Politics & Power Quote by Malcolm Wallop

There is a deliberately jarring downgrade embedded here: citizens turned into subjects. Wallop’s line works because it refuses to argue policy on the government’s chosen terrain (security “tools,” legislative “necessities”) and instead attacks the moral posture beneath them. National ID cards and terrorism bills are treated less as discrete proposals than as symptoms of a governing habit: command first, justify later.

The phrasing “has grown used to” does heavy lifting. It implies drift, not a single villainous act. Power, in this telling, doesn’t seize; it acclimates. That’s a canny move for a politician: it invites listeners who might not see themselves as anti-government radicals to still feel implicated, even mildly embarrassed, by their own normalization of surveillance and emergency powers.

Subtext: the real fight is over what kind of people “we” are allowed to be in public. An identity card regime is bureaucratically banal, but culturally intimate; it makes proof of legitimacy an everyday demand. Pair it with a terrorism bill and you get the classic post-crisis alchemy where fear turns exceptional authority into routine administration.

Contextually, this sits squarely in the late-20th/early-21st-century Anglosphere debate about security versus liberty, when terrorism legislation and data-gathering infrastructure expanded under the banner of protection. Wallop’s rhetorical gambit is to frame those expansions not as protection but as a reversion to pre-democratic hierarchy. The sting is the insinuation that the government isn’t just overreaching; it’s forgetting who it works for, and betting that the public has forgotten, too.