Identity Documents Bill, Second Reading 5


Yesterday’s Second Reading debate of the Identity Documents Bill in the Commons has seemingly gone completely unreported in the media, save for a few minutes’ mention on BBC Radio 4’s “Yesterday in Parliament”. If passed, the Bill will abolish the ID Cards Scheme (although not the biometric visas that the last government called “ID cards for foreigners”).

The full debate can be read in Hansard (840Kb PDF), and is also conveniently broken out into individual speeches by the excellent They Work For You site. The video can be see on the Parliament TV site (begins at 1:14pm) and partially on the BBC Democracy live web site (starts with David Blunkett’s speech).

Theresa May (Home Secretary, Con) moved the second reading:

The national identity card scheme represents the worst of government. It is intrusive and bullying, ineffective and expensive. It is an assault on individual liberty which does not promise a greater good. The Bill is, therefore, partly symbolic. It sends a message that the Government are going to do business in a different way. We are the servants of the people, not their masters, and every action that we take must be considered in that context.

David Blunkett (Former Home Secretary, Lab) made a speech that included a back-handed compliment to NO2ID:

I need to be contrite enough to congratulate Phil Booth from NO2ID, Dr Whitley from the London School of Economics identity project, and others, for the tremendous campaign that they have run, over the past five years in particular, to stop this scheme. I congratulate them because they changed the culture and atmosphere around, and attitudes towards the scheme and its intentions in a way that those of us initially involved could not have conceived. In doing so, they have persuaded large swathes of the normally well-informed population, including vast swathes of the media, that the identity cards scheme and the second generation biometric register were intended to impact on the public and intrude on their civil liberties in a way that was never intended and was never going to happen. That they were wrong should not mislead us into misunderstanding what can happen in a vigorous democracy, and how careful we have to be in explaining our intentions and taking on arguments openly.

Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire, Scottish National Party) was forthright in condemning the Labour front bench for introducing the scheme:

I shall leave it to the Labour party to decide how it wants to describe itself, but what on earth were Labour Members were thinking about? What were they trying to do with ID cards? What was a left- of-centre, notionally socialist, party doing introducing ID cards? ID cards were the low water mark of Labour’s anti-civil libertarian agenda and the high water mark of Labour’s attempt to usher in a new surveillance society. Thank goodness the cards have been stopped and Labour has not got away with it.

Although many speeches focussed on the cards themselves, John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley, Liberal Democrat) drew attention to the National Identity Register and the schedule of civil penalties for not keeping it up-to-date:

Under section 10(7):

“An individual who contravenes a requirement imposed on him by…this section shall be liable to a civil penalty not exceeding £1,000.”

Essentially, what that means is that once the information dealt with in schedule 1 is on the register, anyone who has an ID card-whether they are compulsory or not-is under a duty to notify and will be fined up to £1,000 if they do not inform the Government of those changes. Perhaps that was the stealth tax that was going to get the Government out of the financial mess the country was in. If we are talking about £1,000 fines for 60 million people, that comes to £60 billion, which is a good start: there is a third of the deficit gone. The reality is that all the debate, on the basis of which public opinion was formed, has been about the card and its cost. Once people start being fined for not telling the Government about changes, the position becomes much more difficult

The second reading was approved without any MP voting against it. The Bill’s progress can be followed via its page on Parliament’s web site.


5 thoughts on “Identity Documents Bill, Second Reading

  • Ian Russell

    I would not call Blunkett’s words a back-handed compliment to Phil Booth, Dr. Whitley, other people and NO2ID. I regard them as an insult, both to all of these people, the media and to the public. Blunkett has in effect said that although the public and media are normally sufficiently “well-informed” to see the truth, in this case they have been deceived by Phil Booth, etc. into believing that Blunkett’s love child was wrong. The fact is that the public and media have been sufficiently “well-informed” to see right through this scheme.

    No, Blunkett still does not get it.

  • Foster

    Blunkett’s exquisitely bitter response makes it all worthwhile.

    It’s somewhat worrying that a supposedly democratic politician is having such trouble reconciling himself to having comprehensively lost the argument, but predictable I guess. The political elite has every intention of creating it’s database state, I suspect this is a tactical withdrawal

  • Foster

    Blunkett’s exquisitely bitter response makes it all worthwhile.

    It’s somewhat worrying that a supposedly democratic politician is having such trouble reconciling himself to having comprehensively lost the argument, but predictable I guess. The political elite has every intention of creating it’s database state, I suspect this is a tactical withdrawal

Comments are closed.