Daily Mail, July 28 2003

The war between the BBC and the government has now dramatically escalated yet again.

The BBC’s chairman Gavyn Davies raised the stakes still further yesterday with an explosive outburst. He accused the government of threatening to revenge itself upon the BBC by emasculating its independence through the imminent review of its charter and the role of its governors.

Like so much in this complex, confusing and disturbing story, there may be no simple villain and victim here. Life is rarely so straightforward.

As I suggested last week, it is entirely possible that all the actors in the Andrew Gilligan drama may be at fault. It could be that Dr David Kelly did not tell the select committee the whole truth, but that at the same time the government treated him badly and [ital] that the BBC behaved unprofessionally.

Similarly, the BBC and the government are locked into the same spiral of frantic spin and propaganda, as each tries to knife the other in a mutual paroxysm of panic, self-justification and genuinely felt moral outrage.

Mr Davies’s outburst is part of the BBC’s ploy in presenting itself as the champion of truth against government attempts to cow it and shut down dissent. (The fact that the BBC Chairman happens to be a friend of Gordon Brown, and might therefore have an interest in damaging Tony Blair, should also not be disregarded).

But Mr Davies was absolutely right to assert the BBC’s independence from government. Where he was entirely wrong, however, was to claim that the BBC upheld ‘its traditional attachment to impartiality’ in its coverage of Iraq.

Leave aside, for the moment, the particulars of the Gilligan story. The BBC’s Iraq coverage was so obsessively anti-war that the crew of the Ark Royal stopped watching it in disgust during the hostilities.

More generally, the BBC has for years been betraying its charter obligation to objectivity. I write as someone who is a passionate believer in the BBC as a unique British institution, and as a frequent contributor to its programmes.

Nevertheless, BBC journalism -- with some honourable exceptions -- is indefensibly skewed over a wide range of issues. It filters all events through the prism of a particular world-view – the perspective of the left.

So on topics such as the European Union, the Conservative party, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, America or the war in Iraq, its coverage is loaded. Its choice of interviewees is often unbalanced, it employs double standards in treating one side far more roughly than the other, and much of its questioning rests on a series of highly partisan assumptions.

Thus, questions addressed to the Tories typically start from the premise that their only rational way back to power is to become more like the Labour party. On Europe, the premise is that the sceptics are outlandish and extreme. On Ireland, it is that the ‘peace process’ is sacrosanct.

On the Middle East, it is that Israel is the cause of the impasse, with virtually no reference to the fundamental Palestinian breaches of the ‘road map’. And on Iraq, it has been that the initiative was doomed to disaster at every turn, with each setback or negative report given disproportionate attention.

The BBC claims that, since it is regularly attacked from both government and opposition, it must be getting the balance correct. But this spectacularly misses the point – that it is attacked by both because it is now on the left of both.

Alarmingly, BBC executives cannot see the problem because they, too, mostly share these assumptions. They think their views occupy the middle ground; but in fact, they represent a left-wing default mode, where right-wing views require a health warning but left-wing views do not.

And they assume anyone who makes these points is, by definition, ‘right-wing’. In other words, the BBC embodies – terrifyingly – a thought system that is simply closed.

The BBC is far more influential than any newspaper. It creates the background noise that helps shape a culture. And because it is so trusted, it influences the thought processes even of natural conservatives, so that they, too, come to support elements of this same world-view.

Trust in an objective source of news is essential. It helps create soundly-based popular opinion and a robust democracy. Which is why the BBC has played such a crucial role in building the cohesion and spirit of this nation. And independence from government, as Mr Davies correctly identified, is essential to maintaining that public trust.

Every government has on occasion attacked the BBC, which has properly fought it off. Whatever the provocation over its Iraq coverage, Tony Blair should have risen above it and not laid himself open to the charge that he is trying to muzzle the media.

For the protestations by the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, that the government has not threatened the BBC’s independence are disingenuous. She herself said Lord Hutton’s inquiry would influence the future of the BBC and its governors. There have also been chilling background hints to the press that the governors’ role might be replaced by Ofcom, the external regulator, which would bring the BBC’s journalism ‘to heel’.

There is no doubt that the BBC governors have failed to regulate BBC standards adequately. But Ofcom would destroy its independence, as it would have no interest in defending BBC values.

