Emailing the MP

With the ID-card bill before the House of Commons again today, I thought it was about time I emailed my MP again. This is an nice, easy task thanks to WriteToThem.com – they make it very easy to send an email to your MP (UK only, though, sorry!). Fill in a form, reply to a confirmation email and Bob’s your uncle!

Here’s what I wrote to my MP (Andrew Lansley, Conservative).

Dear Andrew Lansley,
I am writing to encourage you in your party’s opposition to the ID cards and register legislation curently before the House. The Lords’ amendments are a start in rendering this proposed legislation reasonable, although much work surely remains to be done (if, indeed, anything can be salvaged).
At a minimum, the costs (and how they were arrived at) must be disclosed before the scheme proceeds. Also, the Government must be honest about the elements of compulsion included in this Bill (such as the link between passports and the ID card).
For myself, my objection isn’t to a voluntary identity card (I have no objections to that idea). The two crucial flaws are the element of compulsion, and the Register – a huge undertaking that adds no benefit to the carriers of the cards and has far too many chances of going wrong both during the scheme’s setup and through security breaches thereafter. The foolish reliance on immature biometric technology is only the final nail in the scheme’s coffin.
Yours sincerely

The big problems with this legislation, as I said, are the elements of compulsion and the Register. The Labour Party consistently say that the card will be voluntary, and I have no problem with providing a reliable method of demonstrating our identity for banks and so on. However, by forcing anyone who gets a passport to be part of the scheme, they make a mockery of this assertion. There’s a world of difference between giving us a card that lets us prove who we are and compelling everyone to carry this card so that the authorities can discover who we are. If that’s not clear, I believe that it is linked to the presumption of innocence. “Innocent until proven guilty” is a foundation stone of the British legal system, and many of those it spawned. The innocent should not have to fear interference in their lives – again, the British legal system assumes that we are allowed to do what we want provided that we break no law.

Worse that that, though, is the Register. This has nothing to do with us being able to prove our identities. That could be done with a card and nothing else – modern smart cards can store the necessary information themselves to prove that the person holding the card is the person who’s supposed to be holding it (whether that’s photo, biometrics, personal data or whatever). The Register, however, is a central repository of personal information that exists for the Government’s purposes (and they have never told us exactly what those purposes are – the justification is extremely fluid, depending on whatever issues are in the news at the moment). More than 50 separate pieces of information will live there, linked to other databases and accessible to anyone in central or local government, in the police, in the social services, even shared with foreign governments and their agencies.

They say that the innocent have nothing to hide, but that’s only true if there are never any mistakes. With such a huge database, even tiny error rates (say, one in a million transactions) would lead to tens of thousands of people being wrongly believed to be criminals every year. And with the way data are to be shared under this scheme (and the other diminutions of our legal rights and defences) that’s got to be a worry. After all, if the Government can hold you in prison for 28 days without charge just because they believe you to be linked to terrorism (or, worse, the 90 days they want to be able to hold you), that’s a rather serious inconvenience to the innocent.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 10:31am on 13 February 2006
Category: Life, Politics, Struggling, General