Biometric ID documentsBrown 'misled' with ID card claims
Anti-national ID groups claims U.K. prime minister Groton Brown’s claims at the Labor Party conference that “in the next Parliament there will be no compulsory ID cards for British citizens,” and that “We will reduce the information British citizens have to give for the new biometric passport to no more than that required for today’s passport,” could not be true even if taken literally
Gordon Brown’s remarks to the Labor party conference on ID cards were “the same misleading line as before,” anti-biometric-national-ID group NO2ID has claimed. Brown said: “We will reduce the information British citizens have to give for the new biometric passport to no more than that required for today’s passport. And so conference, I can say to you today, in the next Parliament there will be no compulsory ID cards for British citizens.”
NO2ID said that ministers have repeatedly denied the ID scheme is compulsory throughout the last five years. Instead, it had been designed to force people to volunteer for a system they cannot leave. The campaigners said that Brown’s words could not be true even if taken literally, since biometric passports must have at least the biometrics as well as the information already on existing passports.
He was also contradicting the plans published by the Identity and Passport Service to build a biographical database that will be shared between the passport and identity schemes, and integrated with the DWP’s systems, NO2ID said, adding that the prime minister’s comments were also at odds with the raft of regulations defining the information to be held and the masses more information involved in the application process, set out in regulations passed earlier this summer.
Guy Herbert, general secretary of NO2ID, said: “Mr Brown is a Lewis Carroll character: he imagines ‘What I tell you three times is true.’ But even if repetition makes it easier for ministers to delude themselves, this is the same misleading line as before. Whatever he says about a card, the plan remains the same: to treat the entire population like dangerous sex offenders and keep us all on a Home Office database for life.”
