Identity and the rule of law ...

For the past couple of years I have been travelling with an electronic passport. I don't like it.
Every time it goes into one of those machines that reads it I think of the salvific possibilities of human error and creativity. today, unless you really know how to falsify chips etc then all of those folk saved by forged papers during the 2nd World War wouldn't stand a hope ...
The local passport and identity service is housed on the street where we are staying in Liverpool and rather surprisingly it has a street art installation of these small portholes of pictures of British citizens of very diverse origins, their names, places and years of birth are given. At night time the portholes are lit up in blue. Given some of the terrible rhetoric around "foreigners" and "immigrants", given how terribly difficult it is to get a visa to this country I found this artwork surprisingly counter-cultural - perhaps it is an attempt to foster multi-culturalism (now often much despised). Anyway these small blue portholes do give me some hope that all is not lost, that humanity still values decency and inclusivity - even when the terrible forms people have to fill in and the rhetoric that is all too often heard seems to give a very different message. Long live the blue portholes of a different story of British identity.