Ahh, ID cards. Time was the Lib Dems were alone in campaigning for this new invasion of our privacy by the state to be abandoned. Then that nice Mr Cameron’s Tories decided they were, after all, probably not such a good thing. And now it seems that even David Blunkett – perhaps Labour’s most authoritarian home secretary, and against some stiff opposition, too – has decided that, really, they’re maybe unnecessary.
The Lib Dems’ shadow home secretary Chris Huhne’s response is delightfully withering:
When even the father of ID cards spurns them, the idea is truly an abandoned orphan.”
He continues, equally splendidly:
Only the most profligate of governments would lavish billions on this programme in such a deep recession where hard choices are needed on public priorities. There is no face-saver with passports, which were becoming biometric in any case. It would be ridiculous to insist that people pay for new passports whether they need them or not.
“The Government should remember that the British state belongs to the British people and not the other way around.”
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3 Comments
And not a Well-Behaved Orphan either.
It has always seemed to me (and most folk) that ID cards were abhorrent per se but to be required to pay for them was beyond sense and reason. I never had much time for David Blunkett either in Education or at the Home Office so his suggestion that we should all have to have passports instead of ID cards just confirms my view that the man’s not fit for office. Wasn’t it Tsarist Russia that required internal passports to travel around the country? What a good precedent for an authoritarian government.
“The Government should remember that the British state belongs to the British people and not the other way around.”
And print! That’s it. That’s the message we’ve been waiting for, simple, popular and liber, now can we please start campaigning on it