Julian Huppert
Main Page: Julian Huppert (Liberal Democrat - Cambridge)Department Debates - View all Julian Huppert's debates with the Home Office
(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
I agree with the Home Secretary. Has there been any estimate of the cost of continuing the system for those few people who already have identity cards?
Alan Johnson
That precise point has been made by Liberty, which opposes ID cards—[Interruption.] An hon. Member says that Liberty does not make that point, but it does, on the basis that ID cards for foreign nationals will be compulsory. Although it is a card with fingerprints and biometric identification, we cannot now call it an ID card, which is really silly—it must be called a “permit” or “warrant” or some such thing. Liberty says that either everyone should have a card, which is novel for Liberty, or no one should have one.
Alan Johnson
I will not give way because I am about to conclude.
My final point is that the Government intend not only to stop issuing cards, but to make the 15,000 already in circulation illegal. I find that despicable, and I do not think that that is too strong a word. How can any Government seek to punish hundreds of thousands of its citizens for having the temerity to take advantage of a scheme that was pledged in a manifesto, supported in law and introduced in an entirely legitimate way? [Interruption.] The Home Secretary is chuntering from the Front Bench, but I will gladly take an intervention.
Pete Wishart
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that. I observed with great interest the Conservatives’ new interest in civil liberties when they were in opposition. We must hope that they maintain it in government and do not go back to form, because the Conservatives have not got a great track record on these issues.
Dr Huppert
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that what he has just said explains why it is misleading for the Labour party to describe itself as a progressive party?
Pete Wishart
I shall leave it to the Labour party to decide how it wants to describe itself, but what on earth were Labour Members were thinking about? What were they trying to do with ID cards? What was a left- of-centre, notionally socialist, party doing introducing ID cards? ID cards were the low water mark of Labour’s anti-civil libertarian agenda and the high water mark of Labour’s attempt to usher in a new surveillance society. Thank goodness the cards have been stopped and Labour has not got away with it.
Listening to the right hon. Members for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) and for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson), one would have thought that they were introducing nice, cuddly, friendly, inexpensive little things that would not bother a soul. The truth is that ID cards would have changed for ever the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the state. ID cards, and the much more dangerous national register, would, for ever and a day, have put the onus on the citizen to have his information shared. They would have changed the relationship around entirely, so I am pleased they have gone.
Where on earth did these things come from? I wish to be charitable—you know me, Mr Deputy Speaker, I am charitable when I can be—so I should say that perhaps they were an incoherent, bizarre, knee-jerk response to the events of the past decade. One can imagine the conversation around the Cabinet table, with the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough saying, “Listen boss, I have a new idea that will show that we are actually doing something—ID cards. They will upset the civil liberties brigade, but that plays well with the focus groups. They will certainly wrong-foot the Tories.” One can just picture the enthusiastic nodding of Messrs Reid and Clarke as they thought that they had come up with a cunning plot to get one over on the Tories and seem as though they were doing something. That is what it was all about—I am being charitable to them. They wanted to be seen to do something in the face of the dreadful events at the beginning of the previous decade.
Of course, time passed and the cards did upset the civil liberties brigade, but time also proved that, for tackling terrorism, the cards were as much use as Emu without Rod Hull. They would have done nothing to tackle terrorism. We have seen the events in Spain and Turkey. Fair enough, I accept that, as hon. Members have said, there were convictions based on the use of ID cards, but the cards did nothing to stop those events. The story had to change: the cards could no longer exclusively be about tackling terrorism, but had to be about more than that. Seemingly, they were about tackling identity fraud and illegal immigration and would even help people to play the lottery. They would be not so much ID cards but supercards—the cure of all society’s ills. The problem was that nobody believed a word of it. Despite the ridiculous rewriting of history about what identity cards were and what they were intended to be, everyone knew what they were. It was the difference between the state and the individual.
Mr Winnick
The hon. Gentleman, who is my constituency neighbour, and I never agree on economic issues, but we tend to share certain views on civil liberties. He is right in what he says about the Churchill Government, and I am sure that the Attlee Government would have done the same, had they been re-elected in 1951. We are going back a long time, but I am not aware that the Conservative Opposition in the 1945 Parliament argued for the abolition of identity cards. I am glad that those cards were abolished; I did not want to see them come back after half a century.
