Identity Documents Bill

Pete Wishart Excerpts

Wednesday 9th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Alan Johnson]

My hon. Friend should write and tell them that the Government believe—this Government, who believe in the big society and in listening to people—that the scheme into which they bought, which Parliament approved at every stage and which was in the 2005 manifesto of the party that was elected to government, is somehow illegitimate. His constituents should realise that it was their mistake in not presuming a victory for the Tory party at the recent general election. That seems to be the reason.

That description of the benefits to which I referred is accurate, and the consultation carried out by the previous Conservative Government showed overwhelming public support. The Labour Government resuscitated the proposals and subjected them to a fresh, six-month public consultation and further scrutiny in the form of a draft Bill in 2003. The Select Committee on Home Affairs held a simultaneous inquiry, and the outcome of all that was, again, overwhelming public support.

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

I am trying desperately to understand the right hon. Gentleman’s position. He still seems to be for ID cards, but he will not oppose the Bill this evening. What is the Labour party’s position on ID cards? Can we expect to see them in a future Labour party manifesto?

[Alan Johnson]

That is to be determined by the party. However, we cannot suggest that we did not lose the election; we cannot simply oppose every measure that the Government propose. We have to ensure that we consider the will of the people. I do not doubt that the mandate of the two parties in government allows them to introduce the measure before us, but they are absolutely wrong to cancel the national identity register, to say that they will not go ahead with second-generation biometric passports and, most of all, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello) said, to take such an arrogant and dismissive approach to the British public.

The Home Secretary said that ID cards would be made a footnote to history, so let us carry on with the history. The Conservative Government proposed ID cards and undertook public consultation; Labour resuscitated the proposal; the Home Affairs Committee supported it; public scrutiny supported it; and the draft Bill gained overwhelming support.

I should at this point mention the strange episode of the ten-minute Bill in January 2002, when the then Member for Broxtowe, now sadly no longer a Member, proposed leave to introduce an identity card Bill. The House will know that on a ten-minute Bill only the die-hard supporters of a proposition will turn up to vote, but among that bunch of ID card zealots, those people who wanted an “unBritish, intrusive and anti-democratic” scheme, we find the former shadow Home Secretary, now the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), the current Leader of the House, and a whole bunch of their Conservative colleagues.

To listen to the Home Secretary speak today, one would never believe that she once walked through the Aye Lobby in support of ID cards. I have to reveal that she did. Members should listen to her speech today, or read it again in Hansard, and then recall that the Home Secretary supported Second Reading of the Identity Cards Bill on 20 December 2004; and she was not a Tory rebel: she voted with her party in support of that Bill, whose measures she now seeks to repeal. The Conservatives continued to give their support. Indeed, they supported it under the leadership of Michael Howard at the 2005 general election.

The right hon. Lady now says that people were foolish to go out and buy ID cards, but both main parties at that general election supported ID cards, so the proposition that they should be removed is quite extraordinary. The Conservatives continued to give their support right into the 2005 general election, when Labour’s winning manifesto pledged

“to provide citizens with a…secure identity card to protect them…from identity theft and clamp down on illegal working and fraudulent use of public services.”

Why does the Home Secretary now believe that it was an infringement of civil liberties, the cause of the end of civilisation as we know it, when she voted for that precise scheme in 2004?

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[Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) on a feisty maiden speech, demanding that her constituency get a greater share of resources and investment from the Government, and I wish her well in that endeavour. I also congratulate you, Mr Deputy Speaker, on your election. I intend to be brief, because my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary’s speech was excellent and put forward in considerable detail a great deal of what I would otherwise have needed to say. I speak as the former Home Secretary who published the Bill to which he referred extensively and which was supported by senior Conservative Members. However, I do not want to cover old ground; instead I want to admit to one or two mistakes, and touch on what may have happened since.

I need to be contrite enough to congratulate Phil Booth from NO2ID, Dr Whitley from the London School of Economics identity project, and others, for the tremendous campaign that they have run, over the past five years in particular, to stop this scheme. I congratulate them because they changed the culture and atmosphere around, and attitudes towards the scheme and its intentions in a way that those of us initially involved could not have conceived. In doing so, they have persuaded large swathes of the normally well-informed population, including vast swathes of the media, that the identity cards scheme and the second generation biometric register were intended to impact on the public and intrude on their civil liberties in a way that was never intended and was never going to happen. That they were wrong should not mislead us into misunderstanding what can happen in a vigorous democracy, and how careful we have to be in explaining our intentions and taking on arguments openly.

