By Steve Ranger, 15 April 2005 12:10
NEWS Legislation paving the way for identity cards will be reintroduced by the summer, if Labour wins the general election.
Labour's election campaign co-ordinator, Alan Milburn, said that following events including the ricin case trial, the public needs to be reassured that "every action" was being taken by government, the police and security services to combat terrorism.
"I have spoken to the Prime Minister and Charles Clarke, who have agreed that the Identity Cards Bill will be a major plank of Labour's first Queen's Speech if we win the election," he said.
"If Labour win, the ID Card Bill will be reintroduced before the summer," he added.
Legislation to introduce the controversial biometric ID cards did not make it through parliament before the election was called, and Labour said this was the fault of the Conservatives.
"Only last week, the Conservatives blocked ID cards from becoming law, after nearly three years of discussion in parliament," claimed Milburn.
"I now challenge Michael Howard to say whether the Conservatives will support or oppose the ID Cards Bill when it is reintroduced in parliament," he added.
A Conservative Party spokesman said the party was in favour of ID cards in principle, but if elected would hold a review of the project before going ahead.
Liberal Democrats are opposed to the plans and say hundreds of millions can be saved by scrapping ID card plans.
Comments
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1. anonymous
The people we are trying to protect ourselves against will find ways to crack the system. Don't bank cards get cloned. If the people entitled to the information can read it, then so can well resourced criminals and terrorists. They will also be able to change it.
So you will have a cloned card, with all the data except the biometrics genuine, but the biometrics belonging to the identity thief.
How many false passports are there out there?
UK officialdom can't even match registers of death against registers of birth, so that copies of birth certificates of deceased persons carry the word deceased all over them!!!
But of course foreigners won't have UK ID cards: so how will ID cards protect us against them?
2. Ken Hall
Expensive, insecure, inaccurate, unreliable and unworkable. How many experts have examined the Government plans and come up with the above descriptions for the ID card and central database scheme?
They cannot plead ignorance and yet they persist on trying to sell us a very expensive lemon that won't work?
Why? We know it won't stop terrorism, or organised crime. They know it won't and yet it is still being pursued.
I wonder what the Government really needs these cards for? To protect us from terrorists? No. To protect the Government from the people? More likely.
We need to vote them out NOW.
3. Graham Coles
Then lets hope they don't win.
I thought the Labour party already said the guy in question wouldn't have been issued an identity card anyway, so I guess they have some explaining to do to state how it would have stopped this incident.
This argument seems to have been thrashed to death by security experts - ID cards DO NOT stop terrorism, illegal immigration etc. It's a sad state of affairs when a government refuses to listen to experts and keeps pushing lies and propaganda to scare people into accepting something (a very expensive something) that doesn't work.
And where the hell did the Lib dems come up with a figure of hundreds of millions? The last time I saw estimates of this project it was expecting to be around five billion pounds, and that's assuming a project of that size doesn't slip (some chance!).
4. Karen Challinor
Well the point is that they have already got it through the house before the public knew what was going on, they don't have to debate it any further they just have to get it through the lords and believe me if they get back in they will do just that.
It's too late to lobby your MP, the only way to stop this now is to vote for a party that doesn't support the bill in the next election
5. Richard Davies
I have read the ID Card bill and it contains nothing technical about how they will make it work in a secure manner...I don't know how they dare to proceed in the face of all this opposition...who asked for this scheme anyway?
What will they do when it fails miserably and they have already spent the money?
6. Ruth
Yet another good reason for not voting Labour!