Senior Home Office bureaucrats have been trying to persuade governments to adopt identity cards for decades. Unfortunately, this Labour Government has now fallen for this nonsense, and is preparing a right-wing populist campaign in which identity cards will be a central teature.
Once more this is policy making for electoral convenience. As with the disgraceful announcement of civil service job cuts by the Chancellor, so the Home Secretary's reactionary shopping list of bills in the Queen's Speech is intended primarily to spike the Tories guns, this time winning over that old Thatcherite favourite "Laura Norder" New Labour's As citizens, our cause.
privacy will be
We are now heading into invaded on an an unprecedented scale, under the shadow of and those most often fears which on the receiving end the of discrimination Government is stoking up from the state will Attempts will be made to suggest that will also help to combat terrorism. A little thought is enough to show how far away this is from evidence-based policymaking.
Certainly, there is no evidence that those nations with compulsory identity cards are free from the evils from which he hoped that the NIR will protect us.
Giving the state the authority to keep all our details on a comprehensive database, which will provide the intrastructure for future compulSUL identity cards, fundamentally shifts the relationship between the state and the individual in an authoritarian direction.
As citizens, our privacy will be invaded on an unprecedented scale, and those most often the receiving end of discrimination from the state will face new hazards. However, as workers, many trade unionists will also be expected to check identities on the NIR and potentially to exclude from access to public services if they don't check out. This is not what union members signed up for when they came to work in public services, and W C shouldn't stand for it.
We need investment in improving public services, not investment in computerised intrusion.
The trade unions need to mobilise COUS members to oppose the National Identity Register, up to and including supporting workers who refuse to cooperate with the imposition of additional duties around the use of ID cards to deny access to public services.
Before, during and after the forthcoming general election campaign, the trade unions need to be at the forefront of the fight against ID cards.
• Visit www.no2id.net for more details about the NoID campaign