The ID scheme has NOT been shelved, cancelled, or even significantly changed says NO2ID
July 2nd, 2009 by Mark FosterComment?
Once more government spin has triumphed and much of the media has got it wrong. The new Home Secretary Alan Johnson has not made any significant changes to the scheme. Compulsion by stealth is still the order of the day, just as it always was. Someone joining the ID scheme ‘voluntarily’
will still be placing control of their identity in the hands of the IPS for life.
The Home Office line remains the same. No compulsion (as the Home Office defines it) was going to be applied until almost everyone had ‘volunteered’ and then it was only a matter of rounding up a minority of resisters and marginalised people.
The Home Office’s idea of “voluntary” is not the same as yours and mine.
Since 2004 the scheme was (and it still is) to proceed by “designating”
one-by-one under the Identity Cards Act 2006 other documents issued by official bodies — in the first place passports.
Once a document has been designated, you won’t be able to apply for one without also applying to be entered, for life, on the national identity register. If you don’t agree to be registered it won’t be that you are refused (say) a passport; you’d have voluntarily decided not to apply.
There’s no compulsion to have a passport. It is useful for travelling.
But you aren’t compelled to travel.
Or (say) to drive. Or to work as a security guard. Or with children. Or in healthcare. To get parole from prison. To practice as a lawyer. …
Any official licence, registration certificate or permit can be designated, and — in the home office’s skewed logic — handing control of your identity to the Home Office’s Identity and Passport Service will still be entirely voluntary.
That they were due for a confrontation with the airside worker’s unions over designating new passes at Manchester and City Airports is an illustration of just how voluntary “voluntary” really is. But the fact they have now ducked that fight for political convenience suggests saying no does work - if you say it loudly enough.
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It is still not too late for MPs to derail the scheme by repudiating the regulations due to be debated next week and detailed in the last newsletter. Only one of those statutory instruments has been dropped. If you have not done so already, please contact your MP:
(NO2ID’s lobbying guide, written for us by the former assistant of a very distinguished retired minister, is brusque but absolutely to the
point: http://www.no2id.net/downloads/print/NO2ID-HowtoLobby.pdf )Peers will also have a vote on this; so if you happen to know one (or be one), then it would be a good idea to alert friends in the Lords now that the matter is soon to come up.
What just happened?
+ A brief history of the government’s definition of voluntary +
Back in March 2006 as the then ID cards bill ping-ponged between the House of Commons and the House of Lords the issue of the voluntary nature of the ID scheme was a major bone of contention. Labour’s manifesto said they would introduce a voluntary scheme but when it emerged that passport applicants would also be forced to go on to the ID database the Lords objected to this “creeping compulsion” and introduced an amendment to remove the connection to the passport. However MPs (by a majority of just 33) re-introduced de facto compulsion. During the Commons debate Nick Clegg MP pointed out that: “The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following definition of voluntary - ‘done, given, or acting of one’s own free will’”, adding that the debate was not just about “one of the most expensive, illiberal follies in recent times, it is also about our specific disagreement on the meaning of that one word”. When the bill finally received Royal Assent and became the ID Cards Act it was reported that the Lords had accepted an offer from the Home Office that anyone applying for a new biometric passport before January 2010 could opt out of having an ID card. The government’s skewed logic is that nobody is required by the state to apply for a passport, therefore forcing people who apply for a voluntary document to go onto the ID database is not compulsion, it’s just complying with regulations required to obtain the voluntary document. Such semantic gymnastics can be found in George Orwell’s fictional language Newspeak. Perhaps “compulantary” sums it up nicely.
+ BBC makes outlandish claim of ID card applications +
In a week of media dis-information the BBC reported on their website that “Some 3,500 UK citizens have already applied for the cards”. This statement simply cannot be true as the regulations that specify the content and manner of application have not yet been approved by parliament. The BBC may be referring to a web page on the UK Identity and Passport service (UKIPS) that allows visitors to “register your interest in identity cards and the National Identity Service”. They don’t mention how many forms were filled out by Mickey Mouse or Mr NO2IDcards and filling out a web form for more information is clearly not the same as “applying”. The Home Office clearly agrees, as the registration page warns: “Registering for information on the National Identity Service does not provide evidence that the Identity and Passport Service has verified or confirmed the identity details provided by the registrant as being accurate or reliable. This information should not be taken as proof of identity in any way”. Even if the figure of 3,500 were anywhere near to the number of people who “want” to be locked into the ID scheme for life, the figure is dwarfed by the number of people who have completed NO2ID’s newsletter signup and registered their opposition to the scheme.
+ Government names next ID scheme victims +
This week the Home Office announced that airside workers at Manchester and London City airports will not be required to register on the ID scheme as a condition of work, though they will “be encouraged to obtain an identity card”. In response the British Airline Pilots’ Association
(BALPA) said: “we have never seen the national ID card as an improvement to security and we are glad that the new Home Secretary has listened to BALPA”. But as the Home Office backed off airside workers (supported by angry unions) they announced their next ID scheme targets - stating that “the Government also intends to focus attention on young people, for whom they [ID cards] will act as a proof of age, helping prove an individual’s right to enter premises or buy goods” and also they will “be looking at options which could allow pensioners aged 75 and over to receive an identity card free of charge”. They also announced an expansion of the trial in Greater Manchester where residents “will be able to apply for an Identity card before the end of this year” to “residents in locations across the North West will be entitled to apply from early next year”.
Read the Identity and Passport service press release at http://www.ips.gov.uk/cps/rde/xchg/ips_live/hs.xsl/1158.htm
+ LSE releases Interception Modernisation briefing +
The London School of Economics (LSE) has released a ‘Briefing on the Interception Modernisation Programme’. The briefing aims to provide “some depth of understanding of the nature of the Home Office’s latest proposals on communications surveillance”. The briefing is related to the Communications Data consultation that closes on 20th July (see What’s Next section). The document warns: “The range of tools available to law enforcement to track and link activity and database content is now vast and growing all the time” and points out that: “What is being proposed under this [sic] modernisation powers is that every communication transaction, and all forms of future transactions, is now ’suspicious’, worthy of later consideration by the police”.