Mr Winnick
If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I want to move on to function creep, which is another factor. In evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, the point was made that when identity cards were introduced in 1939—and rightly so in the circumstances of those days—there were three reasons for doing so: conscription, national security and food rationing. By 1950, there were no fewer than 35 stated purposes as to why an identity card was necessary, one of which, incidentally, was the prevention of bigamous marriages. We have not heard an argument in the recent debate that ID cards are necessary for that purpose.
Dr Huppert
I am sorry to intrude on an Attlee versus Churchill argument, but the hon. Gentleman should perhaps remember that Clarence Willcock was a Liberal candidate, and when asked to explain what he did, he said:
“I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing.”
That is a clear precedent. Had there been a Liberal Government at that time, ID cards would definitely have been scrapped.
Mr Winnick
The chances of having a Liberal Government in 1950 were as remote as having a Communist Government, but be that as it may; the hon. Gentleman has made his point.
It has sometimes been argued that biometrics provide an additional important difference from previous identity cards in Europe, but when evidence was given by experts—their expertise was not in doubt—before the Home Affairs Committee, considerable technical doubt was thrown over the extent to which biometrics would necessarily always be reliable. As for the national identity register, I have listened over the years to the arguments as to why it is necessary and all I can say is that, again, I have not been persuaded. It is suggested that such information is necessary for national insurance and passports and therefore why should we worry about it for identity cards, but surely the difference is that, although the other documents are not the subject of any controversy, identity cards are, because in the main they are one step too far, which remains the view held by many people in this country.
I am not arguing—it would be a foolish argument—that if identity cards had been introduced into Britain, we would have become a sort of semi-police state. That is absolute nonsense, but I do believe that they would have been an infringement of civil liberties. When we look at other European countries and fellow members of the European Union that do have identity cards, we find that they are certainly not police states. Some have a very dubious past, but we are very pleased that they are now no less democratic than we are. They have a different history, and our history—one that I want to see maintained—suggests that in peacetime we should not have identity cards, as they do not do what they are supposed to do. I wish that the whole issue had not been raised either by the Conservatives or by Labour over the past 22 years.
I have many differences with the Conservative Government. Only yesterday I gave an indication of my feelings about the cuts: along with my Labour colleagues, I will defend the position of those who are least able to bear the burden. There will be many battles with the Conservative Government, and, as I have said, we will not hesitate to defend the people who sent us here. However, I am pleased that identity cards are to be abolished.
Who knows what may happen in four or five years, but I think it most unlikely that we in the Labour party will employ identity cards as one of the features of the next general election campaign. I want to see the issue buried for good. There is no necessity for identity cards, and I hope that, at long last, both sides in the House of Commons will reach the view held by me and by a number of other Labour Members that we should not have them in peacetime.
Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
Thank you for calling me to speak, Mr Deputy Speaker, and congratulations on your election. It is nice to see so many elections in this place at the moment.
It is a great honour to follow so many maiden speeches, from hon. Members on both sides of the House. I pay particular tribute to the hon. Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero), who gave a very confident and stylish description of Ashfield and the value of community in that area.
On the subject of ID cards, it is also a great privilege to follow the hon. Members for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) and for Walsall North (Mr Winnick). They have been steadfast in their stance on this matter, and have agreed with the Liberal Democrats that ID cards have always been wrong. I am delighted to follow them.
Identity cards have always been a passion of mine. I was a very early member of NO2ID and was very involved in its campaigning. I pay tribute to the work of that organisation—to Phil Booth, for his work nationally, and to Andrew Watson, the eastern co-ordinator.
The hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) said that the issue of ID cards did not come up in his constituency during the election. In my constituency of Cambridge, one of the largest of the 35 hustings that we held was organised by NO2ID, along with Oxfam and Amnesty International. The subject came up at almost every one of the other hustings that we had.
The ID card proposal also caused me to be involved with Liberty, which was mentioned earlier. I was elected to its national council, partly through my interest in identity cards and my understanding of what was happening. I am therefore delighted that one of the first steps of this coalition Government is to get rid of identity cards, finally.
Why do I oppose ID cards? I have always thought that there are three main reasons why we should not have them: the issues of principle, practice and price. We have talked about the principle, and we have heard how Clarence Henry Willcock, the Liberal from Finchley and Golders Green, objected in 1950. He was the last person to be convicted under the National Registration Act 1939, and his case led to a change in the law.
