By John Oates
I will be making a trip to the Identity and Passport Service's registration centre in Manchester at 1pm today. I will not be registering for an identity card. Instead, I will be joining friends from No2ID and other campaigns in demonstrating against the identity scheme. Our message is simple – "Don't be a guinea pig, stop the ID card con!"
I expect to see more protesters than volunteers at the registration centre; 96% of respondents in a recent Manchester Evening News online poll opposed the scheme. Fewer than 2,000 people in the north-west have "expressed interest" in the ID cards, and that number includes opponents like myself.
Despite lack of interest, the government is still pushing ahead with the scheme, spending £230,000 every day to bring it about. Its current claims are that it is a cheap, convenient way to prove your identity.
An ID card costs £30 initially, compared with £77.50 for your first adult passport – but for now you need a passport to apply for an ID card. Regardless, the ID card scheme costs every taxpayer about £300. It would save money if the government instead gave everyone a free adult passport when they turn 16. The passport cost has also increased from £42 in 2005, only £8 of which can be justified for meeting international standards for the insecure "e-Passports".
I don't need to carry about vast quantities of paperwork with me on a daily basis to prove my identity or address. I rarely need anything more than my bank card to talk to my bank. A card that lives in my wallet is something I'm more likely to lose – and risk the fine for not reporting a lost ID card..
Clearly, I don't want an ID card and shouldn't register. But why am I protesting against it? It's a voluntary scheme, and people can take it or leave it, right?
The ID card may well be voluntary, but the underlying national identity register database reeks of compulsion. Registering for a card means being tracked for life by the largest state database system in the western world, which has no equivalent in European ID card systems.
The Home Office is keeping quiet about the fines for not keeping your information up to date on this database, the vast numbers of faceless bureaucrats who will have access, and their inability to keep it secure. They don't like to remind us that from 2011 we'll be forced on to the database to get a passport, and after that perhaps for a Criminal Records Bureau check, and then ...
I don't think it's fair for the government to trick people into this database state, which is likely to be scrapped after the general election. That's why I'm spreading the word – "Don't be a guinea pig, stop the ID card con!"
Anyone enrolling on the ID database will be subjecting themselves to lifelong reporting requirements. There are severe financial penalties for failure to keep the authorities notified of any change of detail.
Furthermore, the ID database will store information of a kind that no government department has ever had access to before, except where the security services have placed suspects under surveillance.
The national identity register’s audit trail will record every occasion on which an identity is verified, such as stays in hotels and visits to clinics, providing a detailed profile of every citizen’s life.
Dr Geraint Bevan, Glasgow
UNDER the Identity Cards Act 2006 the Identity and Passport Service has become a branch of the snooper state. Everyone registered for an identity card will subsequently have to report every change in their circumstances on pain of a fine of up to £1,000, and be forced to re-register every ten years or face more large fines. Greatly increased amounts of information about citizens will be kept on a new £6bn database, funded by inflated £77 passport fees. Logging ID card usage in the database will allow government to monitor citizens’ daily lives.
No democratic government has ever tried to track its population’s movements in this way. Whitehall’s identity cards scheme has no place in our country, and must be scrapped immediately.
There is no radical change in this identity card announcement. If you want to travel outside Britain, ID cards will be compulsory
What's weird about the latest Home Office announcement on ID cards is not the mendacity. One gets used to that. It is its pretence simultaneously at calm and radical change.
Let us be clear: there is no radical change in this announcement, a compulsory identity card trial for airside workers due to start in September has been abandoned by the new home secretary but for the rest of us the Home Office line remains the same. No compulsion (as the Home Office means the term) was going to be applied until almost everyone had volunteered, and it was only a matter of rounding a minority of resisters and marginalised people.
The Home Office's idea of voluntary is not the same as yours and mine.
Since 2004, and in petto before, the object of the exercise has been for the scheme to have "parasitic vitality", for it to be a vampire on the body politic. It was – and is – to proceed by one-by-one "designating" under the Identity Cards Act other documents issued by official bodies, primarily passports.
Once a document has been designated, you won't be able to apply for one without also applying to be entered, for life, on the national identity register. If you don't it won't be that you have been refused (say) a passport; you'd have voluntarily decided not to apply. There's no compulsion to have a passport. It is useful for travelling. But you aren't compelled to travel.
Or to drive. Or to work as a security guard. Or with children. Or in healthcare. To get parole from prison. To practice as a lawyer. Any official licence, registration certificate or permit can be designated, and – by the home office's lights – handing control of your identity to the Home Office's Identity and Passport Service will be entirely voluntary.
That they were due for a confrontation with the airside worker's unions over designating new passes at Manchester and City Airports is an illustration of just how voluntary "voluntary" really is. But the fact they have now ducked that fight for political convenience suggests we can say, no. We just have to unveil the fraud of no compulsion first.
The Home Secretary has come under renewed fire from civil liberties campaigners for distorting the truth about the compulsory introduction of Identity registration.
This week new Home Office supremo Alan Johnson backtracked on a proposal to force around 30,000 airport workers in Manchester and London to carry ID cards following the threat of legal action.
He announced however that the government was pressing ahead with and accelerating the voluntary roll-out of ID cards, while stating that the cards would not be compulsory for British citizens.
All foreign nationals in Britain are to be forced to carry identity cards and the Home Secretary said he wished to see this scheme fast-tracked.
