Registers of people

I have noticed before the reluctance of our politicians here in the UK to get involved in national registers of people, despite ideas for same breaking through to the surface from time to time, driven by some need or other of the day. I remember one such back in the mid 1970's, when people were worried that we were not keep a good enough track of how many people there were in the various parts of the country. This being back in the days when we had local government and central government money was dished out to local government very much on the basis of population. 

Another was much more recently, when the Home Office spent some money with Price Waterhouse to take another look. I forget what prompted this look, but it was during my time with the Home Office, in the run up to my retirement in 2006 or so. And it all died down fairly quickly.

This despite the fact that there is, or at least used to be, something called the National Health Service Central Register, based in a former Turkish bath house called Smedley Hydro, up in Southport. Hundreds of yards of shelves of ledgers. And there certainly are several large registers operated by the people at HMR&C.

Despite the fact that it does not bother us much at all that huge amounts of data are stored about us, possibly the majority of us, by the likes of Amazon, Google and Facebook. All organisations which live by sucking money out of us, directly or indirectly, quite unlike governments which we elect to look after us and our interests.

A reluctance which I believe to be driven by memories of abuse of such registers by the seriously unpleasant, not to say evil, authoritarian governments of the middle of the last century, particularly those of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Noting in passing that the former started the war which the latter won for us.

But I think it is time to move on, and I was sorry to see the leader of the Labour Party yesterday joining the ranks of those who believe that registers were not very British. That keeping track of our coronavirus vaccination status was not very British.

This despite the fact that lots of people have access to the national register of our car insurance status. Which nobody much seems to mind about at all.