Vaccine passports will set you free? First take a look at who’s peddling them

There’s that noise again: the man of reason and the man of steel, Tony Blair’s British, utterly placeless, slightly thoughtful, but yet forceful voice talking about vaccine passports and the necessity thereof. Thoughtful, forceful, and of course utterly stark staring megalomaniacal nuts. Good ol’ reliable Tony.

Blair has turned up again to urge the adoption of “vaccine passports”, and it’s like the ringing in your ears from the AZ shot (did anyone else get that?). He says vaccine passports aren’t just necessary, they’re “inevitable”. God, where have I heard that before? They’re essential for the world to open up. Ah, modernisation. Best line of all? They’re the key to freedom. Ah, the old New Labour magic — it never goes away.

Blair shouldn’t be interviewed by anyone, least of all the public broadcaster, as an uninterested commentator. He’s a global PR shill for numerous murderous regimes and God knows what corporations, so you never know who he’s speaking for out of that snake-like mouth, the one he can’t persuade into a smile even for an official Christmas card. There’s an obvious reason why petrostates and other nasties would have a direct interest in a global regime of vaccine passports, but let’s get to that in a bit.

For the moment, it’s worth noting why someone like Blair, or our own dear centrist Malcolm Turnbull, would be advocating not merely the consideration, or very limited use, of some sort of vaccine certification, but the blanket, immediate and unreflective application of such.

These men are what a certain type of 1990s centrism has evolved into, under the pressure, or with the pretext, of decades of wars, renewed imperialism, and the social war of rising inequality and blighted, limited lives by the many millions.

They started with various third-way ideas, oriented to the idea that politics was simply “problem solving”, without “ideology”, in the service of a few goals held to be unarguably “good”.

‘Anti-social banning orders’

By the late 1990s, as neoliberalism failed to deliver that of itself, such an approach was already looking to selective state coercion to deliver “solutions”. Thus the Blair government introduced “anti-social banning orders” (ASBO), measures hanging somewhere between law and regulation, to shift the task of social harmony from better provision to controlling persons.

The one nightmare family on a housing estate wasn’t rehoused away from other people; it was given an ASBO, which it flouted anyway because it was a nightmare family.

The failure of ASBOs to act as anything much other than a new weapon in police anti-vagrancy powers didn’t deter the Blair and Gordon Brown governments from extending them. By 2009, PM-of-the-future pick Ed Balls was advocating placing CCTVs inside the homes of 20,000 highly dysfunctional families to reshape their behaviour. The “New Labour” centrists got very cross when it was pointed out that such measures not only eroded an idea of citizenship, public space and much more but also didn’t work on their own terms.

Because “solutions” based on liberal modernisation was the true path after the end of history, measures would simply have to be redoubled rather than rethought. In New Labour’s domestic policy was the origins of the Iraq debacle: New Labour’s participation in the war was simply domestic control projected outwards, giving the Middle East a giant ASBO.

The various forms of third way politics have failed to deliver, and now those who advocated it turn more and more to an explicitly coercive model, which has a view to a post-liberal Western world.

They’re tracing a familiar course in a way, from the first part of the last century when those who had put their faith in a social-liberal takeover of government drifted — through World War I, bolshevism and further chaos — to a curiosity about and then enthusiasm for the most successful coercive technocratic government of the time: Mussolini’s.

“Liberal fascism” was what HG Wells replied when he was asked what the world needed in the 1920s. Those who had no great use for his cult of violence were nevertheless impressed by the corporatism that underlay it, and the idea that it could be adopted to other societies, where class conflict made the imposition of a smooth order impossible.

Powers of passports

There is something of that impatience in the new champions of vaccine passports. Most of us would accept that they should be required for certain forms of work. We might consider them for certain other purposes. Blair wants them imposed without debate. Turnbull wants them for people who go to the cinema.

This sort of urging shows you how “social liberalism_ — of which social democracy and third way centrism are subsets — can decay into coercive corporatism, often as a way of covering government ineptitude or lack of will to be effective. The notion that “vaccine passports will make you free” uses the notion of “positive” — i.e. collective — freedom, but without its necessary complement, which is universalism. Citizenship is preserved, to some degree, when we remain united in the social obligations we are obliged to perform.

As I noted earlier, we used to just instruct people to get chest X-rays for TB, no (or very few) ifs or buts. T’would be better to make vaccination obligatory and have the state be both explicit in its coercion and universal in its application. That not only makes power visible, but it also avoids the fundamental division we would be instituting.

We gaze in horror at China’s state-run “social credit” system. But we are building a patchwork version in the West, through the growth of credit ratings, universal tech-fuelled blacklisting in rental markets, etc. A vaccine passport would simply fill in another part of that.

Of course, the other reason why Blair and others might be so keen to sell vaccine passports comes back to his and their interests as clients of capital. Capital wants to move around the world as seamlessly as possible. One of the ways it does so is by sequestering labour. Is it faintly possible that some of Blair’s clients want vaccine passports so that the pipeline of global seasonal, casual labour for, ooooh, I dunno, lunatic megalomaniac city projects in Middle Eastern deserts can proceed unimpeded? Were a vaccine passport to be introduced, it would certainly be the only passport such workers would be allowed to hold on to.

But we shouldn’t match the global corporatists’ certainty with a version of our own. That’s just empty libertarianism. Given that the Australian “freedom agenda” is now Liberal Senator James Paterson asking what tweets ABC staff have “liked” — what a pathetic decline for the IPA — it’s now a train to hitch your wagon to (though, no doubt, it runs on time).

There may in the future be a need for some form of certification extended beyond medical and other occupations when a more lethal virus emerges (virologists say that the chances of COVID mutating so that it begins to affect our T-cells, are very, very small. COVID may beg to differ. And we’re going to give it all the help it needs by letting it ravage Africa so as to protect the big pharma patent system. How sporting we are).

If one thought that a limited application of vaccine passports now would give us experience for the use of them later, and could be limited in application, there would be a strong case for them. But this goes only one way.

There are very strong forces pushing us to a Western post-liberal order; we need to resist them and preserve the idea of universalism, solidarity and unconditional citizenship for as long as we can, so there will be something to rally for when the hammer comes down. If anything alerts us to that, it’s the return of Blair, not the vaccine, but the raw virus itself, spreading around the world, a strain of the disease he purports to cure.