Indeed, regulation is not the way to attack cultural corruption. Just look at the way Ofsted failed to destroy the lethal shibboleths poisoning the education system, and became instead a tame poodle of government.

The BBC governors may be unsatisfactory, but they are the least worst alternative -- a peculiarly British mechanism for a peculiarly British institution. So what is to be done to remedy the problem of which they are part?

Some think the BBC should lose its licence fee altogether. But the problem of bias infects commercial broadcasting organisations, too. Just look at Channel Four News; or in America, CNN, whose left-wing bias was so bad it provoked Fox News to start disseminating right-wing bias.

And only public subsidy can fund a broadcasting commitment to ideals beyond popular demand – to extensive foreign coverage, for example, or costly speech radio.

If a valued institution is in trouble, it should not be destroyed but brought back to its core values. Its failings should be exposed in detailed published critiques. And crucially, its governors have to be people who will uphold all its ideals.

The government’s supposedly tame placemen on the BBC’s board of governors have shown they understand the need for independence. But they have also shown they don’t understand what that independence is for. And that is because they were appointed by politicians who themselves have no interest in promoting objectivity and truth.

The BBC’s slide is a symptom of a far wider malaise. There is now a distinct sense that things are unravelling. This row has served to expose once again a deep fault-line, a weakness in our institutions which no longer wish to defend this country and its values but instead have turned upon them – and threaten to destroy each other in the process.

Daily Mail, July 21 2003

No-one can really know why a man decides to kill himself. No-one can yet explain why the tough-minded Dr David Kelly should have been driven to take his life -- having assured a neighbour minutes earlier that the imbroglio in which he had become such an unwilling player would soon blow over.

In the wake of this appalling and needless tragedy, everyone is busy washing their own hands clean. Recriminations are flying. Calls for Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and Geoff Hoon to resign are now being matched – after the BBC’s admission that Dr Kelly was, indeed, reporter Andrew Gilligan’s source -- by demands for the heads of Mr Gilligan and assorted BBC bigwigs.

Maybe this changing emphasis explains the alteration overnight in the Prime Minister’s demeanour, from appearing traumatised in Tokyo to confident in Korea. Maybe he believes he will be exonerated as the BBC’s defence crumbles.

If so, he could not be more mistaken. Clearly, the full facts won’t be known until the Hutton inquiry reports (if then). But whether or not the BBC case does crack open, the government still cannot duck its own sickening culpability.

For it simply used Dr Kelly as raw meat for the trap it thought it had set for the BBC. On the Today programme, Mr Gilligan had claimed the government had ‘sexed up’ its September dossier with the assertion that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction could be deployed within 45 minutes – a statement he said was inserted against the wishes of the intelligence service, and for which he later claimed Mr Campbell was responsible.

The Foreign Affairs Select Committee ruled that this whole allegation was baseless and untrue. At that point, the government could and should have left the issue alone. But instead, it seized upon Dr Kelly -- who had owned up to his Defence Ministry bosses that he had briefed Mr Gilligan a week before his report was broadcast -- and tried to turn him into a weapon of final destruction against the BBC. This was cynical and unforgivable.

Whatever the justice of the government’s position, it should never have done this. It should merely have disputed the claim and vigorously made its case to the public. Instead, it proceeded to behave like the Mafia settling a score with a rival family threatening its turf. It behaved like a bunch of thugs.

Dr Kelly had come forward in an act of integrity. He didn’t want to be named, and was assured he would not be. He was betrayed. The government made known enough information to lead journalists straight to him -- even telling them they would confirm his name if it was put to them.

If the government had not sent Dr Kelly undefended straight into the guns, he would probably still be alive. But the BBC must share responsibility for the disaster. It was right not to have named its source, but the issue is not whether it should have named him. It is that it defended its story unequivocally and at the highest level, even though it must have had doubts over key elements.

For Mr Gilligan had told the BBC’s director of news, Richard Sambrook, the identity of Dr Kelly; and his rank, at least, was also communicated to Director-General Greg Dyke.

Mr Gilligan agreed with the committee that his information came from a ‘source in the intelligence services’; he called him one of the ‘senior officials in charge of drawing up the dossier’. Furthermore, Mr Sambrook said: ‘We have always said that we had one senior and credible source in the intelligence services’.

