First draft prepared in August 2025.
Those who advocate for ever greater state control of individual lives are wont to claim that only people with something to hide have anything to fear. If the advocate is an uneducated person with a very ordinary life then their claim could be attributed to ignorance or stupidity. When this claim is made by a politician or civil servant, or somebody who already has some power in society, then it is an indicator that the person making the claim is evil, and such a person should swiftly have all of their power removed.
In the twentieth century (and in 2025, still within living memory, albeit only just) certain governments incarcerated groups of their citizens and, in some cases, systematically destroyed them. The nations in which these evils occurred were not at the bottom of the civilized scale but, on the contrary, the nations concerned were considered highly developed, civilized, organized, and industrialized. Some of them were not altogether unlike the United Kingdom.
Amongst these nations were: Russia, Germany, Turkey, Ukraine, Italy, the United States of America and Japan. The perpetrators of tyranny were not undeveloped nations but were, by most accounts, amongst the better countries of the world. Yet despite their supposed civilized character it was in these countries and the territories that they controlled that people were rounded up, incarcerated, ill treated and, in some cases, exterminated.
Exactly why millions of people were forced to suffer is not easily explained but those people who suffered did not always have something to hide in the sense of being criminals or gangsters, violent people or agitators. In most cases the people who were brutally treated by these supposedly civilized government regimes were just ordinary folk trying to make the best of the short lives allotted to them. They had nothing to hide except themselves.
The people who claim we should not be afraid of identifying ourselves in order to have access to services, or to perform transactions, or to be in public spaces, could be very stupid, ignorant or evil or a combination of all three.
No government can be trusted with that kind of power.
Throughout history there have been many episodes in which people with much zeal but no wisdom come to positions of power and, when that happens, everybody has something to fear. In the UK in 2025, our present government and prime minister have plenty of zeal but very little obvious wisdom. Moreover we haven't seen evidence of wisdom in government since the 1990s or 1980s, and even then it wasn't abundant.
The ordinary person has only two defences against brutal or totalitarian regimes: The first defence, is to ensure that no government regime ever acquires the power by which it might initiate oppression. The second defence, to be used if the first failed, is to hide — as many people had to do during the fascist and communist purges that occurred within living memory. Pervasive identification systems defeat both of these defences:
Pervasive identification systems will allow governments and corporations to accumulate immense and detailed information about the activities of citizens, and information, as intelligent and informed people know, is power. Compulsory, pervasive identification systems linked to computerized record keeping makes widescale oppression quite easy and dissension simple to suppress, because the government can very easily:
Similarly, pervasive schemes of compulsory identification will make it almost impossible for people to hide until the totalitarian regime has expired.
Examples of governments persecuting their own citizens or persons under their governance:
Germany and America were, in the first half of the 20th century, both developed or advanced nations yet citizens of both countries experienced persecution by their own governments.
In Germany the Nazi organization initiated a process of persecution against Communists, Gypsies, Jews, persons of feeble intellect, and whoever else the powerful officials deemed unsuitable for the society they hoped to create. In America persons of Japanese descent experienced various forms of persecution including loss of liberty during the second world war.
These two countries are mentioned only because government persecution is often alleged to occur only in less developed nations, but these two countries were both amongst the most developed nations of the world, both socially and industrially, at the time the oppression occurred.
Similar, or worse, acts of government-orchestrated persecution and oppression have occurred in other countries during the 20th Century: Burundi/Rwanda, Cambodia, China, Turkey, North Korea, Russia, Uganda and Zimbabwe all spring quickly to mind. In prior centuries history is littered with other examples of the same sort of thing. There is no reason to think that the United Kingdom is immune to such things.
History shows us that government institutions in any country and any era can, and do, become the oppressors to the people they are supposed to serve in governance. The phenomena is not restricted to governments in particular countries, nor in particular continents, nor of a particular skin colour. History teaches us that from time to time the governments in even the most reasonable of countries go through periods of paranoia, and when that happens anybody might have a need to hide and everybody has something to fear.
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