It is because we have such a vigorous democracy that we have reached this situation and are accepting that—for the time being, at least—the proposition is dead. However, the issues will not go away. The issue of second generation biometric passports will not go away because the rest of the world is moving around us, and because they are a more authentic and therefore verifiable way of securing our identities. My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson) is right to say that we need to find and develop simpler ways of securing, presenting and owning our own identities, in a manner that was not possible 10 years ago but is becoming possible now.

That is so particularly for specific purposes. In the end, I believe that our person will be our identity, and that we will be able to walk through electronic border controls and present ourselves, not a card or passport. It will automatically register our biometric fingerprints, our irises—in the future; at the moment the technology is not up to it, but it will be—and use facial recognition based on digital technology, which will avoid fraud.

I have a card here; I am very proud of it. I have been offered a lot of money for it on eBay. I have agreed with Simon Davies of Privacy International that we could frame it and put it in a gallery. I do not intend to auction it off because my grandchildren will want to hold it in their hands. They will say, “Granddad, what was so terrible about this card that you paid £30 for it? Did it involve you actually having to give deeply private information that was going to be shared with the rest of the world, or be intruded upon by criminals who were going to steal the information that was registered when you took up the card?” I will have to say to them, “I’m terribly sorry, but that didn’t happen. It was never going to happen, but people believed it was going to happen.” My grandchildren will say, “Did they really believe that? Do I understand from reading the history books that people believed it was going to cost £2.5 billion, and that they were going to employ 3,000 extra police officers?” I shall say, “Yes, they did.” My grandchildren will ask, “Did they go to school, granddad? Did they do mathematics? Did they have any grasp of economics?” I shall say, “No, they were substantially driven by the Liberal Democrats,” and that the Deputy Prime Minister from 2010 onwards, who was the leader of the Liberal Democrats, actually believed his own rhetoric.

I have a lot of time for the new Home Secretary. I like her personally, and I do not believe that she believed a word of the adjectival hyperbole with which she started her speech. She does not believe that the scheme was going to cost billions or that money that had never been raised would have been spent on projects that could not be funded because the money being spent on the register and the ID card was not coming from the taxpayer or from those purchasing the passport and the ID card. She does not believe that, but she has been forced to, because of the coalition agreement, which the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats sat down one afternoon to work out. Presumably, the new Chief Secretary managed to persuade the right hon. Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Mr Hague), now the Foreign Secretary, that he had got it completely wrong, making it necessary to do away not only with the ID card—which, as the Home Secretary said, is symbolic—but with second generation biometric passports. The Foreign Secretary was persuaded that afternoon, and the Government and the country are now lumbered. What an odd way to carry on.

I do not know whether the new Chief Secretary has any grasp of economics, but he must now know, as the Conservatives now know, that there were no billions of pounds available to spend on anything else, whether on hospitals in Gosport or anywhere else. There was no pot of gold to draw on. We are apparently going to save £5 million a year over 10 years. Well, that is really going to knock a hole in the deficit and provide the cash for the deficit reduction strategy!

I have in my other hand my existing passport, which is totally forgeable, and is not really worth the paper it is written on. When I went to Europe twice this last month, they were really happy to have my ID card, because it has biometrics on it and it is more authentic, ensuring my identity is proved.

What have I learned from the last eight years? First, we need to explain more clearly what is beneficial to the individual rather than to the state. Secondly, we need to be absolutely clear about the costings so that they are not rolled up over 10 years and people’s individual purchase is not confused with taxation. Thirdly, we need to ensure that people do not believe that additional data is going to be taken that would previously not have been available for the passport or for the DVLA driving licence.

Incidentally, the BBC managed to get a driving licence for Freddie Forsyth, who wrote “The Day of the Jackal”, and for me. I promise the world that at no point in the future will I ever use the driving licence that the BBC obtained on my behalf in order to drive around this country. I would have been a much greater risk to the people of Britain than identity cards would ever have been in terms of intruding on their lifestyle, their liberty and their well-being. When I took out the ID card, the only thing I had to provide over and above the information for my passport was to pick from 25 options something relevant to my past that only I would know, which I could offer if my identity were to be challenged and a further check had to be made. That is all—no information that could be transferred for other purposes, no intrusion that criminals could get hold of and use beyond what they already had access to in other ways, nothing nefarious that would in any way intrude on my or anyone else’s civil liberties. The truth is, however, that people believed otherwise. They believed that there would be those problems, that the card would cost a lot of money, which could be spent on something else, and that the register and biometrics were not a priority at the time.

[Pete Wishart]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way, but this is typical new Labour arrogance: everybody else was wrong, and they were right. What has been described are these benign, nice and inexpensive cards, forgetting the fact that they hold up to 50 pieces of information that would be stored and shared. That is what new Labour were enthusing about with these identity cards. Can the right hon. Gentleman not accept that perhaps the rest of us have got it right and he has got it wrong?

