote nullified.
I'm all for COVID passports. You get more scrutiny trying to enter India than the UK.
Lucky we are all sheep and wear masks.
That's another can of worms.
I’ve already accepted that you’ve researched it and established that British people resented being asked by the police to produce their I.D., as if they were suspects.
Maybe then the fault lay with the police in this country, my kid in Germany has never complained of being constantly asked for his ‘Personalausweis’, (I.D. Card), and to my absolute recall nor have any of my French relatives.
I think the point is, is there any evidence that it does? Genuinely interested. We can all have opinions, but is there data to back it up?
I would have thought the Germans especially would have been against police essentially saying papers, please