Identity Card U turn or Government stealth?

British citizens will never be forced to carry ID cards, the Government announced today.

A trial scheme that was to force some airport staff at Manchester and the City of London to carry the controversial cards has been scrapped. Airport workers never wanted to be guinea pigs for this deeply unpopular scheme.

The home secretary Mr Johnson said: 'I want the introduction of identity cards for all British citizens to be voluntary and I have therefore decided that identity cards issued to airside workers, planned initially at Manchester and London City airports later this year, should also be voluntary.'

Previously, ministers said ID cards could become compulsory once 80 per cent of the population was covered.

The government said: 'Holding an identity card should be a personal choice for British citizens - just as it is now to obtain a passport.'

The announcement means that foreign nationals in the UK will be the only group of people who will be forced to carry the cards.

The rollout of the ID card scheme will now be accelerated on a purely voluntary basis for UK citizens at £30 per card, starting in Greater Manchester by the end of the year.

A pilot scheme covering Greater Manchester will be extended to the whole of the North West of England from early next year, Mr Johnson said.

Everyone who wants a card, or a biometric passport, will have their details stored on the national identity register.

Civil liberties groups said this amounted to a compulsory scheme.

Isabella Sankey, director of policy for Liberty, said: 'The Home Secretary needs to be clear as to whether entry on to the National Identity Register will continue to be automatic when applying for a passport.

'If so, the identity scheme will be compulsory in practice. However you spin it, big ears, four legs and a long trunk still make an elephant.’

The ID card has been proposed as a way of countering terrorism, identity theft and misuse of public services and also as a way of proving the carrier's age and identity generally.

Cards are linked to the National Identity Register, a centralised database intended to hold information such as fingerprints, facial and iris scans, past and present addresses.

Crucially, the databanks would be indexed to other Government records, allowing them to be cross-referenced.

The register has been pilloried by civil liberties campaigners as an Orwellian tool of state power that would be easily open to abuse.

Next year young people opening bank accounts are to be encouraged to obtain ID cards and over the following two years anyone getting a passport will get one - but can opt out.

On the surface, it seems as though the government has done a u-turn but I find a few issues with this:

1. The governmant has made no denials that it will sell access to the database.

2. It will be difficult to obtain some services without a card (ie banks have welcomed the ID card idea and will be the first to buy the service). Many organisations will make it impossible to obtain products/services without a card.

3. The government will claim that "we haven't forced you to have an ID card" and lay the blame on organisations rather than on the part of stealth by them.
Both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have said they would scrap the scheme if they came into power. But what will happen to the database?

What do you think?