[Mr Blunkett]

I thought I had accepted this afternoon that I and many others got it wrong, but not my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) or our admirable, and honourable, Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), who did a fantastic job in the time she was in post in getting the message across. I have already indicated that we did not explain the issue. The hon. Gentleman illustrates the position extremely well in saying that 50 bits of information were required. If he had gone along and got himself an ID card, he would have realised that that was complete and utter bunkum, but this has been repeated so often that people started to believe it. I challenge anyone who has an ID card, who went along and gave the information to be placed on that database to stand up this afternoon and challenge me. I will give way quite happily if people believe that they can justify the claim that this mega-amount of information had to be provided over and above what was required for the passport.

In the end, however, if people believe something in a democracy, that is what counts. I remember saying at 3 am Friday morning after the general election, “If you’re defeated, you’re defeated.” When defeated, it is right to go back, think again and work out how to develop sensible arguments that protect civil liberties, and protect the nation’s well-being as well.

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[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

I congratulate you on your appointment, Mr Deputy Speaker. I can already sense you melting into that Chair, and I wish you many years in the role. I can also see the other Mr Deputy Speaker bursting to get on to that Chair, dressed in what can only be described as the best of Deputy Speaker finery.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer) on a fine maiden speech. He had some remarkable predecessors and he paid a fitting tribute to Rudi Vis, who was very much respected and liked across the Chamber. We have heard some other fantastic maiden speeches, including a fine and passionate one from the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey). He brings vast experience to the Chamber and I look forward to hearing many more robust and meaningful contributions from him as this Parliament progresses. The hon. Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones) gave a passionate defence of the Welsh language, and my hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) and I are similarly passionate about the Gaelic language. We hope to hear many more speeches on that theme as she makes her contributions in Parliament.

I enjoy the maiden speech season. It is great because we hear all these fine tributes to former colleagues and are given an encyclopaedic tour of the UK’s constituencies. We have several more maiden speeches to hear and I must say that I could hear one every day for the next Parliament if so many are as fine as the ones that we have heard in the past few days; all the speeches have been excellent, and I look forward to hearing some more this afternoon.

I congratulate the coalition Government because they have been as good as their word. The Con Dems have condemned Labour’s hated identity cards to the scrap bin of history and I say well done to the coalition Government. Is it not bizarre, even in these days of political cross-dressing, that it has taken a right-wing Conservative Home Secretary to scrap perhaps the most anti-civil libertarian measure of recent times, which was proposed and introduced by a Labour Government?

[David T. C. Davies]

I hate to give the hon. Gentleman a politics lesson, but he ought to know that right-wing Members of Parliament have always been supporters of liberty and that we have had to defend our liberties from the authoritarians on the left.

[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.

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

I do not want to interrupt the hon. Gentleman’s speech, which we are all enjoying, but does he accept that the ultimate irony in all this is that although ID cards were to remedy all of society’s ills, as he has outlined, they were to be voluntary at first? There was to be an attack on social security fraud, terrorism and criminality, but people had to volunteer for it.

[Pete Wishart]

The hon. Gentleman is right. That contradiction was even acknowledged by Labour Front Benchers as being the thing that would do ID cards in. What was the point of them if the scheme was to be voluntary? Could anyone see Mr Terrorist popping off to his post office voluntarily to apply for an ID card? That was never likely to happen. It was a ridiculous idea and the Labour party knew that, as has been acknowledged by its Front Benchers.

Labour persisted with the scheme, but that approach and all the talk about the new things that ID cards would do only further confused the already sceptical public about what the cards were all about. The right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle is right that ID cards were quite popular in their early days. At first, about 80% of the public thought that they would be a good thing, but that number slowly went down over the years as the public became familiar with what the cards were to do and as they heard the arguments and saw the costs escalate year after year. What ID cards became for new Labour was not so much some great suggestion that it was bringing to the British people as a political virility signal—something that a dying and decaying Government had to push forward to be seen to do something.

When I was preparing this speech, I had no idea what the right hon. Gentleman was going to say. I did not know whether ID cards were to be dumped or to be the first inclusion in the next Labour party manifesto. Indeed, I still am not sure exactly what the Labour party’s position is on them. We know that it is not voting against the measure tonight. What I have heard from Labour Members so far is that they think that ID cards are still a good idea, but the way that they have described them is like no other description of them that I have ever heard.

