Labour’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper has slapped down her close colleague Stephen Kinnock after he said the party would consider bringing in ID cards to help control immigration.
Mr Kinnock, shadow minister for immigration, said identity cards should “certainly be on the table” as one solution to control small boat crossings and migrants working illegally in the UK.
Despite huge controversy over the issue during the New Labour era, Mr Kinnock told Times Radio: “That is certainly something that Labour is reviewing and will be looking at very carefully.”
He said that ID cards would be “so helpful” in reassuring the public that the government had control of its borders. “Just about every member state of the European Union has a proper registration and ID card system.”
However, Ms Cooper said gave a firm “no” when asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme if ID cards was something Labour was considering.
Keir Starmer’s shadow home secretary said the real problem was the lack of proper employment enforcement to tackle the problem of people “either working illegally or being exploited”.
Pressed again on whether she saw no case for ID cards, Ms Cooper said: “We would have stronger employment enforcement and proper standards in place, as well as the stronger action to crack down on the criminal gangs.”
Asked about the issue on LBC Radio, she said: “So actually people actually already have that. So there are already biometric residence permits … The problem is that they aren’t checked. So we don’t have proper enforcement.”
Mr Kinnock had claimed that any review of the policy would be done in “really close consultation with civil liberties groups”.
He said the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown governments ran into trouble when “trying to put too much information” onto proposed ID cards.
The shadow minister said a “very basic” form of ID card “doesn’t get you into areas of civil liberties as much”.
Mr Kinnock added: “It can’t be beyond the wit of man to look at this and put a system in place that both addresses the issues around civil liberties, but also make sure that we know who is living in our country, and how many people are living in our country.”
Former Tory policing minister Kit Malthouse told Times Radio he was opposed to the idea of identity cards. “I would be jumpy about us all having ID cards – it’s not far to jump from that to us all having a barcode tattooed on us at birth.”
Former Labour home secretary David Blunkett first outlined plans for a national ID card back in 2002, but civil liberties campaigners made the issue a thorn in the side of the Blair and Brown governments
Plans for a £4.5bn national identity card scheme were finally scrapped by the David Cameron-led coalition government when it came to power in 2010.