But Mr Johnson did not mention that, under regulations due to go before Parliament, anyone renewing or applying for a British passport will have their details recorded on the National Identity Register.
The regulations would make passports a designated document under the national identity card scheme.
The regulations would also give the government the power to fine people up to £1,000 if they failed to inform the authorities of a change of address or change in personal details within three months.
When contacted by the Morning Star a Home Office spokesman confirmed that, “from 2011 anyone aged 16 or over applying for or renewing a passport will be enrolled on the on the National Identity Register.”
Critics of the scheme argue that this is just compulsory registration by another name.
Responding to the new Home Secretary’s announcement on ID cards, Liberty Director of Policy Isabella Sankey, said: “However you spin it, big ears, four legs and a long trunk still make an elephant.
“And this white elephant is as costly to privacy and race equality as to our purses.
“As long as entry on the National Identity Register is automatic when applying for a passport the ID scheme will be compulsory in practice.”
Paddy McGuffin
What a fiasco. The government has announced it is abandoning all compulsory elements of the ID cards – while accelerating the implementation of a voluntary scheme. The government is playing party politics with our civil liberties – and that's not on.
The rumours have been running round ever since Alan Johnson became home secretary. It's a classic Labour trick – and one he's always been keen on. Scrap ID cards – remove one of the key issues of difference between the government and the opposition and, in doing so, reduce their political room for manoeuvre.
Oh, and save a few hundred million pounds in doing so, which will help fill the gap in the Home Office budget following Gordon Brown's raid around Whitehall departments to find the cash to pay for his latest relaunch.
The trouble is, No 10 didn't buy it. Despite the best efforts of Mr Johnson and his Home Office team, the word on the street is that the prime minister wouldn't let them get rid of what is still one of the government's flagship schemes.
Apparently, the PM wants to hang onto ID cards because he wants to be able to look tough on terror and paint his opponents as weak liberals who don't take the security of the country seriously.
So Alan Johnson's plans were scuppered at the last minute. Instead of being greeted by a ground-breaking new announcement, the assembled Home Affairs correspondents found themselves listening to something rather more anodyne.
No more compulsion ... that is, no more compulsion for airport staff at Manchester or London City airports. And, er, well, that's it!
So the new home secretary has fallen at the first hurdle. What he's been left with is neither fish nor fowl. The ID card scheme is now purely voluntary for British citizens. And for now, it's only happening at all for airline industry workers at a handful of airports and, bizarrely, for the residents of Manchester.
As if any sensible Mancunian is seriously going to wake up one morning and say to themselves, "I think I'll skip the curry tonight, go down to Boots and spend the money on an ID card instead." Or realise that the airside security card that they have already been issued with isn't good enough, and that it might be useful to spend the cash on an extra form of ID as well.
It's just pure fantasy – and it comes at a price of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of pounds. And it's another example of why this government has run out of steam. Introducing ID cards isn't a matter of great national security importance. Since becoming shadow home secretary, I have talked to numerous experts on the terror threat we face. Not one has argued to me that we are wrong on ID cards. Not one has tried to persuade me to change the Conservative party view, and adopt ID cards as a policy.
ID cards have become a totem for the prime minister – against the wishes of many of his colleagues. A former home secretary, David Blunkett, now says the project is too ambitious. Chancellor Alistair Darling has cast doubts on the scheme. Now, we know the current home secretary would like to ditch the plans. But he isn't being allowed to, on strict orders from the Downing Street bunker.
So people will have to wait – just a few months – for the chance to vote in a Conservative government that will scrap the project immediately.
And if you live in Manchester? Well, personally, I'd rather spend the money on a pint of lager, some poppadoms and a prawn biryani.
The announcement today that a compulsory ID card trial for airside workers has been dropped makes clear that the new home secretary, Alan Johnson, a good union man, is not going to take on the British Airline Pilots' Association and other unions in the runup to the next election. For the same reason, he is not going to annoy the rail workers who were also fingered as a test bed in the Home Office's megalomaniac ID plans. This speaks well of Johnson's political skills but not of his principles as democrat.
He is clearly trying to take some of the poison out of the debate by emphasising that identity cards will be voluntary (until MPs vote for a compulsory scheme). He says he will issue £30 cards to young volunteers across North England, and he is thinking of making it free for people over 75 years old.
It's all mood music: we are still stuck with a wasteful and invasive scheme. The really imaginative and bold action would have been for Johnson to conduct a review and announce a swift termination. But that would have meant confrontation with his department, which is wedded to its identity management strategy, trying to sell it to an increasingly sceptical public as a means of empowerment – " to make it easier for citizens to prove and manage their identity" in the words of Sir David Normington, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, and James Hall, chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service.
This is nonsense. The ID card is primarily a scheme that enables government to identify you, and that is made clear in a dubious little paper called Safeguarding Identity, produced by the Home Office last week, which describes how the ID card and the transformational government scheme mesh together in one glorious structure where data about the individual passes between departments. That is the prize and why they will use any argument and spend any amount to achieve it. Every case mounted in favour of ID cards has been convincingly knocked down. It will not protect us from terrorism, as Johnson concedes, and it won't do anything to stop crime. Its effect on benefit fraud is limited. The unions have rejected it, Sheffield city council refuses to take part in a pilot scheme, and politicians from all parties despise it.
The ID card is a dead duck: it's just that no one in government has the guts or sense to read the last rites.
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