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Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, I wonder if I can possibly help the Government. It seems that they have built a high and strong stone wall behind them and that the Pyramus and Thisby on the Front Bench opposite are feeling embarrassed and so have encouraged their colleagues not to support them in order to get the legislation out of the way quickly. There is a fairly simple solution to all this, one that goes to an amendment I have tabled for consideration later: the passport is actually a voluntary document. According to the Government, biometric passports were to have been introduced in October of last year. With the biometric passport will go the new identity card, which will also be voluntary. Since 80 or 90 per cent of this country’s population already have passports and could be issued with the identity cards at a cost of less than £10, it seems logical to encourage as many people as possible to register with the passports authority in order that they may have a simple identity card. As your Lordships will be aware, the main people who do not carry passports are those of retirement age, half of whom do not carry them. Thus it would be a simple matter to issue passports to everyone, possibly free of charge, in the same way as we receive bus passes—which are, of course, a proof of identity. That would be voluntary. A passport is a voluntary document; the fact that you cannot travel without it is an encouragement to have one if you want to travel. But the idea of what should have been called the identity cards register is very worrying, and the Government should think of—I have forgotten the chap—Sisyphus, I think, who rolled his stone up the hill, and then it came rolling down. They may shortly be overwhelmed. The noble Lord, Lord Swindon, struck a chord with me when he spoke about fascism and those awful phrases you would hear in some parts of Europe, often in German, such as ““Papier, bitte””, followed by ““Papiers nicht in ordnung””—I apologise for using a foreign language—and it struck me that I should ask these countries. I have beside me an Act of Parliament from one of those former fascist countries. It has 46 clauses, not 45, that are designed to protect the individual from exactly the sort of thing we are now trying to introduce. I shall read it rather than say it: it is the Bundesdatenschutzgesetz, the German law that says that the individual is free, the data is his, it may not be transferred from one government department to another, and he also has Hoheit, or the intellectual property. It is strange to me, listening to the noble Lord, Lord Swindon, that after all these years we should be swinging so far backwards and recognising that most of the new members of the EU are longing for the days when they are not required to carry papers with them day and night, and where officials do not have the right to misread papers should it suit them in order to intern someone.