According to reports, Dame Stella, who was speaking at an annual
conference for the Association of Colleges in Birmingham, said
that, personally, she did not think that “anybody in the
intelligence services, particularly in my former service, would be
pressing for ID cards.”
"My angle on ID cards is that they may be of some use but only
if they can be made unforgeable and all our other
documentation is quite easy to forge,” she said. “If we have ID
cards at vast expense and people can go into a back room and forge
them they are going to be absolutely useless.”
Politicians and activists alike seized on her remarks.
"When someone of Stella Rimmington's experience expresses these
doubts, the government should listen and abandon this scheme before
wasting any more taxpayers money," Mark Oaten, Liberal Democrat
home affairs spokesman told the BBC.
Prospective Tory leader and shadow home secretary David Davis
called the Government’s rationale for ID cards “completely
bogus”.
"What she has demonstrated is that they will be a spectacular
and probably counter-productive waste of money an
unnecessary incursion on people's privacy," he said, according to
the Independent.
Phil Booth, National Coordinator for campaign group No2ID said
the scheme had been reduced to “just a lot of hot air”.
The Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman, speaking at a daily
press briefing yesterday, played down the remarks, stressing that
Stella Rimington retired from her post with MI5 in 1996 and was
expressing a personal opinion.
He denied that the Government was shifting away from the
security argument as a rationale for ID cards.
Dame Stella’s comments came in the middle of a House of Lords
debate on the draft Bill. On Wednesday peers approved an amendment
that that would restrict the occasions on which a person could be
obliged to prove his identity.
The amendment states that only those who “reasonably require
proof” of the Government’s plans for a national identity card
scheme have been under heavy fire in recent weeks.
Only last week the Select Committee on Delegated Powers and
Regulatory Reform, which considers whether powers being granted to
Government legislation are subject to sufficient scrutiny,
concluded that Parliamentary scrutiny of the ID Card Bill needs to
be enhanced. It described powers being sought in the Bill by the
Home Secretary as "inappropriate."
Reports issued recently by three other Select Committees – the
Joint Committee on Human Rights, the Constitution Committee and the
Home Affairs Select Committee – also criticised the substance of
the Government’s plans.
