Identity Cards Bill

Of course, Madam Deputy Speaker, I respect everything that you say and the admonition that you give me. I may have used a word that the Home Secretary does not wish to hear or understand, but that is not the point. He will have to come to terms with the fact that we have a bicameral constitutional arrangement. It is entirely proper for the other place to present these amendments to this House, and all the more proper given that the other place is a creation of this Government. Having set up this new House of Lords, it is simply not good enough for them to complain when it sends back legislation in a form that they do not like. They should have thought about that before they mucked around with it. On amendments Nos. 22G and 22H, which Ministers may or may not have read, it is important to point out that when we last debated this the Home Secretary was chuntering to the effect that the majority of Cross Benchers did not support the majority of 36 in favour of those amendments. Well, I have news for him. That majority contained within it a majority of Cross Benchers, so he has shot his own fox, if I may use an allusion that may be of interest to him. The House of Lords has presented to this House two sets of amendments that would delay the onset of compulsion until after 31 December 2011. That entirely complies with the Labour party’s manifesto on which it was elected at the last election. It would preserve precisely what that manifesto required—the rolling out of ID cards on a voluntary basis—by allowing members of the public who so wish to enrol their details on to the national identity register in order to receive an identity card prior to that time. The House of Lords is doing no more than what the Labour party promised the public that it was about at that time.