Identity Cards Bill

I shall invite my right hon. and hon. Friends to accept the Government’s word. There will come a time later this afternoon when many of the problems that my hon. Friend and I still have with the Bill can be discussed—when we come to discuss compulsion and ““must”” or ““may”” in relation to designated documents. The narrowness of the present debate permits me to accept the Government’s concession, to welcome their decision to agree to what their lordships say, and, as I said to the hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick), to welcome the sound of the grinding of the Government gears. I do not want to be unpleasant to the Government, but they should have made the concession last summer. As I am sure the Chairman of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham), will appreciate, the concession would never have needed to be made had the Government written the Bill in English in the first place and, when they meant compulsory, written ““compulsory”” in the Bill. But they did not think it was in their political or other interest to do that, so they have arrived at that decision after some delay. It is a pity that they wasted our time, but they got partly to the right answer in the end. The Bill is essentially about the national identity register, and I mentioned some of my concerns about that. Anything to do with identity cards is but a fig leaf. We need to concern ourselves with the practicalities of the national identity register and its implications for civil liberties, rather than allowing ourselves to be bamboozled into thinking that the Bill is simply about whether we should voluntarily or compulsorily carry an identity card. It is not just about that. When we are talking, as we are, about fundamentally altering the relationship between the citizen and the state, it behoves every Member of the House, Front-Bench or Back-Bench, Government or Opposition, to look carefully at the detail of the Bill and not to buy everything that the Government put wrapped up on the shop front. We need to unwrap it and see what is inside the gift the Government claim to be giving us. When we unwrap it, we will find that there is not much to attract us.