The deeply coercive proposals put forward by the patronising Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, for the gradual implementation of the identity card scheme should cause national consternation. It will give the government powers over the individual more characteristic of a police state than a liberal democracy.

Everyone over the age of 16 living in the UK will be numbered, and have their personal details entered on the database. Your National Identity Registration Number (NIRN) will become the ‘key’ enabling government and private sector organisations to access information on the individual. Certain details,
such as name and address, become "registerable acts"

which you are compelled to disclose to the authorities. You must also notify them of any changes. You will be photographed, fingerprinted and have your eyes scanned for iris recognition. The card will carry a photograph and details about you contained on a computer chip. A national scanner network and a new secure infrastructure will be required to read the chip on the card and check your details against the central database. Use of the system by the private and public sectors will deliberately make life without a card increasingly difficult. Government will strongly encourage organisations to use your NIRN to identify your file in any records they keep, enabling the government to track individuals in any database such as banking records and credit vetting organisations, not to mention voting patterns. Once take up has reached the required level the Government will make the cards mandatory.

Data-sharing between organisations on an unprecedented scale will render personal privacy obsolete. The register will contain all the official numbers used to identify individuals in different systems: taxation, national insurance, NHS. Participating agencies will be required to notify the National Information Register of changes to a person’s details. The Home Office will disclose details about you from the register to other agencies without your consent.

The proposals establish a number of new crimes to ensure that people will be forced to comply. Failure to notify authorities of a lost, stolen, damaged or defective card will become a crime. Failure to renew a card or to submit to fingerprinting or iris scanning will also be illegal. So will failure to provide information demanded by the government. You will have to attend an interview at a specified place and time and if you don’t notify the Secretary of State of any change in your personal circumstances or to obey an order to register you will be heavily fined . Penalties range from a £1,000 fine to two years imprisonment. A penalty of up to £2,500 can be levied for failure to attend an appointment for a fingerprint or iris scan. This fine can be repeated for every subsequent failure
to attend.

There are 50 categories of information required for the NIR. These include: name, and any other names by which you have been known. Your place of birth, address, and previous addresses, in the UK and outside, along with your photograph, fingerprints, ‘other’ biometric information. your signature, Registration Number, and the numbers of other registration documents (national insurance; passport; driving licence; any designated document which contains a number).

The Scheme contains no provision for Parliament to decide what information can be stored in the NIR or the card. This will be left to the discretion of the Home Office. ‘Other biometric’ information leaves the way open for any personal information to be obtained, e.g. genetic information. The individual will no longer own the most personal information about themselves.

And yes – you’ve guessed it, as if all of this was not bad enough the Government has said that it will pass the data onto their masters in Brussels. That’s the whole point; the EU initiated the need for identity cards and laid down the framework in the first place.

Before too long you won’t be able to rent a video, buy a bottle of wine or a gallon of petrol or a bag of sugar without some jobsworth demanding to see your ID card. Yes, I do have something to hide – it’s called my privacy and I intend to defend it.

John Moran

UKIP Kingston,Surrey

Visit www.no2id.net