But Dr Kelly was not a member of the intelligence service. Nor was he involved in drafting or compiling the dossier; he merely contributed to it. So the BBC knew from an early stage that the authority being claimed for the story was questionable.

Yet from its board of governors down, it defended the story -- even when the select committee said its central claim was untrue.

Moreover, the confirmation that Dr Kelly was Mr Gilligan’s source exposes a fundamental conflict in their evidence to the select committee. For Dr Kelly told it he did not recognise from Mr Gilligan’s account the conversations he had had with him. He also denied making the comments ascribed to him by Susan Watts, another BBC journalist who made similar claims to Mr Gilligan’s on BBC TV’s Newsnight.

Even more significantly, Dr Kelly told the committee that he backed the September dossier. ‘I had no doubt that the veracity of it was absolute’, he said. And when asked whether he had suggested to anyone that the intelligence service might itself have been unhappy with the dossier, he replied: ‘Unhappy? I do not think they were unhappy. I think they had confidence in the information that was provided in that dossier’.

Of course, it is possible that Dr Kelly was lying. Maybe he had indeed told Mr Gilligan and Ms Watts what they reported. (The BBC has said it will make their notes available to the Hutton inquiry). Maybe, despite its denials, the Defence Ministry put him under such pressure over his job or pension prospects that he did not tell the select committee the truth – and killed himself as a result.

But this would be, by all accounts, entirely out of character for such an honourable and scrupulously precise man. Yet who knows what impact such intolerable pressures might have had, particularly if they came from what Dr Kelly himself described as ‘many dark actors playing games’ with his life.

However, the select committee has now claimed that Mr Gilligan changed crucial aspects of the story he told it when it recalled him last week – a claim that both he and Mark Damazer, the BBC’s deputy director of news, have denied.

Not that the select committee emerges from this affair with any credit either. Apart from treating Dr Kelly as if he were a criminal, it precipitately wrote to the government to declare that he couldn’t have been the BBC’s source. How can anyone have any faith in people who pre-empt their own report – and get it so wrong?

The awful truth is that Dr Kelly is dead because of a fight over a trifle – a claim that was marginal to the legal and moral case for war. The fight was whipped up by a government desperate to disprove the politically lethal charge of dishonesty, and by broadcasters who, stung by the charge they were government poodles, decided to make this their Alamo.

Dr Kelly was looking forward to helping find the weapons of mass destruction he believed Saddam had hidden in Iraq. Now his unrivalled expertise has been lost for ever because of the ‘dark actors’ who made his life intolerable in Britain.

Whatever the Hutton inquiry reveals, the principal contributors to Dr Kelly’s tragedy will almost certainly all be damaged, maybe mortally. The abject performance of the select committee leaves Parliament weakened. The BBC’s kitemark of trust is now in jeopardy. And the government, which has already destroyed public trust, will henceforth be regarded with unmitigated revulsion and disgust.

Our whole political culture has become putrid with ruthlessness, cynicism and deceit – and with the blood of an honourable public servant now staining all its hands.

Daily Mail, July 14 2003

Those who live by spin and focus group will die at the hands of spin and focus group.

Tony Blair is now at bay. Beseiged from all sides, he is being engulfed by the implosion not just of his authority but of Blairism itself. The New Labour project is turning upon him.

Calls for him to resign are growing. The endless furore over whether he misled the country in going to war against Iraq is doing terminal damage.

His trip to Washington this week is turning into a damage limitation exercise to repair a transatlantic split, with everyone blaming each other for the growing clamour that the people were misled over the case for war.

President Bush blames the CIA for wrongly claiming that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger; the CIA blames MI6 for giving it duff information; the Foreign Secretary insists that British intelligence was fundamentally accurate, but MI6 withheld the proof of the Niger adventure from its American allies.

The public might be bemused by these further clandestine twists and turns, but the mud is sticking. Philip Gould, Labour’s pollster, has told the government that it is suffering from a catastrophic collapse of public trust. The Tories are now level-pegging in the polls, and showing the first signs of recovery for ten years.

And meanwhile Gordon Brown, McAvity the cat of British politics who is never there in a crisis, sits expectantly licking his whiskers in satisfaction at the spectacular eclipse of his one-time political soulmate.

The reasons for Mr Blair’s predicament are much more fundamental than the Iraq imbroglio. For the Blairite project itself has failed, and the Prime Minister knows it. An international conference at the weekend designed to kick-start the faltering ‘third way’ New Labour vision was by all accounts an administrative and philosophical shambles. Not so much third way as lost way.

