On the 25th September the government announced it is introducing ID cards for Foreign Nationals.

In 2010, the £93 card will be made available to students on a ‘voluntary’ basis.

As the scheme continues to roll-out however, it will become harder and harder to apply for a driving licence, bank account or student finance without a card.

The government, obsessed as ever with holding more and more data from innocent citizens, is trying to blackmail students into signing up to this costly and unnecessary scheme by stealth.

They are hoping that we won’t notice as we lose control of our own identities to a government that has made a habit of losing huge amounts of personal data.

Help the Liberal Democrats fight this policy today, by signing our petition.

We say ID cards are:

Expensive

Introducing Labour's mandatory ID card scheme is likely to cost every taxpayer at least £200. And then we will each be charged over £90 to obtain one of the new combined ID cards and passports. All that is based on current estimates of the cost but we all know what happens to the costs of big Government schemes!

Intrusive

Human rights campaigners Liberty say:

"Despite not appearing to be compulsory, the Secretary of State can require some types of people to register, by 'proscribing' a group. This is likely to apply to foreign nationals at first but will eventually apply to the entire population."

Ineffective

Spain's ID cards did not prevent the Madrid atrocities. Stella Rimington, the ex-head of MI5, says "I don't think that anybody in the intelligence services ... would be pressing for ID cards". Also, relying on one form of ID may well make problems worse - both America and Australia have far worse problems of identity theft than the UK because both of them rely on a single, widely used, identity number.