---

Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, I consider the amendment of great importance. It raises fundamental issues of liberty. Noble Lords will recall that in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith saw written on the walls of the Ministry of Truth ““War is peace. Freedom is slavery””. I was reminded of those words the other day when some noble Lords on the government Benches said that requiring a person to register, requiring a person to buy an identity card, was to grant him ““a new kind of freedom””. Those were the very words used by the noble Lord, Lord Gould, on 15 November last year, at col. 1012, when talking about these matters. I believe that most people will agree that while identity cards might bring some benefits to the individual, compulsory registration means an inroad on liberty and privacy and that when the Lord Chancellor said at the weekend that identity cards would make it easier for the citizen to deal with the state, what he really meant was that they would make it easier for the state to deal with the citizen. I can see that creeping compulsion is, from the point of view of the Home Office, a convenient way of proceeding. But is it really right that it should be a lottery as to when any particular person is, as it were, caught in the spider’s web; that it should depend on a circumstance entirely outside the individual’s control and for which he is in no way to blame, such as when his driving licence happens to come up for renewal? It will be a complete lottery. The Government’s scheme means that the state will be saying to the individual: ““You are entitled to a driving licence. You have done nothing wrong to disentitle you from having a driving licence. But we will not give you one unless you take a step which has nothing whatever to do with the requirements of the Road Traffic Acts and your ability to drive. We will not give you one unless you buy an identity card and submit to registration.””. How on earth can that be right? The Government’s scheme is capricious and unfair and we should not support it.