John Wadham, director of Liberty:

"The government is taking euphemism to extremes. The proposed universal entitlement card is a compulsory identity card by any other name, and they must be open about that if we are to have the honest debate they have called for. Everyone will be required to register and to produce the card to prove their entitlement to services and employment. If you need the card to get your pension, to see a doctor, or to be allowed to get a job, then it is a compulsory card.

"This plan exposes the fact the government doesn't trust its citizens. It wants 60 million of us to register our identity so it can check up on us, monitor our movements and decide whether we are entitled to the services we have already paid our taxes for. ID cards make us suspects not citizens: that's why all innocent citizens should oppose them.

"The irony is that a Government which trusts us so little gives us so many reasons not to trust it on this issue. The Home Secretary says this is not an identity card although it exists only to establish your identity; it's not compulsory but you have to have it. The card will lead to the Government to establish a national database on all 60 million of us - which the consultation document already envisages linking too the Government databases.

"Like the proposals to allow thousands of bureaucrats to see your email and telephone communications data, it's about making all our information available to all government departments - with huge consequent dangers of misuse.

"In recent months, the Government has claimed that a card will tackle any number of high-profile problems. The reality is that this vastly-expensive scheme will tackle none of them, but will have a serious impact on every innocent hard-working individual in the country.

"Finally, what I can't understand is why my 89 year old mother should be forced to register, maybe have her fingerprints taken and have other personal details stored on her card when she has committed no crime."
-------------------------------------
Specifics: a briefing

Illegal working and benefit fraud: The Home Office wants to issue 60 million cards to 'target' a few thousand people working illegally in this country - the majority of whom have been lost to the system because of incompetence. It has also been said the cards will stop benefit fraud.

In fact only a tiny proportion of fraud (less than the costs of the ID card system) relates to identity. The impact on these problems will be minimal: the impact on the rest of us could be far greater. Why should 60 million of us be forced to carry cards as a result of the failures and incompetence by the Home Office and Benefits Agency?

Secure identity: these cards will be sold and forged (witness the French experience); and yet they may even create greater complacency amongst those trying to protect us.

Thousands of cards will be lost or accidentally destroyed each year and every person without a card will lose their entitlement to services and become a suspect. The vulnerable and the inadequate will find that the loss of the card and the bureaucracy involved in getting a new one will add substantially to their social exclusion.

We also know that it is those people from ethnic minorities or who are black who will be the ones most likely and most often asked to prove their identity.

Foreign experience: Experience elsewhere shows all too clearly the shortcomings of ID card systems. European countries still suffer from the same problems we do - but in many cases with the added serious social division and discontent that springs from misuse of police powers relating to ID cards.

In Australia, initial 70% popular support for an identity card evaporated within months as the real impact of the card on ordinary people became evident. The scheme was buried.