The Blair government is aiming to engineer a situation whereby the carrying of an identity card by every person is compulsory, and at the same time every individual is on the police DNA database.
This will create a unique situation. The state will be able to control the daily life of citizens, by turning them into a nation of suspects, who will have to prove their identity or their innocence whenever they are challenged.
The combination of identity cards and DNA samples will allow the state, its political police and bent coppers to oppress and frame up citizens.
Currently, the House of Lords is proving to be a temporary barrier to the introduction of identity cards, while on the police DNA front, the database is advancing by leaps and bounds, starting off with the government’s main targets, the youth and black workers.
There are currently over three million people on the police DNA database. This is five per cent of the population. In the EU 1.13 per cent of the population is on a DNA database while in the US the figure is 0.5 per cent.
The British ruling class is far and away the most enthusiastic of the ruling classes of the world to get the people under its thumb.
Of the three million on the DNA database, over 140,000 have not committed any crime or been found guilty of any offence.
There are also 24,000 youth aged between 10 and 18 on the data base who have committed no crime, have never been found guilty of any offence, and have never even been cautioned.
Even a Tory MP, Grant Shapps has said that he fears that a youth DNA database is being created by stealth.
He asked: ‘If the government wants to build a DNA database of the entire population, starting with kids – bring forward proposals, pass it through parliament and have a debate.’
The answer is that there is not the slightest chance of his happening since the government knows that parliament would not agree to such a police state measure.
As well as masses of young people, the Home Office admits that there is an ‘over-representation’ of black people on the DNA database. 37 per cent of black men are in the database, compared with fewer than one in 10 white men.
The police and the Home Office are working to get the entire youth and black population onto the DNA database, before they then proceed to the rest of the population.
As the crisis of the capitalist system develops and the class struggle sharpens, Labour’s policy becomes more and more that of an extra-parliamentary dictatorship.
It is based on qualitatively strengthening the power of the state, from bringing in non-jury courts, where the defendant does not know the evidence against him, to summary justice, that bypasses the courts entirely, so that the police officer and the CPS become the judge and the jury, and also exact the punishment, from the imposition of fines, to execution by armed police officers.
Now, as the base for the whole system, the entire population is to be recorded as suspect, indexed through identity cards and the DNA database, and deemed guilty until there is proof of innocence.
The only way to defeat this attempt to impose an open bourgeois dictatorship is through the organisation of a socialist revolution to smash the capitalist state, its databases, and its bodies of armed men and to go forward to a workers’ state and socialism.
