The Moscow traffic cop wanted to make trouble for me, probably in the hope of squeezing a hard currency bribe out of an obvious foreigner.
In the freezing courtyard of a dark, sinister block of flats, he claimed – falsely – that I’d been speeding. He roared at me for my obvious lack of respect, demanded my papers, to put me in my place, and threw them into the brown slush to emphasise his absolute power to ruin my evening and perhaps my life.
‘And anyway’ he sneered, ‘what are you doing in here?’ waving his hand at the tall. oddly stately and well-kept quadrangle into which he had chased me in my muddy, badly-dented red Volvo.
He knew very well that this place, 26 Kutuzov Avenue, was a block reserved for high Communist officials. Leonid Brezhnev, for many years ruler of the entire USSR, had lived there, and his family still did.
The KGB chief Yuri Andropov had dwelt there too. Even in those days it was crammed with Bolshevik notables. So when I softly replied, ‘I live here’, the sneering policeman gingerly picked up the papers he had tossed onto the ground.
He thumbed through them, only to find the impressive rubber stamp which confirmed my claim. For reasons he couldn’t fathom, I was part of the elite. If I lived in that block, I was not a victim to be fleeced, but a person to be feared – and he was my servant.
His whole manner changed. He handed me back my passport and licence, stepped away from me, saluted, and hurriedly climbed into his Zhiguli car.
It was a rare victory over the general bullying and sloppy corruption of Soviet power, and I have savoured it ever since. It also showed how, in such states, the police are the cringing servants of power, not of law.
As a traveller in dark and unfree lands I have many times faced a stone-faced militiaman demanding to see my papers and so I have grown used to the unaccountable authority which petty officials possess in most states in the world. I am glad of the experience. That is exactly why I don’t want this sort of behaviour here, thanks.
The most dangerous thing about being British is that most of us just don’t know how lucky we are. Our encounters with the world abroad are happy ones; holiday trips or pleasant business visits, staying in agreeable, sunny places, meeting obliging, friendly people.
Even the police are nice to us. We don’t realise that our small sea-surrounded home is more or less unique in the history of the world and that they do things very differently, even in countries we think of as relaxed and democratic.
‘Except during the 1939-45 war, when identity cards proved entirely useless and deeply unpopular, the British state has had to justify itself to us,’ writes Peter Hitchens
This period of British specialness may be ending, as the sea ceases to guard us as well as it once did. But we should not help it to end, by foolishly surrendering the freedoms we have.
Even in the most welcoming of continental countries, the state is above the people’s heads and the individual is beneath the feet of then power elite. Almost all these countries have some form of identity card or identity register, and it is up to you to show that you are going about your lawful business.
My Swiss-German mother-in-law, brought up in one of the Continent’s most liberal and democratic nations, was amazed all her life by the casual attitude British people had to their passports.
Like any European, she knew that the loss of such documents, or the inability to produce them, could plunge any individual into a nightmare of powerlessness, lawlessness, detention, interrogation and perhaps quite a bit worse. I have come to adopt her rather more severe view of the subject. And with that comes a strong desire never to see such a regime installed in Britain.
It would turn upside down the proper relationship between the state and the individual. Except during the 1939-45 war, when identity cards proved entirely useless and deeply unpopular, the British state has had to justify itself to us.
But if we are forced to carry slave badges ‘identifying’ ourselves, we would be required to justify ourselves to the government. It would give every jumped-up official behind a desk a new way of harassing and belittling us, as happened during World War II.
And heaven help you if you lost yours, even though the place would soon be awash with very convincing forgeries. Indeed, you’d probably find your card had been cloned by criminals, condemning you to weeks of explaining that you hadn’t been where you weren’t.
Oh, and it won’t solve the migrant crisis, France has identity cards, and also has an estimated 900,000 undocumented migrants living in its cities. So much for the wonders of digital ID.
If the government wants to keep out illegal migrants and to help keep us free, it should instead make the sea a safeguard, as it used to be. Let us treat it as a land border, and copy the Poles, currently reinforcing a ‘wall of steel’, an 18ft high barricade along their frontier with Belarus, costing £460million.
Nobody compels them to ‘rescue’ people who try and fail to cross their border illegally. Such failed migrants just have to stay in Belarus. Sorry. Surely technology and materials now exist to anchor a similar fence on the seabed itself, high, deep and strong enough to prevent the arrival of most illegal migrants in unauthorised boats.
Nobody’s human rights would be infringed. Special guarded channels would remain open for legal traffic. Anyone else would just have to go back to France or, better still, not set out in the first place.
In my view the attempt to impose identity cards on this country, under the feeble pretext of deterring migrants, comes from the same Blairite origin as the revolution in policing which has led to the arrest of people for expressing opinions.
In 2004, I published a book on the subject, The Abolition Of Liberty. It warned against much that has since happened. It noted the recent prosecution of an elderly eccentric, Harry Hammond, in Bournemouth.
He displayed a placard (mild by modern Twitter standards) saying: ‘Stop immorality. Stop homosexuality. Stop lesbianism’. He was then attacked by liberal open-minded types, who disagreed with him.
One tugged the placard from his hands so that this weak old man fell to the ground. Others pelted him with clods of earth. Another emptied a bottle of water over his head.
Nothing at all happened to these charmers. One old-fashioned police officer wanted to help Mr Hammond. But another, of the new type, arrested him for ‘provoking violence’. He was fined £300 and died soon afterwards.
I wrote then: ‘There is now a direct, as well as an indirect threat to liberty. This threat comes from the elite state’s certainty that its benevolence and goodness are beyond dispute. We may be witnessing the early stages of the gradual transformation of a free society into a closed society, in which some ideas can no longer be publicly expressed.’
Such a society will undoubtedly have identity cards, along with facial recognition, electronic tracking of travel and all the glinting, bullying weapons Stalin and Hitler wished they had, but never managed to develop. Please don’t let it happen.
