Identity Cards Bill

moved Amendment No. 4:"Page 1, line 4, leave out ““Identity”” and insert ““Surveillance””" The noble Lord said: The noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, urged the Government to be clear and honest. My entirely constructive and amiable purpose is to give a proper nomenclature to the register. Perhaps the Committee will forgive a short historical perspective which will help to support my argument for the change because it demonstrates how safeguards have in the past been set aside and how one thing leads to another. On 5 July 1915, in the middle of the Great War, the National Registration Bill was before the House of Commons, requiring every person between the ages of 15 and 65 to register in a national register for the purposes, so it was said, of using the workforce to the best effect. The Labour Party was against the Bill in principle. Philip Snowden, later to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in the first two Labour governments, said that the hidden purpose was to aid conscription. He said:"““I submit that the ulterior purpose of this Bill has not been disclosed, because if there was no motive behind the Bill than that which is disclosed in it, then such a Bill could not possibly have emanated from any other source than Bedlam””." Of course, the Government denied that the register was to aid conscription. Six months later it was used to aid conscription. They denied that identity certificates had to be carried and produced. In early 1918 the Act was amended to permit a constable to demand sight of the identity certificate on pain of criminal sanctions. But at least the sun set on the 1915 Act when hostilities ceased in November 1918. On 5 September 1939, on the outbreak of the war against Hitler, another emergency registration Act was passed. It was passed for three stated reasons: first, the dislocation of the population caused by mobilisation and mass evacuation; secondly, the likelihood of rationing; and, thirdly, the need for recent statistics because there had been no census since 1931. That Act did not cease at the end of that war. By the time of its abolition in 1952 it was used not for three purposes but for 32, the most bizarre of which was to trace who was guilty of bigamy. Nye Bevan said of it,"““I believe the requirement of an internal passport is more objectionable than an external passport, and that citizens ought to be allowed to move about freely, without running the risks of being accosted by a policeman or anyone else, and asked to produce proof of identity””." I wonder what those giants of the Labour movement, Philip Snowden and Nye Bevan, would make of this new Labour identity register. The Bill is not about preserving the citizen’s identity—this Government have not in eight years taken any step to enhance or to protect personal privacy—it is about surveillance, and it should say so. Supporters of the Bill will say that carrying a card is not compulsory, but it is intended to be. They say that there is nothing which enables a policeman to inspect your card. How, then, could the compulsory nature of an identity card be enforced? Of course, it will happen, and it will happen shortly. On 1 January of this year carrying ID cards became compulsory in the Netherlands as a response to the killing of the film-maker, Theo van Gogh. So far 46,500 people have been fined €50 each for failing to carry an identity card—4,000 of that number were children aged 14 and 15—and a batch of 250 people were put on trial in Utrecht a few weeks ago on 28 September last for positively refusing to carry one. That is the Netherlands experience of ID cards. The Bill puts into the hands of the Government a central database containing direct and indirect access to everything known about an individual. As the Bill is drafted, the database will contain a person’s national insurance number, his passport number and his driving licence details, and it will be necessary to have his movements and his addresses recorded. Is it to be thought that bank accounts, credit card accounts, tax records, medical records and criminal records will not contain at their head a person’s identity number? Your personal identity number will be on file in the tax office. It will easily be cross-referenced at some future date. When coming to and going from this country will there not be a form, as there are in many countries, to inquire who you are, on which you will register your identity card number? If that is not going to happen, how else are identity cards to be used to control immigration? When coming to and going from the UK we will all be required to fill in forms and to put on them our identity numbers, which no doubt will be fed back into the central database to find out who we are. Will the Bill stop identity fraud? The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, said that he was afraid of losing his credit card because it would give people access to his credit. That is a limited access although it may be very unfortunate to have your credit card account interfered with. However, if a hacker—the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, referred to this—gains access to the proposed central database, he can steal every aspect of one’s identity. Will the Bill stop terrorists? Suppose that every person were to swipe their identity card on entering a Tube train and that train were to be blown apart by a suicide bomber, you would know who the British citizens were who were on that train, but you would not know who the foreign visitors were, and you would not know which of the passengers was the suicide bomber anyway. How is an identity card supposed to protect the citizens of this country from a suicide bomber? In Spain 40 years ago under General Franco identity cards were introduced—that was a fascist dictatorship, of course—but that did not prevent the Madrid bombings that occurred a year or two ago. Like the rest of your Lordships I have nothing to hide, but that does not mean to say that I am happy to carry an identity card. If I have nothing to hide, why should government departments and authorities have access to all this information about me? Why should this or any future government have in their hands the means of surveillance of the whole of my life? Certainly, privacy must be balanced against security and the interests of the individual have to be balanced against the interests of the state, but we run the risk of losing the right balance and of letting fear rule our lives for this moment, with the danger of allowing government—a favourable government or a malign one—to rule our lives in the future. Let us call this identity card and the database behind it what they are—tools for the personal surveillance of every citizen in this country. I beg to move.