ID cards are illiberal

Written by Councillor Paul Elgood and published in GScene on Sun 13th Feb 2005

With the Labour and the Tory leaderships in Parliament chumming up together in support of ID cards, like the Iraq War, it has been left to the Liberal Democrats to lead the fight against the introduction of ID cards.

ID cards will cost a fortune. The Home Office expects the cost to be at least £3bn over 10 years. Individuals will have to pay £85 for a passport and ID card together, and registration will be compulsory when your passport comes up for renewal. We say that this money could be better spent on fighting policing and community safety issues at local level.

It will lead to discrimination and harassment. ID cards will undermine the contract between the police and the public, with many more people being stopped and required to identify themselves, or present their card at a police station at a later date. Given that the government wants the police to use the cards to detect more illegal immigrants and suspected al-Qaida terrorists, we can expect most of these stops to target black and Asian people. People seeking GP and hospital treatment will have to present their card. Again, the government's concern is to prevent so-called 'health tourism', so many black and Asian people will have to run the gauntlet of identity checks while white people will not. People who refuse to carry an identity card will be discriminated against - they will be denied access to public services like hospital treatment and benefits and also private services like banking and credit.

ID cards will create a bureaucratic nightmare. Hundreds of thousands of people change their address each year. Many change their name through marriage or by deed poll. Our personal data will be shared without our consent. Even if security on the central database is tight, problems arise from the fact that everyone will be given a unique number to identify them which will be encoded on the card. Other databases will be able to index their services using this number. Knowing the number could therefore allow sensitive information about that individual to be retrieved from any number of sources.

It will not help to fight crime or terrorism. The police do not generally have a problem identifying people they arrest: the problem is in catching the criminals in the first place. ID cards would not present an obstacle to most terrorists either. The terrorists who attacked New York on September 11th 2001 and Madrid on March 11th 2004 carried valid identity documents.

We do not have a written constitution. This means the government can get away with expanding the uses of the card and lowering the safeguards on data sharing. The relationship between the state and the citizen is not properly defined in law. Every other country that has a system of compulsory identity cards also has a written constitution.

The money would be better spent on other things. If the government really wants to make an impact on crime, terrorism and illegal immigration, the £3bn it has earmarked for this scheme would be far better spent on more police on the streets.