This is because it always was a con-trick. Supposed to provide an alternative to the old right/left division, it was as dishonest as it was vacuous. Its creators – Tony Blair and Bill Clinton -- grasped that the public whose votes they had to win were instinctively conservative.

So the two of them spoke the language of reassurance, security and social repair. In fact, theirs was a deeply ideological agenda aimed at reshaping society to go with the flow of post-modernity – the nihilistic challenge to family, nation and tradition.

Now this has blown up in Mr Blair’s face. His hollow project has resulted in systemic government incompetence. Asylum is a shambles, violent crime is rising, the health service is foundering, education standards are falling and transport is in a jam.

In response, the Prime Minister threatens yet more stealth taxes to pay for doubtless even worse public services. The principal achievements of his third way will turn out to have been legalising sex in public lavatories, the mounting addiction of young people to cannabis, and depriving the Lord Chancellor of his tights.

People take an exceedingly dim view of these priorities. They have seen right through all the false sincerity, the bogus promises and the dodgy statistics. The public’s disillusionment is now so extreme that there is nothing Mr Blair can say that will be believed.

Into this credibility crisis has erupted the row over weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The root cause of the turmoil is that the public were never convinced by the argument for a pre-emptive war. I personally believe that this war was entirely justified, and moreover that – despite the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’ – Mr Blair made the case properly to Parliament.

The legal and moral justification did not depend on current intelligence, but on the fact that Saddam had failed to observe the conditions for the 1991 Gulf War ceasefire, requiring him to prove he had dismantled his WMD programme.

But because Mr Blair – the focus-group premier -- never leads but follows public opinion, he panicked when he failed to convince the people. So he pressured the intelligence service to come up with more tangible evidence.

The nature of intelligence information, however, is that aspects of it may be wrong, or right at the time but not proveable, or overtaken by subsequent events. So this has provided huge opportunities for people who were always opposed to the war.

The row over intelligence is demonstrably ridiculous. The claim now being made that Saddam did not pose a risk to the world from his WMD programme after all is at odds with what every western government and intelligence service and the UN Security Council itself believed to be the case.

Wherever Saddam is now -- roasting in the afterlife, or directing the current guerrilla attacks in Iraq -- he must be laughing fit to bust at the way the west is tearing its leaders to shreds.

Now Mr Blair’s difficulties over Iraq have been seized upon by his many enemies -- both those who think he is betraying Labour ideals over foundation hospitals and tuition fees, and those who sense he has lost his talismanic power to win elections. They all realise that the charge of dishonesty over Iraq is the weapon of Tony’s destruction.

For the real damage done by this tumult is the way it brings to the front of voters’ minds the fact that they don’t trust this government and have no confidence that it will ever get anything right.

By contrast, the Tories are beginning to sound more plausible. Iain Duncan Smith may be a poor performer at Prime Minister’s Questions, but people do not care for debating chamber pyrotechnics, and the Conservatives are at least registering a tone that sounds like common-sense and pragmatism.

People now distrust all politicians. So paradoxically, the party which promises that politicians will have as little impact on their lives as possible will win public trust.

The Tories are developing their own ‘third way’ idea – albeit far too tentatively and inconsistently -- that people should gain control over how their money is spent, through vouchers for health care, for example. If they have the wit to extend this, they will catch the public mood of radical disengagement from conventional politics.

Mr Blair is now horribly exposed. His inner circle has all but disintegrated. Cabinet ministers in his image have either been sacked, given up or are flailing around. Above all, he is a performer with the thinnest of skins, who cannot survive without the cheers of the crowd. It is no longer unthinkable that he may step down.

Gordon Brown may then become Labour’s John Major. Widely admired for intellectual strength and integrity, Mr Brown (who is, in fact, the real architect of the public services debacle) n simil;ar fashion to er Iraq, l of Mrs Thatcher, kins, who needs=image have either given up, been sacked or are flailing aroun might be viewed by the public in similar fashion to Mr Major when he replaced Mrs Thatcher -- as the leader of a new government, to be given a fresh chance.

If Mr Blair was strong at home, the turmoil over Iraq wouldn’t touch him. But the tide of Blairism has visibly gone out, leaving him beached, alone, badly wounded and with his enemies closing in.

