Please see below a message from Nick Timothy MP:
‘A number of people have written in to ask me my position on the Government’s announcement that they want to introduce mandatory digital ID cards. I want to make clear that I will oppose this scheme.
Before I come to the substance, I should make clear just how cynical this announcement was. With Keir Starmer and his chief of staff in the firing line over £750k in donations they kept hidden from the country, they chose to announce this policy – with no detail, no plans, and no documents – to try to move the story on. If you look at the papers, I suppose they succeeded.
This policy was not in Labour’s manifesto. They promised they would “smash the gangs” and stop the Channel crossings, but the crossings have gone up and are at record levels. Their ludicrous “one in, one out” deal with France means three people we should have deported to their countries of origin have been sent to France, three illegal immigrants in France have come here, and thousands more have continued to cross the Channel.
It is my emphatic view that anyone who arrives illegally in this country should not be permitted to stay in any circumstances. I continue to argue in Parliament for drastic reductions in legal immigration levels, a plan to return many recent arrivals to their home countries, and changes in human rights law that allow us to deport all foreign criminals and illegal immigrants.
On this latter point, the major problem is that we cannot change our human rights laws, because they derive from the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Court in Strasbourg gets to determine how those rights are defined, and to whom they are applied. This is why I believe we must leave the European Convention on Human Rights, and write our own laws.
There are obvious risks with digital ID cards given the need for data security. I am also concerned about the Government’s tendency towards encouraging “anarcho-tyranny”, in which there is a complete lack of enforcement against those who break the law and cause harm, for example illegal immigrants, but unduly tough punishments for ordinary people when it comes to parking fines and even expressing their opinions online.
The Government is seeking to impose digital ID cards when it isn’t even doing the basics to control immigration and stop the Channel crossings. It is doing so without a mandate and – at a time when it has done so much to damage trust in the state – it does not have the public support to implement such a sensitive and intrusive policy.’