What was said on appeal is particularly interesting. Lord Goddard, the Lord Chief Justice, said that the use of identity cards
“tends to make people resentful of the acts of the police, and inclines them to obstruct the police instead of assisting them.”
That was true in 1952, and it is true now.
That deals with the question of principle, but what about identity cards in practice? They, and the much worse identity register, are part of a complex Government IT project. We know what happens to such projects—they tend not to work very well, they cost too much, there are a security problems, and they are hard to implement. I hear some complaints from Opposition Members, but my comments are not just targeted at the previous Government, because this is a general problem of Government IT projects across the world. Mission creep is also a problem, because one starts off by collecting only a little information and gradually more and more is obtained. That has occurred in too many instances.
Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
On mission creep, is my hon. Friend aware that when this matter and a statutory instrument were being debated, the hon. Member for Tynemouth (Mr Campbell), who is in his place, expressed an interest in using any spare capacity on the chip to store other information, but he was not able to tell us what that information would be? Is that not a good illustration of how mission creep might arise without people realising it?
Dr Huppert
Indeed it is, and I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I was not aware of the history of that debate, but what he describes is exactly the sort of problem that occurs: extra information ends up being stored and what starts off as—possibly—a semi-innocent project becomes more and more sinister. A lot of work has been done on this by a colleague in Cambridge, Professor Ross Anderson. I pay tribute to his work on that and on summary care records, which also relates to Government IT systems. I hope that hon. Members will sign my early-day motion 186 and persuade this Government not to go ahead with that awful project too.
The price of ID cards was also an issue, and we heard some argument about the exact cost to the public purse earlier. I say to the shadow Home Secretary that it is not just the public purse that matters; we should also care about the cost to all the people who had to buy the cards and would have continued to buy the cards under the Labour Government’s scheme. We are limiting the cost to them as much as we can, as well as limiting the cost to the public purse. As we have heard, there would have been continued costs for them in the form of fines and the cost of keeping the database going.
This Bill is not exactly as I would have drafted it. As a new Member, I certainly would not have written it in this particular style, but I suspect that I will have to get used to that. I would like clarity to be provided on a couple of points as this Bill goes through the rest of its process. We have discussed mission creep, and I am very concerned about overly broad descriptions. We have seen from the previous Government how something that seems fairly good in law can be taken wider and wider until we find that somebody can be convicted for making a joke on Twitter. We must be careful about what we say, and I hope that we will have a chance to explore what “relevant information” means in clause 10(3) and exactly how that is to be controlled.
I would also like to understand more about clause 4, in particular subsection 2(b), which makes it an offence to use documentation for “ascertaining or verifying” information about somebody. I wish to understand exactly what that means. If I were to take a family member’s passport to someone else to prove who they are, would that be an offence? I have concerns about that, given how the provision is drafted. We should explore that in Committee, when I am sure the Government will make it clear how I have misinterpreted that and why I should not worry.
The other issue that should come up in our discussion is identity cards for foreign nationals—or any other such term that we might use. I disagree with some of the comments made about that, because I consider that such cards are discriminatory. We should be getting rid of all these identity cards, whoever they are for in this country. They are discriminatory and they involve the same problems that we have discussed: they do not work very well, and they involve the same problems of cost, practicality and keeping a database secure. I hope that this Government will examine that issue, either later during the passage of this Bill or in a future Bill.
Someone who did buy an identity card has asked me what now happens to it and to the money that they spent. That is a fascinating issue, and I should be interested if the Government were to work out what the cost would be of maintaining the entire system and all the back-up systems to service the 15,000 people in that position. That involves issues relating to interaction. [Interruption.] If, as the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) is suggesting, it is free, that would also be useful to know.
I was interested to hear the shadow Home Secretary’s line that no changes should be made when a new Government come into power, and that it is somehow wrong ever to change anything that has happened. I seem to remember Gordon Brown changing a few things when he came into office in 1997, and that affecting decisions previously made on tax changes. We cannot have a system whereby Governments cannot change decisions made previously for fear that they might affect people inadvertently.
In general, I support this Bill and I am delighted to see it, because it is a wonderful start of real liberal values in this new coalition. It is a real start on rebalancing the relationship between the citizen and the state, and I hope that it will be the first of many acts of a reforming, progressive Government.