Identity Cards Bill

On the face of it, this is just another Committee stage debate about the inclusion of the word ““may”” or the word ““must”” in clauses 5 and 8, or the words of Government amendment (a). Despite the guillotine, this short debate is about a lot more than that. The amendments are not, as the Home Secretary says, technical. One would have to be deaf or stupid to accede to the arguments advanced by him tonight. We all know the Home Secretary is neither deaf nor stupid, but for the life of us we cannot understand what the Government are attempting to do, yet again, by riding roughshod over common sense and justice. We are discussing the relationship between the citizen and the state, and whether it is right for the Government to change that relationship fundamentally by requiring the citizen to do what the state says he must do for its convenience, rather than his. This part of the Bill and the debate that we are having fully describes the difference between, on the one hand, me, my party and our supporters tonight and the Members of the other place whose amendments we are seeking to sustain and, on the other, the Government. Through the Bill, the Government have revealed their true colours and motives more clearly tonight than they may have realised: ““Do as we say, not as we do.”” What do they do? Let us have a look, as the Home Secretary invited us to do. I know that he is not deaf or stupid, so we will take him back to his own manifesto, to which he glibly referred us this evening. It is worth repeating, and it is a document that he will no doubt enjoy hearing. It states:"““We will introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports.””" The words are plain and their meaning is obvious. I doubt that anybody, even the Home Secretary, is confused by what the Government intended that the public should understand before the general election in 2005. It is clear beyond doubt that the Government know that their case is flawed and that Baroness Scotland in the other place and the Home Secretary and his Ministers in the House know that they are dangling on a flimsy thread of argument, yet they still seem to enjoy the twisting in the wind that we observe. Why else did they agree to introduce compulsion only following further primary legislation for that 15 or 20 per cent. of the British public who do not have a passport? They did it because they were complying with their own manifesto. They knew what ““voluntary”” means, but now they pretend it means something else. This is not about the Salisbury convention or about a proper balance between this House and the other. It is about a Government who are guilty of intellectual dishonesty on a grand scale and who do not have the decency or the common sense to understand that, admittedly unusually, the public have read their manifesto and taken them at their word. We recently had the derisory spectacle of the Secretary of State for Health throwing the Labour party’s manifesto commitment on smoking in public places into the ashtray. Clearly, manifestos are relied on only when it suits the occasion, but it is surely better to have half an eye on the wording if they want to rely on it.