Stamped and surveiled
Who, watching the election results roll in during the early hours of 13 December 2019, could have predicted the ideological state of the incoming government just 18 months later? Boris Johnson paved his way to 10 Downing Street by advertising himself as an optimistic, freedom-loving libertarian. He was reminiscent of an eighteenth-century buccaneer or an American revolutionary patriot. He flew a modern Gadsden flag, warning the ‘Great Supine Invertebrate Jellies’ of government away from the British people, both at home and in Europe. What a difference a pandemic makes. Since early 2020, the government has overseen the greatest subversion of civil liberties in living memory. Now Johnson has defied his old self once again by announcing the introduction of Covid passports. Where the vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi once said that Covid passports are ‘not how we do things in the UK’, he has now asserted the government’s ‘right to mandate’ proof of inoculation, a negative test or antibodies to access venues from churches to clubs.
The introduction of Covid passports marks a seismic shift in the government’s ideology. We cannot afford to be euphemistic when discussing them: Covid passports are identification cards. They infringe upon privacy and rights and introduce a two-tier checkpoint society based on individual health. February’s iteration of Boris Johnson was right to identify Covid passports as ‘discriminatory’. In June, the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee derided the government’s case for Covid passports. Among the concerns they expressed, MPs noted that the scheme would ‘disproportionately discriminate’ on the basis of race, religion, age and socio-economic background. It is no secret that traditionally marginalised groups in the UK are less likely to get the vaccine. Black Britons are half as likely to get vaccinated as their White counterparts, and just 37.9 per cent of individuals in the lowest areas of deprivation have been vaccinated. Under the scheme, those who – for whatever reason – have not been vaccinated will become second-class citizens, barred from accessing venues and events. Parts of the country will be shut off to people as an indirect result of their protected characteristics. This exclusion is an unacceptable step towards state-sponsored discrimination.
Many successive governments have been tempted by the alluring control that identification cards present. Johnson’s acceptance of the new scheme makes him an unlikely bedfellow with one of his predecessors. As early as September 2020, former prime minister Tony Blair was advocating the use of Covid passports. ‘You don’t need a large amount of information’, he told the BBC, rationalising that ‘people give a lot more information probably to their supermarkets than they will to the government’. His logic is flawed: no supermarket would use a customer’s information to stop them from entering their premises, nor would they have the force of the state in their arsenal. Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised that Blair is such a keen proponent of vaccine passports. In the wake of 9/11, he was the architect of the national identity card, which linked each carrier’s fingerprints, facial scan and personal information to a National Identity Register. Before the controversial Act was scrapped by the coalition government it was Johnson who, with the loudest voice, cried out against the ‘matronly authority’ of identification cards. Now, it seems, is his turn to repeat history. As Solzhenitsyn wrote: ‘A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.’ Where under Blair it was the war on terror, under Johnson it is the war on the coronavirus, that serves as the excuse for the contemporary tyranny of identification cards.
It is difficult to see the point of Covid passports from a public health perspective. As the Select Committee noted, the government has failed to make the scientific case in favour of the scheme. At the time of writing, there is a steep decline in coronavirus cases, and over 70 per cent of the adult population have had their second vaccine. While the risk of Covid-19 is rapidly diminishing, the government is intent on pushing these forms of medical identification through, with no clear exit strategy. Dominic Raab has admitted that they were raised as a possibility to ‘coax’ young people into being vaccinated and that they may never be introduced. However, by May of this year, the Department of Health had already signed a number of contracts for the development of Covid passports. Based on this information we are left with two, equally distasteful, options: either the government is genuinely considering employing this intrusive scheme, or it is using the threat of its introduction to control individual behaviour. It is time to ask if we are happy with such a dishonest and illiberal executive. If Johnson were still a pundit today, I think we all know what his answer would be.