Jewish Chronicle, July 11 2003.

Everyone knows that Israel’s public relations are terrible. Few, though, probably appreciate just how terrible they are.

Severing relations with the BBC was merely the latest example of Israel’s maladroitness. Not, of course, that its fury was anything other than wholly justified. The unbalanced TV programme on Israel’s weapons of mass destruction was merely the last straw. BBC coverage of Israel is consistently hostile, prejudiced, ignorant and unfair.

Even so, moving against the BBC was utterly counter-productive. This, however, is nothing new. Israel’s consistent failure to put its case effectively, merely sounding defensive and ineffectual against hostile attack, perplexes many. This is not the fault of the press officers at the Israel embassy, who do the best they can. But they have to work against the background of Israel’s strategic failure to grapple with the British public’s now incendiary hostility to Israel.

You can hear it in the way Israeli spokesmen consistently fail to hear the real, unspoken question – ‘Isn’t Israel’s very existence indefensible?’ -- behind the questions they are asked by British interviewers. Apart from the occasional protest letter to newspapers, Israel’s government expresses no high-profile outrage at the demonisation of Israel that is now routine in Britain.

It makes no attempt to educate the British about Israel’s history by correcting their innumerable misapprehensions. The only Israeli writers who appear in British newspapers tend to be those who either themselves misrepresent their country’s history or ignore it altogether.

A steady stream of attractive and high profile Palestinian thinkers regularly addresses MPs and peers. Israel provides virtually no-one, except the odd predictable politician.

After meeting a number of Israeli officials in the last few months, I find it hard to exaggerate both the depth of their incomprehension of British animosity and their inability to grasp that this needs to be taken seriously.

Of course, they know about the Guardian, Independent and the BBC. They therefore think the problem is limited to the political left. When told that conservative Middle Britain, no less, now believes that Israel is the world’s true rogue state and the fundamental cause of world terror, the officials’ jaws hit the floor.

But worse is the impression that some don’t actually care. Since Israel will always stand alone, they say, and Britain and Europe will never come to its aid, why should it bother to tackle such attitudes?

Others appreciate that such a dismissal of British public opinion is desperately stupid. They understand that the vilification of Israel threatens its economic interests and its security. If its case is not effectively made in Britain, there is far less chance of forcing the EU to stop funding Palestinian terror and incitement; far less chance of reversing the gathering global consensus that Israel is a pariah state, a consensus which will eventually infect even America.

And the case Israel has to make is no less than for its very existence. Officials protest that this would cede to their enemies the intolerable idea that there are indeed questions to be asked over its existence, which would be asked of no other country. In theory, this is true enough; but it ignores the fact that what is feeding the virulent British hostility is the view, now openly expressed, that the creation of Israel was a terrible mistake.

The main reason for this is almost total ignorance by the British of Israel’s history, a gap which has allowed propaganda, lies, libels and distortions to take deadly and virtually unchallenged hold.

But what hope is there when by all accounts the Israeli government – and particularly the foreign ministry – is such a hotbed of factional in-fighting, petty rivalries and vested interests that no coherent approach is possible? It is almost beyond belief that the government of a country fighting for its survival should so resemble amateur night at the Hendon Hippodrome.

The result is that it lurches from one desperate extreme to the other – from displaying arrogant indifference to its public image abroad, to suddenly slamming the door in the BBC’s face in a fit of temper.

It is hard not to see in this the pathological damage that has been done to Israel’s sense of itself: the profound weariness and disorientation from more than half a century of bombardment, the introversion arising from a permanent state of siege – and most lethal of all, the creeping demoralisation from the nagging fear that the vile things said about it may be right.

Such internal weakening is, of course, the strategic purpose of terrorism. This long, long Arab game that is being played, applauded by an ignorant and gullible world, is having the effect laid out decades back by Arab strategists, who saw how to destroy Israel through a pincer movement both from within and without. In Israel’s lamentable public presentation, therefore, lie the seeds of terror’s victory.

Daily Mail, July 9 2003

How much longer are we going to ignore the mounting death toll among the elderly arising from official parsimony, buck-passing and negligence?

Winifred Humphrey, aged 102, has died just 16 days after being evicted from her state-funded place in the care home she had lived in for nine years, to make room for a fee-paying resident.

