Last week I was singled out at the Despatch Box by Tony McNulty – the government minister summing up in the Identity Cards debate – for being ‘irresponsible’, ‘wrong’ and ‘wrong’ again. So – clearly I’m doing something right!

One of the many problems with Labour’s case for ID cards is it’s based on a perfect world – one where computers get it right, where iris scanners are as accurate as something straight out of James Bond, where administrators have accurate records, where every policeman is perfectly impartial in who they choose to stop, and on and on. Well – life isn’t perfect!

The government hasn’t got much of a record when it comes to getting big projects right. Tony McNulty himself should know that only too well – having previously been the minister in charge of CrossRail – that big rail project which has been delayed even more than the trains.

The Passport Office’s big IT project was an expensive nightmare – yet they’re a key part of the ID cards plans. Even the much, much simpler plan to draw together councils’ different electoral registers into one national electronic database has precious little to show for the last five years of planning – though at least the project has done so little, it hasn’t managed to waste much money!

But above all there’s the civil liberties question. I was born free and have always believed I was innocent until proved guilty. When I walk out of my front door going about my own business – no one has any right to know anything about me as long as I do no harm.

I should not need a license to leave my house – let alone pay between one and three hundred pounds for the privilege. (Even if Labour keeps down the cost we get charged for an ID card, that will only be done by taking the money from somewhere else – we’ll still be paying for it through our taxes).

Labour’s proposals strike at the heart of everything I believe in and am passionate about in terms of civil liberties. This is the biggest shift in the relationship between State and individual in my lifetime.

And then – of course – the scheme won’t deliver any of the benefits the Government dangles as a carrot over the nation’s head – which is why the carrot keeps changing. At first it was to stop terrorism. It won’t do that. Accuracy of identity documents has not been the problem with terrorists. Credit where it’s due, thegovernment has admitted that Thursday’s tragic events would not have been halted by ID cards.

The government has tried justifying ID cards because of immigration – and it’s no surprise to me that the figures on ‘illegal’ immigrants have suddenly surfaced. That won’t work either – the Met Police’s Operation Maxim crackdown on organised immigration crime found plenty of forged ID documents in use by the criminals. But guess what … more than 9 out of every 10 is a forged ID document from another country. Changing the UK’s ID documents won’t help with that. Trying to make the rest of the world start using the UK’s ID cards would be a bit too big brother even for Blair and Clarke!

And so the Government moved on to identity fraud – which ID cards do not tackle either. The Government keeps on saying this costs the UK £1.3 billion a year. Quite possibly true – but that doesn’t mean ID cards will help. Some of this sum is estimates of excise fraud, but much of the criminal activity involves people who have (and would still have) foreign ID cards, not UK ones. Or look at the figures for credit card fraud that are in that total too. Oh but – look again, they include fraud where the card users wasn’t present, so no chance to check any I.D. documents anyway.

So as the Government’s rationale changes as each new argument is demolished, as the costs spiral and as people realise the huge range of information the Government wants to store on the ID card database – I make it over 30 different items listed in the legislation already (and that’s without the inevitable creep which will come over time) -the scheme hopefully will go down.

The alternative? Well, the Lib Dem manifesto costings for the general election pointed out how the sums could be made to add up – if we scrap ID cards – to get an extra 10,000 police officers plus 20,000 community support officers. Now that would be fighting crime seriously!