ID Cards Bill: Bill Passes Second Reading but Liberal Democrats will keep Fighting

12.00.00pm UTC (GMT +0000) Wed 29th Jun 2005

The Government's majority was more than halved to 31 last night when 20 Labour MPs joined Liberal Democrats, Tories and others to vote against the ID cards bill's second reading. Before MPs voted by 314 to 283 - with more than 40 MPs absent or abstaining - to give the bill a second reading, the home secretary signalled a series of concessions, promising to cap the cost of the proposed ID card to individuals - and even to offer a lower price to the poor - and to look again at the need for 51 categories of information that would be required for the proposed national identity register.

The public know that this £1 billion project will go over budget, that these pieces of plastic will not tackle terrorism and that the system will be neither compulsory nor voluntary. The database will make the Child Support Agency mess-up look like a tea party. People who look like an illegal worker or a terrorist will be stopped and asked to prove their identity under the scheme.

People will have to turn up at centres miles away from their homes at which their irises and fingerprints will be scanned in an intrusive way.

If someone had said in 1997 that eight years later we would have a Labour Government who had tried to abolish trial by jury, who wanted to lock people up under house arrest at the say-so of a politician, who tried to remove benefits from asylum seekers and who tried to ban freedom of speech, it would have been unbelievable. Now, in about four hours' time, the Government will add to that list by trying to introduce compulsory ID cards.

The scheme is illiberal, wrong and will not work, we Liberal Democrats will vote against it.