Identity Cards Bill

I have great respect for the opinion of the noble Lord, Lord Gould, on these matters, and I find myself agreeing with him much of the time. I would be the first to say that this House is the inferior House and must ultimately subject itself to the other place. That is what the Parliament Act and the notion of manifesto obligations are about. But I urge the noble Lord not to press his case in relation to the manifesto too hard. The noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, made the point—and this is not a trick arithmetic point—that the Government got the support of only 37 per cent of those who voted. That is to say, 63 per cent of those who voted did not support the manifesto with this commitment in it. It is also germane to point out that in terms of the electorate the Government got the support of only one in four. I go further; it is dangerous to say that everything in a 100-page manifesto is somehow imprinted with the will of the British people. That seems to be—I do not want to use too strong a word—just not sensible. Frankly, I do not know anybody who read the Labour manifesto. I would be interested to know whether the noble Lord, Lord Gould, did—he probably wrote it, so I withdraw that argument. But how many noble Lords read the Labour manifesto, or the Tory or Liberal Democrat manifestos? I ask the noble Lord to temper his understandable democratic zeal with a bit of reality. I want to make two other points. The first is that my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford—who has moved a Second Reading debate with his subtle amendment, and God bless him—talked about Holland. I was very interested to hear what is going on in Utrecht, and the case is much stronger than the noble Lord realises because the Dutch have no national database. The thing that most of us are most concerned about is a national database with all the cross-referrals to every government department that ever existed and the cross-referral under Section 17 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, which extends to public authorities abroad as well as here. That is what we dislike. That is the big brother. That is the managerialism that has become the dominant feature of British life and, Heaven help us, is becoming the dominant feature of British politics. I, for one, say that that is not my idea of democracy or freedom. It is not my idea of why this place exists. In Holland, there is no national database or biometrics and there is a choice between an ID card and some other recognised card of identification, such as a driving licence. It is a stronger case than my noble friend makes. I shall make the point that my noble friend Lord Thomas uses the word ““surveillance””. That is a sinister word and that is why he chose it. The problem with this debate is that nobody sitting on the Government Benches is sinister. That really is a problem because you are dealing with reasonable, decent, freedom-loving people. I come back to the point: it is not our job to assume that governments for all time are going to be of that ilk and it behoves us on an issue such as this to be a touch cynical about the potential of future governments and authoritarianism. Finally, my noble friend Lord Thomas said that this Bill is not honest because it does not talk about surveillance. It does not use that word, but Clause 1(3)—I almost defy any Member of the Committee to get his head around it, as it seems to be written by somebody actually setting out to bamboozle the lot of us—states:"““The statutory purposes are to facilitate . . . the provision of a . . . method””," for ascertaining facts about us. If you gut it, that is what it says. ““Surveillance”” is a loaded word and I therefore would not use it, but the provision comes close. I am supporting my noble friend but undermining him.