While the Indian government makes grandiose announcements about Universal ID smartcard and gives high-profile software czar cabinet rank to run the program, Britain has pretty much given up on it’s National ID card program!
The scheme has been mired in controversy ever since its launch, coming under fire from all angles as politicians tried to present it as a solution to multiple problems. It 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.
ID cards were enshrined in the Identity Cards Act 2006 and major contracts were to have been awarded by the end of this year for design, production and rollout.
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.
ID cards were first mooted as a voluntary scheme by Michael Howard, Home Secretary under John Major. At the time Tony Blair, then in Opposition, attacked it as a waste of resources that would be better spent putting more police officers on the streets. But New Labour revived the idea and ramped it up in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington DC – proposing that identity cards should be compulsory. David Blunkett, then Home Secretary, put the scheme out to consultation in July the following year and gave the go-ahead in 2003.
By that time doubts had surfaced about its effectiveness against terrorism. The official name, ‘entitlement cards’, was dropped as being too euphemistic. In the immediate wake of the July 7 attacks in London, Mr Blunkett’s successor Charles Clarke admitted he did not believe ID cards would have prevented the atrocities. In August 2005 Tony McNulty, the Minister in charge of the scheme, apologised for ‘overselling’ its benefits. He admitted in a private Whitehall seminar: ‘Perhaps, in the past, the Government in its enthusiasm oversold the advantages of identity cards. We did suggest, or at least implied, that they may well be a panacea for identity fraud, benefit fraud, terrorism, entitlement and access to public services. Perhaps we ran away with it in our enthusiasm. I apologise for us overselling the case for ID cards.’
When it was revealed that scanners designed to read the cards would not be able to identify Islamic terror suspects because of key technical difficulties, MPs declared the scheme ‘a farce’.
- The end of ID cards? Now Government reveals they WON’T be compulsory, The Daily Mail, 30 Jun 2009
Do we know what we are doing here in India?
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