[continued from previous message] 
  
 The idea of the ID card seems sensible in the age of terrorism, identity 
 theft, and illegal immigration until you realise that the centralised 
 database - the National Identity Register - will log and store details of 
 every important action in a person's life. When the ID card is swiped as 
 someone identifies himself at, say, a bank, hospital, pharmacy, or insurance 
 company, those details are retained and may be inspected by, among others, 
 the police, tax authorities, customs, and MI5, the domestic intelligence 
 service. The system will locate and track the entire adult population. If 
 you put it together with the national system of licence-plate-recognition 
 cameras, which is about to go live on British highways and in town centres, 
 and understand that the ID card, under a new regulation, will also carry 
 details of a person's medical records, you realise that the state will be 
 able to keep tabs on anyone it chooses and find out about the most private 
 parts of a person's life. 
  
 Despite the cost of the ID card system - estimated by the Government as 
 being about B#5.8bn and by the London School of Economics as being between 
 B#10bn and B#19bn - few think that it will attack the problems of terrorism 
 and ID theft. 
  
 George Churchill-Coleman described it to me as an absolute waste of time. 
 "You and I will carry them because we are upright citizens. But a terrorist 
 isn't going to carry [his own]. He will be carrying yours." 
  
 Neil Tennant, a former Labour donor who has stopped giving money to and 
 voting for Labour because of ID cards, says: "My specific fear is that we 
 are going to create a society where a policeman stops me on the way to 
 Waitrose on the King's Road and says, 'Can I see your identity card?' I 
 don't see why I should have to do that." Tennant says he may leave the 
 country if a compulsory ID card comes into force. "We can't live in a 
 total-surveillance society," he adds. "It is to disrespect us." 
  
 Defending myself against claims of paranoia and the attacks of Labour's 
 former home secretary, I have simply referred people to the statute book of 
 British law, where the evidence of what I have been saying is there for all 
 to see. But two other factors in this silent takeover are not so visible. 
 The first is a profound change in the relationship between the individual 
 and the state. Nothing demonstrates the sense of the state's entitlement 
 over the average citizen more than the new laws that came in at the 
 beginning of the year and allow anyone to be arrested for any crime - even 
 dropping litter. And here's the crucial point. Once a person is arrested he 
 or she may be fingerprinted and photographed by the police and have a DNA 
 sample removed with an oral swab - by force if necessary. And this is before 
 that person has been found guilty of any crime, whether it be dropping 
 litter or shooting someone. 
  
 So much for the presumption of innocence, but there again we have no reason 
 to be surprised. Last year, in his annual Labour Party conference speech, 
 Blair said this: "The whole of our system starts from the proposition that 
 its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don't 
 misunderstand me. That must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But 
 surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in 
 safety. It means a complete change of thinking. It doesn't mean abandoning 
 human rights. It means deciding whose come first." The point of human 
 rights, as Churchill noted, is that they treat the innocent, the suspect, 
 and the convict equally: "These are the symbols, in the treatment of crime 
 and criminals, which mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, 
 and are a sign and proof of the living virtue in it." 
  
 The DNA database is part of this presumption of guilt. Naturally the police 
 support it, because it has obvious benefits in solving crimes, but it should 
 be pointed out to any country considering the compulsory retention of the 
 DNA of innocent people that in Britain 38 per cent of all black men are 
 represented on the database, while just 10 percent of white men are. There 
 will be an inbuilt racism in the system until - heaven forbid - we all have 
 our DNA taken and recorded on our ID cards. 
  
 Baroness Kennedy, a lawyer and Labour peer, is one of the most vocal critics 
 of Blair's new laws. In the annual James Cameron Memorial Lecture at the 
 City University, London, in April she gave a devastating account of her own 
 party's waywardness. She accused government ministers of seeing themselves 
 as the embodiment of the state, rather than, as I would put it, the servants 
 of the state. 
  
 "The common law is built on moral wisdom," she said, "grounded in the 
 experience of ages, acknowledging that governments can abuse power and when 
 a person is on trial the burden of proof must be on the state and no one's 
 liberty should be removed without evidence of the highest standard. By 
 removing trial by jury and seeking to detain people on civil Asbo orders as 
 a pre-emptive strike, by introducing ID cards, the Government is creating 
 new paradigms of state power. Being required to produce your papers to show 
 who you are is a public manifestation of who is in control. What we seem to 
 have forgotten is that the state is there courtesy of us and we are not here 
 courtesy the state." 
  
 The second invisible change that has occurred in Britain is best expressed 
 by Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics, who did 
 pioneering work on the ID card scheme and then suffered a wounding onslaught 
 from the Government when it did not agree with his findings. The worrying 
 thing, he suggests, is that the instinctive sense of personal liberty has 
 been lost in the British people. "We have reached that stage now where we 
 have gone almost as far as it is possible to go in establishing the 
 infrastructures of control and surveillance within an open and free 
 environment," he says. "That architecture only has to work and the citizens 
 only have to become compliant for the Government to have control. 
  
 "That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to their 
 fate. They've bought the Government's arguments for the public good. There 
 is a generational failure of memory about individual rights. Whenever 
 Government says that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an 
 entire generation has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively And that 
 is the great lesson that other countries must learn. The US must never lose 
 sight of its traditions of individual freedom." 
  
 Those who understand what has gone on in Britain have the sense of being in 
 one of those nightmares where you are crying out to warn someone of 
 impending danger, but they cannot hear you. And yet I do take some hope from 
 the picnickers of Parliament Square. May the numbers of these young 
 eccentrics swell and swell over the coming months, for their actions are a 
 sign that the spirit of liberty and dogged defiance are not yet dead in 
 Britain. 
  
  
 [This article is taken from the current issue of Vanity Fair] 
  
  
 Charged for quoting George Orwell in public 
  
 In another example of the Government's draconian stance on political 
 protest, Steven Jago, 36, a management accountant, yesterday became the 
 latest person to be charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police 
 Act. 
  
 On 18 June, Mr Jago carried a placard in Whitehall bearing the George Orwell 
  
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