Why we will always oppose ID cards

I explained I had not, so they told me that they were going to freeze a transaction for £1400 to a sports outlet there. They then reeled off my home address, my phone number and email and my credit card number and asked me to open my credit card app so they could block further transactions. At this point I said that I would feel safer if I ended that call and rang the company’s fraud line directly. They hung up.

Digital ID would be a ‘honey pot for hackers’ says Alex Cole-Hamilton (Picture: Adobe)

I was astonished, not just by how slick the scam was, but at the depth of personal data they had harvested about me. It was a wakeup call and provides a useful jump off point to explain my party’s opposition to Keir Starmer’s plans to introduce mandatory digital ID cards for every adult in the UK.

Liberal Democrats were in the vanguard opposing the ID card scheme introduced by the last Labour government and we will be again. Fundamentally we don’t think government should have an automatic right of access to your highly sensitive personal data beyond the delivery of certain specific services.

Such a central deposit of information will automatically become a honey pot for hackers and agents of a hostile power. I’m not entirely convinced I trust the government to have the gumption or data security necessary that is up the job in resisting such attacks. Remember when child benefit details for 7.2 million families went missing, or when the Ministry of Defence accidentally leaked a spreadsheet containing 19,000 Afghans trying to flee the Taliban?

I’m also concerned about how this scheme could be misused to control the population. Once this infrastructure is in place and we are all dutifully supplying our data, what’s to stop this government, or a future government expanding the scope of the scheme and demanding more? For initially pedestrian reasons it could widen the scheme to include religion, gender identity, political views, sexual preference or congenital illness.

History is littered with gloomy examples of regimes using the collection of such information to persecutory or even lethal ends. Authoritarianism is built on data collected about citizens often initially for perfectly innocent reasons.

So far, the cost of such a scheme is unquantified, but we’ll be talking about billions of pounds, and just at the moment when every government department faces swingeing budget cuts. There’s no clarity as to how the not insignificant number of UK citizens who are not online will be able to obtain one and no certainty that this will do anything at all to combat illegal immigration and a shadow economy that pays people in cash and asks no questions of those who work in it.

My brush with scammers last night reminded me of just how sophisticated those who would use our data for nefarious reasons have become. So, it’s a strong no thanks from me and my party. UK Ministers may trust that the dark vaults of government are impervious to the reach of those who would use our data or harm our country or persecute our citizens, but I don’t share their faith.

Alex Cole-Hamilton is Scottish Liberal Democrat leader and MSP for Edinburgh Western