Figures show that one in four old people dies from the trauma of being moved from one home to another. These tragedies are occurring all over the country as homes that can’t afford to keep going close, or local authorities transfer residents to cheaper

places, simply because councils refuse to pay the real cost of adequate care.

Only a few weeks ago, Violet Townsend, aged 88, died from acute stress five days after being moved from her care home in Gloucestershire. The council funding Mrs Townsend refused to pay the extra fees - a mere £53.50 per week -- and moved her instead, despite her doctor’s warning that the move would kill her.

To cap it all, the coroner refused to let the doctor register the cause of death as acute stress, forcing him to enter it instead as ‘old age’.

The crisis has arisen from a swindle by the local authorities. The Government has given them a six per cent increase for social service spending. But the majority are spending some of this on other things, giving care homes far less money.

This is disastrous because their costs are soaring through rises in National Insurance, the minimum wage and registration charges by the Criminal Records Bureau. And to add insult to injury, the Government has slapped a 20 per cent increase on the fees they pay to the National Care Standards Commission - whose blizzard of red tape is itself further adding to their financial woes.

The Independent Health Care Association estimates that there is now a gap of no less than £80-£100 per person per week between what councils are paying and what the care actually costs - a national shortfall of more than £1 billion per year.

The result is that homes are closing at the rate of two to three per week. Many that remain open are putting up their costs, which local authorities are refusing to meet. So councils dump residents in cheaper places, regardless of the fact that these homes too may be on their last legs, causing yet further distressing moves for the residents.

As one sickened care home owner says, councils just find the cheapest place, get the old folk out of the way and forget about them. What an appalling commentary on our society, that our venerable elders who are frail, sick or confused should be shunted around like so much unwanted baggage and abandoned to die from the ordeal. What kind of welfare state is this?

And while the immediate cause of the crisis is the local authorities’ behaviour, ministers are simply washing their hands of a situation they helped create. It was, after all, this government which in 1997 abolished the ring-fencing around the care homes’ money, thus giving Labour’s allies in the town halls the freedom to spend it instead on any cock-eyed schemes they might dream up.

But with every home that closes, more elderly people are likely to be kept inappropriately in hospital because there is nowhere else for them to go, thus blocking hospital beds. The Government knows it depends on the independent sector to help relieve this pressure. Yet it is doing nothing to tackle the swindle that is driving care homes to the wall.

And there is an even more surreal twist. The Government has actually passed legislation to put pressure on councils to provide care home places in order to relieve the hospitals. From next January, if they fail to do so they will face a fine. Yet at the same time, the Government is giving councils an extra £50 million, in part -- as the health minister Jacqui Smith explained last April – ‘to minimise any charges for which they may become liable in January’.

What kind of farcical discipline is this, whereby ministers are actually giving local authorities extra money to help pay the fines that are supposed to force them to hand over money they have misappropriated?

The truly terrible thing is that no-one in officialdom seems to care two hoots. It is all part of the shameful way our society now treats its frail elderly - almost as if, since they are no longer economically or socially useful, they have become both invisible and dispensable.

And if they die from the shock or distress of being evicted from the places that are looking after them - well, hey, they were going to die soon anyway, so let’s put down the cause of death as ‘old age’. A society that behaves like this is not just incompetent. It is no longer civilised.

Daily Mail, July 7 2003.

A leaked Cabinet document has revealed that the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, plans to make everyone in Britain buy an identity card. Proposals to be published later this month will say that although it won’t be compulsory to carry this card, anyone who is challenged must produce it within a few days.

This follows a consultation exercise in which, the government claims, it found overwhelming public support for identity cards. Mr Blunkett dismisses any opposition as predictable howls of outrage from the usual suspects among civil liberties campaigners.

This trivialises real concerns and legitimate objections. Identity cards go directly against the very basis of English liberty, which regards everyone as innocent unless proven guilty. They would transform the public into objects of suspicion, required by authority to prove that they are what they say they are. This goes deeply against the grain, and strikes at the very heart of what it is to be British.

People are rightly extremely fearful about the threat of terrorism. They are also incandescent about the volume of illegal immigration, and the abuse of public services by people with no entitlement to be in this country.

