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Home Affairs and Communities

I am enormously grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way on a point of such importance. I hope that he accepts that some of us are deeply uneasy about the ID card scheme. We believe that this is a question of civil rights, and it disturbs us greatly. The history of the holding of every element of information about people’s lives by police forces or Governments suggests not that such information is always used responsibly, but that, in some instances, it is used by Governments for the worst possible reasons.