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David Davis: I will in a moment, the hon. Lady need not worry. To do that, the right hon. Gentleman is forced to the ludicrous assertion that passports are somehow voluntary, too. He said that, in terms, the other day.

Later this year, the World cup tournament will be held in Germany. When I travel there to support the England team, and I tell the German immigration office, "I've not brought my passport because the Home Secretary tells me it's voluntary", I am sure that that officer will be very understanding.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Andy Burnham): It is voluntary to go.

David Davis: We will come back to that in a minute. I am getting heckled by the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), and I shall give way to him in a moment, when he will learn about heckling. I am sure that I will be treated very sympathetically by the German immigration service. When I am eventually let out of prison and I return to Britain, I am sure that I shall have no trouble getting back in without a passport.
 
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It is, of course, ridiculous to assert that passports are voluntary. Perhaps what the Home Secretary means is that foreign travel is voluntary, which is what the Under-Secretary said from a sedentary position. I think that that is what the Government are trying to say.

I suppose that we can also put to one side the disgraceful idea that British citizens, of all people, can leave their own country only if they agree to let the Government intrude on their privacy, on a scale unprecedented in British history. However, does he really believe that foreign travel is voluntary for business men whose customers are all abroad? Does he think that travel is voluntary for people whose parents or children live abroad, as is increasingly the case today? Does he think that foreign travel is voluntary for people whose children get in trouble abroad—something that we have read about too often in the past few months and years? [Interruption.] Does the Under-Secretary of State want to intervene? If so, I shall give way.

Andy Burnham indicated dissent.

David Davis: I see that he does not want to intervene. Does the Home Secretary think that foreign travel is voluntary for diplomats, soldiers and other Crown servants and their families?

Mr. Charles Clarke: It is not compulsory.

David Davis: The Home Secretary says that foreign travel is not compulsory. Oh, yes it is: I am afraid that people cannot be Foreign Office employees without going abroad. The idea is clearly ridiculous. Under this Bill, ID cards are clearly not voluntary; they are clearly compulsory.

Anne Snelgrove: I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way, but either he has cloth ears or he has problems with semantics. I used to be an English teacher, so I shall give him an English lesson if that is what he wants. In our manifesto, we understood that ID cards would be

"rolling out on a voluntary basis as people renewed their passports".

We know what that means. If the right hon. Gentleman does not, that is his problem. The House of Lords should implement our proposals and allow the Bill to go through. Does he agree?

David Davis: The answer to that question is clearly no. The hon. Lady will be aware, as I am, that at least one Home Office Minister recommended that the word "voluntary" should not be used in the manifesto, but the Government insisted on it.

Mr. Heath: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He is making a very important point, but I want to add a small one. When he goes to the World cup, he will not manage to get as far as Germany. Civil aviation regulations mean that it is compulsory for people to have passports before they get on a plane.

David Davis: I thank the hon. Gentleman for that.

Tony Baldry: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way. It is disgraceful for the Government to try to
 
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pretend that they are rewriting the manifesto. Did we not all hear the Home Secretary on Monday try to defend this proposal with his reference to free will? He said:

"That is the free will that people may exercise in deciding whether or not they wish to have a passport . . . That is the free will over what they can do and how they can operate. That is what the wording means."—[Official Report, 13 March 2006; Vol. 443, c. 1261.]

In other words, the Home Secretary seems to suggest that we have a voluntary choice as to whether we have a passport. That is what he said, in terms, on Monday, so the Government cannot come to the House on Thursday and try to rewrite completely what they said then.

David Davis: My hon. Friend is right, and I suspect that the Home Secretary designed his speech today to try to drive away the memory of his second intervention on Monday, which was a ridiculous disgrace.

John Bercow (Buckingham) (Con): I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way. He will have noted, as the House will have done, that the hon. Member for South Swindon (Anne Snelgrove) a few moments ago used the word "understood" in respect of the Labour manifesto. Does he accept that the hon. Lady has invented a new constitutional doctrine: that the purpose of a manifesto is not to communicate a clear message to the electorate, but to communicate internally to party colleagues in the doublespeak that only they understand? Will he confirm that establishing what proportion of the electorate thought that the return of a Labour Government would mean compulsory ID cards would require several noughts after the decimal point before one reached a positive figure?

2 pm

David Davis: My hon. Friend is right in all except one respect. This doctrine is not entirely novel; it first saw the light of day in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland".

Mr. Desmond Swayne (New Forest, West) (Con): When I was mobilised to serve in Iraq, which was not a voluntary process, I was required to produce a passport in order to travel—[Interruption.] It was scrutinised at Brize Norton. That again was not a voluntary process. Other officers and soldiers had to acquire a passport in order to comply. I suppose, ultimately, the decision to join the armed forces was voluntary. Was that what the Government meant?

David Davis: My hon. Friend makes his point perfectly. He was heckled from a sedentary position by a Labour Member who said that he had military ID, but if my hon. Friend was taking members of his family, they would not have military ID. Indeed, I see no exemption in the Bill to allow people not to be put on the national identity register because they are soldiers, Crown servants, Foreign Office employees or the like.

Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

David Davis: No, I shall not. I must make some progress. I may give way to the hon. Gentleman in a moment, but I am not sure.
 
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We can see that the Government's proposal is clearly in breach of their own manifesto, unless one takes the attitude that the manifesto did not mean to say that or that that is not what they understood it to mean—but the words mean what they mean. This part of the Bill is not the exercise of a democratic mandate. The best that can be said of it is that it is an exercise in elected dictatorship, full stop. So the Lords are right to amend it and they are entirely within their rights. That point destroys the entire speech that the Home Secretary just made.

We have continually been treated by the Home Secretary and his Ministers—sometimes from a sedentary position, but mostly on the "Today" programme—to new reasons for this legislation, be they terrorism, welfare reform, immigration or fraud. One Minister puts up a reason for the idea, only for another honest Minister to admit that the Government have overstated their case. That has happened several times in the course of argument over the Bill. That is followed by another Minister coming up with another argument, which is also overstated. That has been most obviously the case on terrorism.

The Government love to portray everybody except themselves as soft on terrorism. It is their favourite tactic with all of their illiberal legislation. Time and again, impositions are placed on the British people, which they have not faced for centuries, on the basis of arguments that are designed to make other people, the Government think, look soft on terrorism. That has applied most obviously to this Bill. I want the House to listen to the words of Baroness Park of Monmouth. The House should remember that Daphne Park has worked in the defence of our country in some of the most dangerous postings in the world. She has taken more risks in the defence of our country than the Home Secretary has had hot dinners, and that is a pretty high hurdle. I would trust her judgment on the defence of the realm way beyond that of the Prime Minister or, indeed, any Minister. Yesterday she said:

"The very creation of such an enormous national identity register will be a present to terrorists; it will be a splendid thing for them to disrupt . . . . It will also provide valuable information to organised crime and to the intelligence services of unfriendly countries".—[Official Report, House of Lords, 15 March 2006; Vol. 679, c. 1234.]

So much for our national security.

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