I had thought that ID cards would be subject to the same sort of revisionism that has been seen with some of the Labour leadership candidates. I thought that they might go the same way as the Iraq war or Alf Garnett’s immigration policies, but, no, it seems that they are still to be a feature of Labour’s new vision and version to reconnect with the British public. They will be there to try to reconnect with the British public.

[Mr Richard Shepherd (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

Might the hon. Gentleman be being a little harsh on the Labour party? That might seem an odd thing to say, but this idea has rested since time immemorial in the Home Office, which pulled it out yet again in Michael Howard’s Green Paper, which was defeated. There is a long history of the state—the Crown—seeking to number and identify every citizen in this kingdom.

[Pete Wishart]

The hon. Gentleman is spot on. He has made a better assessment of the functions and uses of ID cards than we have heard from Labour Members.

I come to where we are now. I welcome the Bill, but a few issues concern me and I say this with all sincerity to the Minister for Immigration. I am still concerned that foreign nationals are expected to have ID cards. It might be called a permit or something else, but it seems to me to be quite like an ID card. I wish that the Government would do away with the whole scheme. Why keep an element of a discredited scheme? All I can see is some kind of divisive legacy to Labour’s ID cards if they are kept for foreign nationals. I hope that he will reconsider that.

I want to ask a bigger question. What are we to make of the Conservatives as the champions of civil liberties? That is great, but it certainly does not chime with experience. Throughout the last few decades, the Conservatives were totally illiberal when it came to proposing legislation, although they found a new thirst for civil liberties in opposition. I hope it stays.

I know you will be thinking, Mr Deputy Speaker, that all those Liberals will protect us and make sure the Conservatives do the right thing when they are presented with the first national security brief that comes their way. However, although the Minister for Equalities is part of the Home Office Front-Bench team, most of the senior positions seem to be reserved for our Conservative friends. I wonder whether perhaps the Liberals are not trusted on the key issues for the Home Office; for example, the views of some Liberals on immigration might not chime so well with Back-Bench Conservatives. I am concerned that the Liberals have some work to do to make sure that those guys are kept on the right track. That is their job, because if the Conservatives go back to form, we may be in a bit of trouble. Only recently, the Conservatives opposed the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Freedom of Information Act 2000, so the Liberals will have a tough job keeping the Conservative party on track.

But today is not a day to be churlish. There is good news. We have what we wanted—the end of ID cards. It is good riddance to bad rubbish. It was a dreadful, dreadful idea. I still do not know what Labour was thinking about. Now that Labour Members are in opposition, I hope they acquire a thirst for civil liberties again and that the party goes back to what it used to be when its members championed civil liberties.

Let us never again have a situation when any Government propose such anti-civil libertarian measures. Campaign groups have done an extraordinary job in bringing them to our attention. NO2ID and Liberty have been fantastic at informing the British public about the ID card proposals, and I pay tribute to their excellent work. I hope that the Minister for Immigration and the Front-Bench team will look at some of the outstanding issues such as ID cards for foreign nationals

Today is a good day. We have wanted rid of ID cards since they were first suggested. They have not been available for any Scottish services. To people who took out ID cards and want compensation—sorry. They should have at least identified that the cards were controversial before they bought them, and they should not be entitled to compensation. They took the risk of buying ID cards; it was their decision.

Today is good news. Let us make sure it continues, but let us keep watching the Conservatives like a hawk.

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[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is right; we have to be very careful with data protection and the way in which we look after data. We have not had a lost disc for some time; at least, not for the last three weeks, which is pretty good. The last major loss was several months, if not a year, ago. Maybe the civil servants and others with responsibility for all this will ensure that no further discs will be lost in the future. I hope that we will have assurances about how that will be done.

In conclusion, although the Home Secretary made a terrific case against identity cards—she is always very good at putting the case—the Opposition will not vote against the Bill. Speeches from people such as me should be relatively brief; that is why I will not take up my full allocation of time.

[Pete Wishart]

Does the right hon. Gentleman have any idea as to the position of the Labour party now on ID cards? We understand that Labour will not vote against the Bill. Will ID cards be part of the programme of the Labour Opposition?

[Keith Vaz]

I look forward to finding out when my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch replies to the debate. Until the election, we were very much in favour of ID cards. When she replies, she will tell us. I am trying not to second-guess my hon. Friend, who is pretty good at her job. I will let her speak for herself and tell the House what she thinks the official Opposition’s position is.

I hope that we will tread carefully in the next few weeks and that we will take forward the suggestions that have been made. I know that it is in the nature of new Governments to feel that they should do things very quickly and urgently and it is obviously up to the Government what legislation they put before the House. But I hope that they will take advice from former Ministers who have been involved in these issues and will read carefully the reports of the Select Committee in the last Parliament.