ENIGMATIC STRANGENESS

Muriel Gray argues against ID cards for all:

Currently, you or I can open a bank account under any name we wish. We can procure a credit card under that name. We can have gas, electricity and telephone lines brought to our home and pay for them under that name. We can book into a hotel as Donald Duck or travel round our own country by air or train as Pocahontas, all of which will be rendered impossible when the commercial sector decides to exploit a scheme that ensures customers can hide nothing.

Never again will a couple book into that Cornish hotel as Mr and Mrs Smith and fail to show for breakfast. The staunch defenders of the ID scheme question why one would wish to fabricate such deceptions, but the reason is that the enigmatic stranger is a keystone of the British notion of freedom. The romantic ideal that anyone can be who they wish to be is so stitched into our mythology and literature - from strangers on trains to millionaire philanthropists posing as paupers and ambitious youngsters escaping class restraints by altering their identity - that its loss would be a tragedy.

ID cards may not be a good idea but weak-arsed arguments like that above will discredit the whole anti-ID card campaign. I mean, it almost seems as if Gray regards criminal behaviour as romantic.