- The Observer,
- Sunday October 12, 2003
David Blunkett wants each of us to carry a card with fingerprint and other personal data to stop those who have no entitlement using public services (he means illegal immigrants). But the Home Secretary knows that it is already easy to do this. Everyone has unique NHS and national insurance numbers. Birth certificates, driving licences, passports also provide means of proving who we are. All can be forged, of course. But so, too, can compulsory ID cards.
Nor is there any proof that such cards would make us more secure. In the US, which continues to resist an ID system, the 11 September terrorists were well known to the US authorities. The missing information was not who they were, but what they were up to. ID cards would not have prevented the tragedy. Nor would they here. As we reveal today, Mr Blunkett's 'entitlement' card would be ineffective against terrorism.
If introduced, we would inevitably see official abuses: young black men challenged by police to produce cards, a return to the stop-and-search policing that so soured relations between police and ethnic minority communities in the 1980s. Mr Blunkett should admit defeat and quietly shelve his plans for compulsory ID cards. In the fight against crime, there must surely be a better use for the £3 billion of taxpayers' money that he is planning to spend on this discredited scheme.
