Identity Cards Bill

Let me assist you, Madam Deputy Speaker, by saying that my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) and I are wholly at one in our appreciation of the Prime Minister’s skills. They ought to be trumpeted up and down the country. He is a master at saying one thing and meaning another. On the last occasion when we debated the matter in the House, there was a rather unfortunate intervention from the hon. Member for South Swindon (Anne Snelgrove), who laid claim to having written the relevant passage of the Labour party manifesto. She was rather proud of it at the time, but perhaps she did not realise what she was doing. The Home Secretary may not have been keen that she should continue to take part in these debates—I do not see her in the Chamber today. Let me remind the House—it is well worth doing so as frequently as we can—precisely what the Labour party said in its manifesto. It stated that it"““will introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports.””" It does not take much knowledge of the English language and its syntax to realise that the expression ““on a voluntary basis”” governs the phrase ““will introduce ID cards””. I shall explain the position in simple language to those on the Government Front Bench. They promised the British public at the last election that they would introduce ID cards on a voluntary basis as people renewed their passports. What they now propose, for which the other place is holding the Government to account, is compulsory registration on the national identity register, incidentally to get an identity card, by stealth—by some underhand secret method. [Interruption.] I know that manifestos are a matter of great amusement to the Government, but if the Government had intended that the public should understand that the policy on which they wanted to be re-elected was, ““We will introduce a compulsory system whereby, when you renew your passport or some other designated document, the list of which is yet to be defined, you will be registered on the national identity register””, they would have said it. I hope the hon. Member for South Swindon, who is not present, will forgive me, but it seems to me that that section of the Labour party manifesto was written by a fool or a knave—a knave if it was intended to mislead or confuse, or a fool if it resulted from a failure to understand the ordinary meaning of those simple English words. I do not mind which it is, but either way the British public elected the Government under a false prospectus.