22 June 2006

Following former Home Secretary David Blunkett’s admission that ID cards were intended to track residents of the UK [1], at Prime Minister’s questions yesterday, Tony Blair said: I should also say that if we want to keep track of people in this country, in the end we will have to face up to the difficult decision on identity cards.[2]

Phil Booth, NO2ID [3] National Coordinator said:

These are damning admissions that directly contradict what Home Office ministers said [4] while forcing through the ID cards legislation.

The Government can’t keep track of relatively few child sex offenders, and of foreigners who are already in prison. Its answer: everybody should be tracked all the time. But isn’t it strange how the answer came before the question? Mr Blair and his authoritarian cabal decided to build a surveillance state as far back as 2003, perhaps earlier, with their “entitlement cards”. Why didn’t they come clean before now?

- ENDS -

Notes for editors

1) On BBC Radio 4’s Today show, Wednesday 14th June, replying to question about amnesty for illegal immigrants, David Blunkett said:

Blunkett: Not without identity cards. We had a little debate – it was supposed to be under Chatham House rules at the Royal Institute for International Affairs in 2003, it immediately was released, as ever* about this issue, because I was asked this question specifically by a journalist. I said it’s impossible to have an amnesty without ID cards and a clean database, because you firstly don’t have any incentives for people to actually come up front and register, and make themselves available, and secondly you have no means of tracking them.
* repudiated by Chatham House, here:
http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/index.php?id=3D189&pid=3D303

2) Hansard, 21 Jun 2006 – Column 1312.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/cm060621/debtext/60621-0587.htm

3) NO2ID is the non-partisan national campaign against ID cards and the database state. See http://www.no2id.net

4) In a letter to The Observer on March 26, entitled ‘ID cards will not mean we are watching you’, then Home Office Minister responsible for ID cards, Andy Burnham wrote: “The scheme will not track your life’s activities.” -
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,1739799,00.html

6 June 2006

Despite denials from Home Office officials when challenged by Criminal Law Week [1], Policing Minister Tony McNulty today issued a Statutory Instrument
to plug the hole in the law about possession of a forged passport [2] created when the Government passed the Identity Cards Act 2006 on 30th March 2006.

The UK Identity & Passport Service (UKIPS) compound their error in continuing to deny that the law was repealed in a circular to Chief Police Officers [3]. NO2ID [4] questions why the former passport agency should be telling the police their job.

Phil Booth, NO2ID National Coordinator said:

The Home Office were not only incompetent in this case, they lied to cover up their mistake. Today’s action demands at the very least acknowledgement and a public apology to those who pointed out this error, and provides a stark warning to the public that the Home Office are quite literally making things up as they go along.

It is mind-boggling that in over two years since the draft legislation was introduced, no-one at the Home Office realised that their supposedly security-conscious ID legislation gave a ‘get out of jail free’ card to passport forgers.

- ENDS -
Notes for editors

1) ‘Passport forgery law is repealed by accident,’ Graeme Wilson, Daily Telegraph, 18/5/06http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=3D/news/2006/05/18/npass18.xml&sSheet=3D/news/2006/05/18/ixuknews.html

2) http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2006/20061439.htm – Statutory Instrument 2006 No. 1439(C. 49)

3) Section 44 of the Identity Cards Act 2006 clearly states that it repeals Section 5, subsection (5)(f) and (fa) and subsections (9) to (11) of the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981 (cf. Schedule 2). All other sections, bar this one and sections 36 and 38 – which came into force 2 months after the passing of the Act – are subject to order, i.e. a Statutory Instrument will need to be issued. UKIPS clearly can’t read its own legislation and is deliberately misleading police when it says, “Those offences have not already been repealed”, in today’s Home Office Circular
15: http://www.knowledgenetwork.gov.uk/HO/circular.nsf/79755433dd36a66980256d4f004d1514/d7e8c43f7120af3580257180004e0fd8?OpenDocument=20

4) NO2ID is the non-partisan national campaign against ID cards and the database state. See http://www.no2id.net