CRITICS of ID cards forecast that the scheme would become Labour’s “plastic poll tax”, which would come back and haunt them in future elections.
Douglas Hogg (Con, Sleaford and North Hykeham) said it was “a project seeking justification” which taxpayers would end up subsidising heavily. He added: “Those who carried out the bombing of the World Trade Centre carried valid ID cards.”
Edward Garnier, the Shadow Home Affairs Minister, said: “This is a Bill which will allow every citizen not only to expose his private life and his private information to the Government . . . but will also require us to carry not just a plastic poll tax machine in our pockets but a policeman in our pockets.”
Lynne Jones (Lab, Birmingham Selly Oak) said that the “dumb and dangerous” legislation should be “killed at birth”. It was “more serious than the decision to go to war”.
Austin Mitchell (Lab, Great Grimsby), added: “It is like a combination of super-Domes with massive expenditure just timed to ruin the election prospects of a Labour Government which we want to carry on so it can carry on the work of social reform.”
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Glenda Jackson (Lab, Hampstead and Highgate) compared the Home Secretary with a snake-oil salesman offering a cure for all ills. “ID cards . . . apparently are going to reduce, if not obliterate, crime, acts of terrorism and benefit fraud,” she sadi. “But no one has been able to tell us how.”
Summing up, Tony McNulty, the Immigration Minister, reminded Labour MPs that they had stood on a manifesto committed to ID cards. He concluded: “This . . . is about, in the end, protecting the identity of the individual not suppressing the individual. It is not . . . an attack on civil liberties.”