The Man versus the State - the end of ID cards in 1950

4.01.00am UTC (GMT +0000) Wed 5th Apr 2006

In 1950, a young man, Clarence Willcock, was stopped in his car by a policeman in North London on suspicion of speeding and asked for his identity card. Like the good Young Liberal that he was, Willcock refused to produce his card. Willcock's argument to the Middlesex magistrates was that the National Register was a piece of wartime legislation that was no longer in force in peacetime. The magistrates disagreed. The Appeal Court not only confirmed the judgement but also gave Willcock an absolute discharge and in his concluding remarks, Lord Goddard, the Lord Chief Justice and soon to be infamous as the hanging judge in the Derek Bentley case, strongly criticised the police's use of identity cards.

The Lord Chief Justice said "It is obvious that the police now, as a matter of routine, demand the production of national registration identity cards whenever they stop or interrogate a motorist for whatever cause. Of course, if they are looking for a stolen car or have reason to believe that a particular motorist is engaged in committing a crime, that is one thing, but to demand a national registration identity card from all and sundry ... , for instance, from a lady who may leave her car outside a shop longer than she should, or some trivial matter of that sort,… is wholly unreasonable."

"This Act was passed for security purposes, and not for the purposes for which, apparently, it is now sought to be used. To use Acts of Parliament, passed for particular purposes during war, in times when the war is past, except that technically a state of war exists, tends to turn law-abiding subjects into lawbreakers, which is a most undesirable state of affairs. Further, in this country we have always prided ourselves on the good feeling that exists between the police and the public and such action tends to make the people resentful of the acts of the police and inclines them to obstruct the police instead of to assist them."

"To paraphrase, facetiously: 'Don't let 'em have it'. Such criticism, when combined with the gradual removal of rationing "restrictions, made the National Register unsustainable. However, it should be noted that the end of rationing alone would probably not have ended the second British identity card. At that moment the National Register was being used to generate the National Health Service Central Register and it is more than plausible that a second intimate connection between administrative systems would have replaced the former one between National Register and food rationing."

Related Links:

History & Policy: Identity cards in Britain: past experience and policy implications.

Say NO to ID Card.