If you've got nothing to hide...

I've just finished reading this book:

Readable. Not much more, but more than I've ever done, so let's not start off in too curmudgeonly a fashion. The premise is excellent: set in 1937, Mosley becomes Prime Minister after the King refuses to abdicate, Britain becomes fascist and cosies up to Hitler's Germany, and only one heroic ex-Tory MP and Great War veteran can stop him.

Sadly what doesn't follow doesn't quite do this premise justice. However, there are some neat touches. The portrait of 1930s Britain is excellently drawn - and it is this that produces the book's most arresting situation. It is when a policeman, the archetypal 1930s English constable, now plunged into the nightmare of working for a fascist madman, compels our hero to produce "his papers".

Imagine it - the friendly neighbourhood copper, helper of old ladies, scourge of local ruffians, sporter of luxurious moustache, barking out commands at the behest of a crazed fascist dictatorship. Ugly isn't it?

Which makes this Government's intention to introduce ID cards, and a colossal accompanying database, even less appealing.

• They cost a fortune - some say £18bn, at a time when the economy is in poor shape
• They failed to stop the Madrid bombings, the Conservative point out
• The giant database storing our details will be a hacker's wet dream

Those are compelling reasons to halt this idiocy now. Any vaguely intelliegent government would have done so. But I am more vexed by the fundamental alteration in the relationship between state and citizen.

This is a free country, despite the palpable hostility of numerous Home Secretaries down the years. I do not have to prove my identity to the state or any its agents. Compelling me to do so makes this a less free country. It really is a simple as that.

Perhaps the ex-Communists in the Labour Party think that's a good thing though.