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Identity Cards Bill

I am in favour of identity cards and I know what benefits I would like them to have. However, I am very unclear that the system we are being sold by the Government offers these benefits. It seems to me to be far too centralised, cumbersome and complicated to offer them in practice. That is why I am interested to hear much more from the Government on how they see the scheme working. Perhaps I may pick up a comment made by my noble friend Lord Crickhowell. The system fundamentally cannot be secure because the security services need it to be insecure. They will need to hide identities to protect witnesses and to infiltrate people into al-Qaeda. The system will have to have built into it a way in which it can be subverted. If that is the case, there will always be the possibility of someone getting at it.