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Identity Cards

I beg to move,"That this House believes the Government's identity cards scheme should be cancelled immediately." May I begin my remarks with an apology to the Home Secretary? When he made his statement about identity cards last week, I joked with him that his announcement was a fudge arranged between a new Home Secretary who wanted to scrap the ID cards scheme and a Prime Minister who did not. I had, not unsurprisingly, assumed that the result was an ugly compromise between the two, resulting in a voluntary scheme that will cost a large amount of money but will not work. I had also assumed that the Home Secretary had been forced into it in order to keep the Prime Minister off his back, but it now seems that I was completely wrong. The Prime Minister had nothing to do with last week's announcement—in fact, he did not even know all the things that the Home Secretary was going to announce. On reflection, I suppose that is hardly surprising, given that this Prime Minister is clearly no longer in control of his Cabinet, the Chancellor keeps going off piste and the Home Secretary is now joining him. What did surprise me was what that statement actually means. It means that the completely daft announcement made last week that the Government's flagship ID card scheme, which we were once told was designed to play a central part in the battle against terrorism, will be voluntary was not another stupid pronouncement from the Downing street bunker, but was, in fact, the brainchild of the new Home Secretary. Perhaps my apology should be to the Prime Minister and not to the Home Secretary, who was clearly off his rocker when he made that announcement. How on earth is a voluntary ID card scheme going to work? Will the terrorists sign up? Somehow, I do not see the al-Qaeda sleeper cells all rushing down to Boots with their 30 quid to make sure that they have their own ID cards. What about the organised criminals? Will the traffickers and drug smugglers all rush to sign up? Somehow, I doubt it. What about the benefit fraudsters? They probably will not sign up either. So what we are left with is a multi-billion pound ID scheme for young drinkers in pubs and the vain hope that there will be enough volunteers to pay for it. Although we did not agree with them, at least previous Home Secretaries appeared to have some method to what they were doing—this one appears to be taking a flight into cloud cuckoo land. How many millions of people does the Home Secretary honestly think will get up one morning saying to themselves, "I know, I'll skip the curry tonight, go down the shops and spend 30 quid on an ID card instead."? How on earth can a voluntary ID card be of any use in law enforcement? Let us make no mistake about it, the ID card scheme was the magic bullet that the Government told us would solve everything from crime to immigration fraud and terrorism. We were told that once it was introduced, citizens would be safe in the knowledge that there was a piece of plastic and a database that, when combined, would provide the single source of truth about a person.