Identity cards are presented as the antidote to terrorism, welfare fraud and illegal immigration. So it’s hardly surprising that this proposal is currently popular. If these cards were indeed such a panacea, the erosion of liberty might be justified. Given the magnitude of what may be lost in the process, however, the case being made for them has to be persuasive. But it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

For example, they would not eradicate the grave threat of terrorism. As the police themselves say, they have no difficulty identifying terror suspects. Indeed, some have turned out to be British citizens who were living here perfectly legally. The difficulty lies either in finding evidence to put before a court, or in summoning the political will to arrest such people or deport them.

The second claim is that identity cards would halt the flow of illegal immigration. Again, there is no doubting the urgency of the problem. The numbers coming in are wholly unsustainable. Britain has simply lost control of its borders, and nothing the government has done has resolved the crisis.

But this is due to a massive failure of political will. Britain has become a magnet for illegal immigration because people know they can easily disappear inside the country once they arrive.

The reason is that the government will not take the action necessary to stop this invasion. It has refused to stop people at the borders by locking them up, and refused to throw them out when they are found to be here illegally.

It has refused to pass its own asylum act and thus reclaim asylum law from the European and English judges who have made it unworkable. It has refused to insist on an opt-out from the European Convention on Human Rights, and refused to acknowledge that its own Human Rights Act has made immigration policy impossible.

Instead, it is now pinning its hopes on identity cards to flush out illegal immigrants. This would be a serious imposition on the rest of the population, who would find themselves having to prove their entitlement to public services. It would subject them at best to inconvenience and at worst to criminalisation if they forgot their cards, or failed to notify the authorities of a change of address or other personal circumstances.

Mr Blunkett says carrying the card wouldn’t be compulsory. Even so, it would be a potential source of harassment and worsen relations between the police and the ethnic minorities. And despite Mr Blunkett’s assurances that strict limits would be imposed on the information held on the card, its capacity for intrusion into personal privacy would be substantial.

All this might be acceptable if it would indeed end the immigration and asylum rackets. But this is far from certain. After all, the abuse of public services could be significantly reduced immediately if there were the will to do so.

People registering with a doctor, school or council housing department could be required right now to produce documentary proof of identity or entitlement – a passport, National Insurance number, even a British driving licence --without which they would not receive these services (except in a medical emergency).

The fact that this is not done is because this country doesn’t bother to enforce any meaningful notion of citizenship, under which those claiming public services or benefits could only do so as part of the bargain of being British.

Not only is this bargain not enforced, but the government is actually increasing the numbers of non-citizens – people on work permits or student visas – who are entitled to free health care and other services.

It is also granting the right to live and work in the UK to all the central European countries which are about to join the EU next May. So presumably their millions of inhabitants would also have the right to access British public services, and would be given the identity cards to prove it.

Then there’s the little matter of fraud and the black market in stolen identities.

Mr Blunkett says his hi-tech card would stop identity theft because it would be equipped with images of a person’s iris or fingerprint --the very latest in what is known as ‘biometric’ technology.

But this would still require data to be cross-checked, entailing a high degree of bureaucratic efficiency by a government which cannot even manage to pay tax credits, deliver passports or enforce child maintenance payments without catastrophic system failure.

Moreover, every ‘foolproof’ technological advance has always been foiled by determined criminals. Indeed, researchers have already found ways of fooling the biometric iris or fingerprint scanners. All the evidence from countries where identity cards have been introduced is they provide an instant black market for fraudsters.

True, European countries with successful immigration controls have identity cards. But they, too, were facing an immigration crisis until they started locking people up and throwing them out. In other words, there is no substitute for taking tough-minded decisions to curb terrorism, illegal immigration or welfare fraud.

But instead of taking such effective action, the Home Office is busy tearing up traditional liberties – just as its response to rising violent crime is to threaten jury trials and the presumption of innocence. All this from the government that brought in the Human Rights Act – proving that this highly partisan agenda is not about human freedom at all, but ideological control.

And it’s a particularly European kind of control. For European countries are top-down democracies, in which freedom is bestowed on their citizens by politicians and judges courtesy of written constitutions. And because their notion of citizenship depends upon an identity card, those countries are happy to have open borders since their citizens are internally policed.

The British have always found that system oppressive. We have relied instead on policing our borders, not our people. Now that our own system has catastrophically broken down, the government intends to start policing its citizens instead, abandoning our ancient principles -- and forcing us to pay £39 each for the privilege.