Identity Cards Bill

My Lords, I begin by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Soley, on his maiden speech. It was delivered with such ease, fluency and panache that one could only sit there in awe. I cringe with embarrassment when I remember the halting affair that I gave about a year ago in my maiden speech. I suppose that in my defence I could say that I have never been a political masochist, as he seems to be. Three main objections could be made to the introduction of identity cards, and they have been very well aired in the debate today. They are cost, technology and civil liberties. I say nothing about the first two of those except to make the important point that, in looking at cost, one should not just look at gross cost but at net cost. Net cost is the cost of introducing identity cards minus the savings that would accrue from the cases of fraud and other criminal behaviour that they would prevent. All the evidence shows that those savings would be considerable. I believe, somewhat differently from my noble friend Lady Henig, that the main objections to the Identity Cards Bill are objections from the point of view of civil liberties, and that they are objections of principle rather than of practice. I wonder how many of my noble friends sitting here might feel a certain frisson of unease—although they do not seem to feel it—defending a principle that seems illiberal, as identity cards seem part of the authoritarian or totalitarian state. They carry the flavour of a society in which a policeman can stop you on the street and utter the notorious words, ““Show me your papers””. They carry the flavour of the secret policeman who knocks on your door in the middle of the night and carts you off to some unknown prison in the remote wastes. In eastern Europe before 1990 there was quite a good joke about that; it was not so much a joke as a pithy observation—Hansard reporters please note that I said ““pithy”” observation: ““What is the definition of a democracy? A democracy is a political system in which someone knocks on your door at the dead of night and you think it is the milkman””. We do not have milkmen any more, or most of us do not, but noble Lords will get the gist. It is incumbent on anyone who would defend the Identity Cards Bill and who would assert the importance of identity cards to show that the range of substantive freedoms and forms of social protection that we expect from the state would be greater with the introduction of an identity card scheme, especially a compulsory identity card scheme, than they would be without it. I believe that it is possible and necessary to do that. The backdrop to this is changes in our society which, as a sociologist, I feel reasonably competent to comment on. The big change of our times is the impact of globalisation in our lives. The Prime Minister in his speech to the European Parliament last week spoke of the need to respond to the challenges of globalisation. Indeed, the European summit was about that same issue. Globalisation is the most signal set of changes affecting our lives in contemporary times and has completely transformed our societies over the past 20 to 30 years. What does it mean concretely? Concretely, it means an enormous flow of electronic money, information, people and goods across state boundaries. Globalisation means that our society is penetrated by the outside world far more deeply and more frequently and enters more fully into the very detail of our lives, as other noble Lords have said, than was true for any previous generation. As we know, such amazing changes bring many advantages. One of those advantages is travel. There is such a difference between the generations in that regard. My parents went abroad only one day in their entire lives, and that was a day trip to Ostend. They made sure that they got back before darkness fell. Last year, it is reckoned, 185 million people passed through airports in the United Kingdom. That is an extraordinary influx of human traffic, but the most important traffic is electronic traffic, computerised traffic, as my noble friend Lady Henig said. Globalisation has those advantages, but it also has an inherent dark side that bears very much on the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Stevens. The global drugs trade, for example, costs the global community as a whole $450 billion a year, which is more or less equivalent to a medium-size economy such as Spain. The money-laundering market costs $2 trillion a year. Most of that money belongs to us, the taxpayer, the citizen, or the wider society; it has simply been appropriated. Most recycled money in money laundering should have been going for tax purposes across the world. Then there is the impact of international terrorism. In other speeches that I have made in your Lordships’ House, I have tried to stress the essential difference between global terrorism and the sorts of terrorism that we have been familiar with in the shape of the IRA or the terrorists in the Basque country. The most important difference is that we are dealing with global networks; a vast flow of people using modern technologies. Al-Qaeda has cells in something like 80 countries and, according to the 9/11 report produced in the United States, it has some 8,000 people across the world who are prepared to act as suicide martyrs. It is simply a different scale and intensity of threat than anything that we have faced before, especially if you add on the possibility of the use of weapons of mass destruction. I have no doubt that, when surrounded by an appropriate framework of policing and safeguards for our civil liberties, identity cards will help us do two things. First, as other noble Lords have said, they will help us to assert our identities, which is important in a fast-moving, much more impersonal, information-driven environment than anyone has had to live in before. Now when you buy a house you must show a passport, although we have heard that passports can be fairly easily forged. It is important that you show a passport because of the problem of money laundering and the pouring of money into property in London and other areas of the country. Secondly, I have no doubt that identity cards will be an important protective device against the dark side of globalisation, which I have mentioned and which no one should assume can be easily managed. It penetrates to the very heart of our lives. The most important civil liberties issue concerns compulsion, and the Bill supposes that compulsion will at some point become part of the framework of law within which it is applied. The organisation Liberty recently produced an interesting pamphlet In Freedom’s Name, which discussed the principle of compulsion. One of its main arguments is that 44 million people have data on a centralised database controlled largely by the Government for driving licences, credit cards, or passports. However, they are voluntary not compulsory, and the pamphlet argues that the compulsory principle infringes on civil liberties. The argument is specious. You could, of course, choose to live a life where you never drove a car. You could choose to live a life where you did not use anything other than cash; and you could choose to live a life where you never went abroad. But that is not the kind of life that most of our citizens want to live. They want to take advantage of the very freedoms that the opening up of our society and the extension of the information bases in our society make possible for us. It is extremely important to argue that the assertion of identity is a mechanism of freedom, not simply a mechanism of repression. That is more and more the case the more we deal with a whole range of informational databases that circulate in and out of our lives. The Bill is necessary, but of course it must be surrounded by democratic safeguards. Those safeguards are not primarily provided by lawyers or by judges. Any authoritarian state will find means of controlling its citizens whether or not they have identity cards or internal passports. A democratic state, by contrast, will look first to the liberty of its citizens, to the protection of its citizens and to the empowerment of its citizens. Having studied the Bill in detail, I am convinced that it will lead to those things and that therefore the net balance of substantive freedoms is a positive one.