Viewpoint: NO2ID Campaign Attacks Dover Labour MP

Dover Labour MP Gwyn Prosser's attack on the Conservatives, "MP slams Davis' plans to scrap ID card scheme", Kent on Sunday, 7th October 2007, were not entirely unexpected, but so very wrong. Gwyn was on the Home Office Working Party that dreamt up and planned the whole ID card scheme so he obviously backs "his baby" at every opportunity.

I cannot let the comment that ID cards are important to the integrity of our border go unchallenged. People who cross borders do so with the controls of passports and sometimes visas. These are also being tightened with inclusion of biometric details and in the near future interviews before you get one. So what can this have to do with compelling (eventually) the entire population - travelling or not - to have ID cards as well, which will doubtless become impossible to live without in a few years and will also give future governments unprecedented personal information about us all and control over our lives. All this of course at enormous cost - not least to each individual cardholder. We shall in future be expected to pay for being spied on. Incidentally, people who arrive seeking refugee status already get issued with special ID cards.

Another nail in the coffin of freedom, liberty and privacy. Legislation has already gone through and more is in the pipeline to allow ever more sharing of data between different government departments and agencies - and even other organisations, which makes a mockery of their initial promises about data protection, to allay fears at the time the ID Cards Act was passed.

Will this personal information be secure? Not on your life! Thousands of officials will have access to it. RFID microchips can be remotely read by anyone with the right scanning equipment, even without your knowledge. The wrongdoers it's meant to catch will doubtless manage to get around the system, but life will get very difficult for ordinary people should the slightest thing go wrong and "computer says no". If your bank details get stolen, inconvenient though that is, you can get new cards and details, and change a PIN as often as you like. If your biometric e-identity is stolen, you cannot change your looks, iris, fingerprints or DNA. Belgium has already gone further down the biometric identity road than the UK, and guess what? Their system security has already been compromised.

Step by tiny step and scare story after scare story, we are inexorably becoming a database surveillance state, with every move we make, every service we use recorded - which will ultimately lead to total state control of lives. ID cards are the start; link them to e-passports, driving licences, the new children's databases, ANPR cameras, CCTV cameras, black boxes in cars for road pricing and if police chiefs get their way, everyone on their DNA databases - and big brother will truly be here, the Orwellian nightmare will have become fact.

Ian Taylor

Co-ordinator, Dover & Folkestone Branch of the NO2ID Campaign

The NO2ID campaign is an independent campaign supported by a wide range of organisations including the Liberal Democrats.